Video has emerged showing a Customs and Border Patrol agent asking bus passengers if they are US citizens, and the coach driver telling passengers they must be citizens to ride.
The incident ocurred at the Concord Coach Lines bus terminal in Bangor, Maine over Memorial Day weekend, according to the ACLU of New Hampshire which released the video.
In it, passengers are seen standing in line as a CBP agent asks if they are US citizens, which the person filming says he refuses to answer.
Under law, CBP is authorized to operate interior checkpoints within 100 miles of the border, and an agency spokesperson told DailyMail.com that such operations are routine and vital to national security.
Video has emerged showing a CBP agent (left) asking bus passengers if they are US citizens, and the coach driver (right) telling passengers they must be citizens to ride
After a cut in the video, the male filming is heard asking a Concord Coach employee whether you must be a US citizen to ride on the company’s buses.
‘Yep,’ the man replies.
‘I doubt that,’ a female traveling companion is heard muttering.
After the video surfaced, Concord Coach Lines Vice President Ben Blunt told New Hampshire Public Radio that the employee misspoke.
‘I think if we are remiss in anything here, it’s not doing a good enough job talking about this issue with our staff,’ Blunt.
‘We don’t want to ask our employees – our drivers, our ticket agents – to be interfering with a federal officer who is lawfully doing his job,’ says Blunt.
The incident ocurred at the Concord Coach Lines bus terminal (above) in Bangor, Maine over Memorial Day weekend
However, ACLU of New Hampshire Legal Director Gilles Bissonnette in a video statement blasted the company over its ‘complicity’ with CPB.
‘Concord Coach is a private company. It has no legal obligation to comply with [immigration officials], and yet as you’ve just seen and as you’ve just heard, the bus driver says that only US citizens can board this bus,’ Bissonnette said.
He added that the ‘use of a bus station to conduct immigration enforcement is morally repugnant’.
A CBP spokesperson defended the operation in a statement to DailyMail.com.
‘For decades, U.S. Border Patrol agents have routinely engaged in enforcement operations at transportation hubs throughout the nation,’ the spokesperson said.
‘Enforcement actions away from the border are within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Border Patrol and performed in direct support of immediate border enforcement efforts and as a means of preventing smuggling and criminal organizations from exploiting existing transportation hubs to travel to the interior of the United States.
‘These operations at transportation hubs serve as a vital component of the U.S. Border Patrol’s national security efforts,’ the statement added.
CBP has legal authority to operate checkpoints within 100 miles of the US border. Above, a map shows the 100-mile interior enforcement zone in orange
The Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes immigration officials ‘within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States’ to ‘board and search for aliens in any vessel within the territorial waters of the United States and any railcar, aircraft, conveyance, or vehicle’.
A 1953 federal regulation defined ‘reasonable’ to be within 100 air miles, rather than land miles, of a border.
The video from Bangor is the second recent incident on a private bus line to draw attention, after a Greyhound passenger loudly confronted CBP agents when they asked for proof of immigration status on a bus in California earlier this month.