Can Someone Please Shut Down the US Customs Agency?

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I woke up in the middle of last night enraged by this story. I do not thank Ta-Nehisi Coates for bringing it to my attention and ruining my night, but as long as he did, I’m going to ruin yours too.

Thanks to a combination of executive branch policy and Supreme Court indifference in the post-9/11 era, US Customs and Border Protection has become a rogue agency, answerable to no one and run by sociopaths who take grim pleasure in harassing and torturing citizens they disapprove of just because they can. The evidence for this is now legion. If Congress actually wanted to do something useful, that’s what they’d spend this week working on.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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