United States Customs and Border Protection plans to log every person leaving the country by vehicle by taking photos at border crossings of every passenger and matching their faces to their passports, visas, or travel documents, WIRED has learned.
United States Customs and Border Protection plans to log every person leaving the country by vehicle by taking photos at border crossings of every passenger and matching their faces to their passports, visas, or travel documents, WIRED has learned.
Exit Immigration is a real thing that can be done, even if the US doesn’t normally do it. You can leave the US on a plane without any US border agent seeing your passport. Other countries will inspect your paperwork on departure, even if just to stamp it marking that you left . (And stamps seem to be generally going away, too, I was surprised to find when I last went to the UK that I didn’t get a stamp.)
US Border patrol does have the ability to check cars at the land border as they leave, they just usually don’t bother to Canada. I haven’t crossed the land border since COVID, though, so I don’t know if they are stopping cars heading out now.
I do wonder how that handful of people got nabbed at the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, who took a wrong turn onto the bridge without their paperwork, got caught. Did they make it to the Canadian side and then were told to turn around? Or were they nabbed before going across? I wonder if it makes a difference with regard to their immigration status…
If you make it to the Canadian side without papers, the Canadians will refuse you and send you back. On the way back you have to go through the american checkpoint. Each country’s boarder station is built on their own side of the boarder. That’s how they get nabbed in land crossings.
Although they can add an exit check, there isn’t the infrastructure for it. Immigration plazas widen to many lanes at the inspection stations. The outgoing side is just a normal road. Adding an exit check would either slow traffic to a crawl by checking cars on a normal road, or require expensive renovations at every highway boarder crossing. Its possible, but not something they can implement quickly or quietly.
Yes, this is exactly what they could do, if they wanted to. They don’t give a shit about slowing traffic, in fact they will want that because it is making what they do more visible. Their only goal is to intimidate certain people into not coming here.