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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/18/2018 5:43:26 PM
‘The kids are my life,’ a dad said of his missing family. Then he was charged with killing them.


Christopher Watts, 33, was arrested Aug. 16, in Frederick, Colo., on suspicion of killing his wife, Shanann, 34, and their two young daughters.

A day after his pregnant wife and two daughters vanished, Christopher Watts stood in his front yard and faced the parade of news cameras with uniform solemnity.

“I came home and walked in the house and nothing. Just vanished,” the 33-year-old husband and father told Denver 7 ABC on Tuesday.

“It just seems like I’m living in a nightmare, and I can’t get out of it,”he told the KUSA-NBC reporter, as officers from the Frederick Police Department led search dogs through the 4,000-square-foot house behind him.

“In my heart I believe she is somewhere, and I hope she is safe,” hetold Fox 31 as a dog barked from somewhere inside the house behind him.

There were no interviews the next day. Shortly before midnight, police returned to the house, quietly arrested Watts and began hauling trash bags out the front door.

Now the same TV stations that had interviewed the father are reporting that he has been jailed on charges of murder, and his family is dead.

Earlier in the week, when there seemed to be some hope of a happy ending, idyllic photos of the family plastered the news: 4-year-old Bella; her little sister, Celeste; and Christopher and his wife, Shanann, who was in her second trimester with the newest baby Watt.

“She would take the kids to the pool, and he would always take them in a little wagon,” a neighbor in the subdivision told KUSA. “We were always impressed by his doting over them and how much he appeared to love them.”

Their life, apparently, wasn’t perfect. In 2015, two years after buying their house, the Wattses filed for bankruptcy. They were drowning in a $400,000 mortgage and more than $50,000 in credit card debt, bankruptcy court documents show. His paycheck as an operator for Anadarko Petroleum and hers from a children’s hospital weren’t nearly enough.

But they moved on with their lives. They struck a deal with their creditors, and Shanann got a new job doing direct sales for a“lifestyle system” called Thrive. They stayed in their big two-story house, and the family kept growing.

“Little peanut!!” Watts texted to Shanann when she showed him her first ultrasound picture in June.














This month, Shanann took a week-long trip to see her relatives and attend a work conference. “Everyone have an amazing day and absolutely fantastic month!” she wrote on Facebook before leaving.

The girls stayed home with Watts, he told KUSA.

When Shanann flew home on Monday, KDVR reported, a friend picked her up at the airport, dropped her off at the house about 2 a.m..

Another friend stopped by the home later that day to check on her, ABC11 reported. Already concerned because Shanann had missed a doctor’s appointment and wasn’t answering calls, the friend phoned police when no one answered the door.

Watts told reporters he had been at work when he realized something was wrong.

“I was blowing through stoplights. I was blowing through everything just trying to get home as fast as I can, because none of this made sense,” he told KUSA from his driveway on Tuesday — by which points state investigators and the FBI had joined the search for his wife and children.

Watts told the TV cameras he had seen Shanann briefly when she got in late from the airport, then left for work around 5 a.m., after checking on the girls with a baby monitor.

“Just vanished,” he told Denver7. “Nothing was here. I mean she wasn’t here. The kids weren’t here. Nobody was here.”

Watts wanted to drive around looking for them, he said, but police told him it wouldn’t do any good. All he could do was sit around his house, listening to dogs bark and describing his emotions.

“Last night, I had every light in the house on,” he told Denver7. “I was hoping I would just get ran over by the kids, running through the door and just, like, barrel rushing me. But it didn’t happen.”

He paused a moment.

“I mean, the kids are my life,” he said. “I mean, those smiles light up my life. And just, like, I mean, last night, when they usually eat dinner, it was like, I miss them. I miss telling them, ‘Hey, you gotta eat that or you’re not gonna get your dessert.’ I miss that. I miss them, you know, cuddled up on their couches. They have like a Minnie Mouse couch and Sofia couch that they cuddle up on and watch ‘Bubble Guppies’ or something. And to just, like, you know, I was …”

He sighed.

“It was tearing me apart last night.”

There was another pause as Denver7’s videographer shifted the angle.

“This might be a tough question,” the reporter asked, “but did you guys get into, like, an argument before she left?”

“It wasn’t an argument,” Watts said quickly. “We got into a conversation, but I’ll leave it at that.”

And then he talked some more about how much he missed them.

This interview, and others like it, played over the news through the afternoon and into Wednesday.

