Can Someone Please Shut Down the US Customs Agency?

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Monika Bauerlein,
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Have you been following the news less? A lot of people have, and that can be good and bad. It's unnerving, because Mother Jones has a $350,000 fundraising goal right now. In "Slow News Is Good News," we try to reset after several chaotic years and make a longer-lasting case for why our journalism matters. Please read it—and please pitch in!

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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.