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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.