A few oddities about the search began to leak out that day. Shanann’s friends said her phone, keys and wallet had all been found in the house, ABC11 reported. Her car was still in the garage, per NBC News. No one who knew her said she was the type to just pick up and leave.

After dark, more police vehicles began to show up at the Watts house. Reporters photographed officers taking bags of evidence out and towing a pickup away.

At some point Wednesday night, police secured a seal arrest affidavit and jailed Watts on charges of first-degree murder and evidence tampering — three charges each.

Things became clearer on Thursday morning.

Flanked by police and FBI agents at a terse news conference, Colorado Bureau of Investigations Director John Camper announced “absolutely the worst possible outcome anybody could imagine.”

“We’ve recovered a body we’re quite certain is Shanann Watts,” he said. “We have strong reason to believe we know where bodies of the children are.”

Later that day, city officials announced that what were believed to be the bodies of all three missing had been found in an undisclosed location.

Celeste, Belle and Shanann had been submerged inside oil tanks, that station reported, quoting police sources, presumably “to conceal the smell from passersby.”

Investigators released almost no other details about the investigation. The district attorney has until Monday to bring formal charges, at which point the arrest affidavit may be unsealed, revealing how Watts became a suspect.

In the interim, people who knew him and his family have been wracking their memories for signs they think they missed. “He was always punctual, did everything right,” Watt’s former teacher told WTVD. “I always wondered why he was quiet.”

Watts was escorted to court Thursday afternoon, wearing chains and an orange jumpsuit. A district judge refused to set a bond for his release, the Coloradoan reported, and his public defender argued unsuccessfully to have the public barred from his trial.

“Mr. Watts, why did you kill your wife and children?” someone asked as he passed by in the hall.

He said nothing, as he had said almost nothing in court.

While police have not said whether Watts is even cooperating, his late wife’s family sent a statement to CBS4 claiming he had confessed.

“It is with deep hurt, confusion and anger to confirm our beautiful cousin Shanann Watts, her unborn child, and her two angelic daughters … were viciously murdered by husband Chris Watt,” the statement reads.

The family’s house now sits unoccupied. In the same yard where Watts had spoke of his hopes and fears hours earlier, a memorial of crosses and stuffed bears lie in the grass.


(The Washington Post)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/19/2018 11:20:00 AM

Report Finds 100 Priests in One City Ran Horrific Pedophile Ring, As Gov’t Looked the Other Way

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/19/2018 11:58:41 AM
A satanic idol goes to the Arkansas Capitol building

The Satanic Temple unveils its statue of Baphomet, a winged goat creature, at a rally for the First Amendment in Little Rock on Thursday. (Hannah Grabenstein/AP)

A bronze statue of the satanic goat monster Baphomet was unveiled Thursday at the Arkansas Capitol building in front of a cheering crowd of free-speech activists and a smaller crowd of unhappy people holding handwritten Bible verses. The nearly 8-foot-tall statue’s brief public appearance marked the culmination of a three-year effort for the Satanic Temple to bring it there.

Below is the story of Baphomet’s journey to Little Rock, told with as many sinister goat images as possible.

1. Baphomet was born in Detroit

Well, technically his history dates back to 12th-century Europe, when the Catholic Church accused blasphemers of worshiping the idol,according to the BBC. Whether any Satanists actually did worship Baphomet is an open question, and he didn’t acquire his popular goat-human avatar until an occultist author made it up in the 19th century.

And then, somewhere in Detroit in the summer of 2015, this happened:

The Satanic Temple’s one-ton bronze-coated rendering left off Baphomet’s traditional hermaphroditic breasts and added two little kids at his side to make the statue more publicly palatable. The temple hoped to install it next to a Ten Commandments monument at the Oklahoma Capitol. But as Abby Ohlheiser wrote for The Washington Post, the plan fell through after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ordered the Ten Commandments taken down because the monument violated state laws on the separation of church and state.

So the Satanic Temple started looking for a new home for Baphomet — preferably another government building with a prominent religious display for the goat to complement.

2. Satan’s kind of an attention hog



Satanist opens city council meeting, and, well, just watch

The thing about members of the Satanic Temple: They don’t actually worship Satan. Or, at least, devil worship is not a requirement to join the organization, which is based in Salem, Mass.

“The Satan of Modern Satanism is a metaphorical icon for Enlightenment values,” the temple’s co-founder, Lucien Greaves, oncewrote in an op-ed for The Post. “I identify nontheistically with a Miltonic Satan that defies all subjugation, exalts scientific inquiry and promotes Humanistic, pluralistic values.”

In other words, the temple is a group of atheists, humanists and free-speech activists. They tend to use satanic imagery to mess with governments they feel are violating the separation of church and state.

Witness a 2016 city council meeting in Pensacola, Fla., which came to resemble an exorcism when a cowled Satanist showed up to give the opening prayer, prompting nearly everyone else in the room to recite Bible verses at him.

3. Baphomet <3 Arkansas

As soon as Baphomet’s Oklahoma trip fell through, the Satanic Temple turned its attention to Arkansas.

The state legislature had just passed a bill to erect a Ten Commandments monument in Little Rock. In a common legal tactic for religious equality activists, the Satanic Temple sought to install Baphomet alongside the Christian symbol.

“The Satanic Temple’s application was blocked by an emergency-session bill that requires all monuments have legislative sponsorship,” the temple wrote. Unable to find any state legislators willing to invite a monstrous winged goat onto the Capitol grounds, the Satanists started a crowdfunding campaign to bring Baphomet to Arkansas themselves.

The fundraiser easily met its $20,000 goal. Top donors got their name engraved on Baphomet’s back.

4. “Honk AGAINST Satan!”

More than 100 Satanists, atheists and some Christians headed to Little Rock for the big event on Thursday, the Associated Press wrote. Baphomet fans really got into it.

As for the good people of Little Rock, not everyone welcomed the demonic visitor. Here’s the scene the day before the unveiling. It’s unclear how many honked.

“It will be a very cold day in hell before an offensive statue will be forced upon us,” state Sen. Jason Rapert (R), a key supporter of the Ten Commandments display, wrote on the day of Baphomet’s arrival.

More protesters were on hand holding Bible verses when the goat rolled up to the Capitol on a flatbed truck Thursday afternoon. A few people also brought Confederate flags, for reasons unclear. Rapert appeared on the pastor Happy Caldwell’s show to preemptively declare Satan’s defeat.

5. It’s been a rough year for the Ten Commandments

While legal challenges have not (yet?) forced Arkansas to remove the Ten Commandments monument, as they have in other states, the old tablet’s had a hard time of it.

Arkansas state personnelthe new Ten Commandments monument outside the state Capitol in Little Rock, Ark., after a man crashed into it with a vehicle in June, 2017. (AP Photo/Jill Zeman Bleed, File)

No sooner had the monument been installed in 2017 than “an alleged serial destroyer of Ten Commandments monuments” rammed a Dodge into it and shattered it, as Cleve R. Wootson Jr. wrote for The Post.

The monument was rebuilt, but a KATV reporter noticed it had been curtained off behind black tarps by the time Baphomet arrived. Local officials denied the Ten Commandments were being hidden from the Satanists. Rather, they said, the monument just happened to becordoned off for preventive algae treatment.

6. Baphomet’s big show

It’s a little misleading for the temple to call Thursday’s ceremony an unveiling, since that took place three years earlier at what appeared to be a Detroit heavy metal concert.

But Satanists did technically pull a veil off the statue again in front of the Arkansas Capitol, thrilling a crowd that looked more cowboy-hats-and-jean-shorts than hood-and-cowl.

This was not to be Baphomet’s new home, though. He stayed in Little Rock only for a few hours.

From a lectern beside the goat and bronze-cast children, video shows, Greaves took a jab at “flabby old men who fashion themselves the master race” among the protesters, and then made a short speech:

“Good people of Arkansas and supporters of religious liberty,” he said. “I present to you Baphomet: symbol of pluralism, legal equality, tolerance, free inquiry, freedom of conscience and reconciliation.”

“The Satanic Temple never asked for the Ten Commandments monument be taken down, nor do we ask that Baphomet be erected to the exclusion of any other monuments of religious significance,” Greaves continued. “We have as little interest in forcing our beliefs and symbols upon you as we do in having the beliefs of others forced upon us.”

A man in a black ski mask holding a large stick interrupted the ceremony at one point to scream at a speaker for “leading people to hell, ” a video tweeted from the scene shows. (Warning: There’s profanity.) But a police officer intervened, and the unveiling went on.

The Satanists cheered at the end. The Bible poster-holders on the other side of the truck did not. Then the visitors packed up, the flatbed rolled away, and Baphomet returned to an undisclosed location to await his next adventure.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the masked man with a big stick yelled at Lucien Greaves about leading people to hell. He yelled at a different speaker.


(The Washington Post)


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/19/2018 4:00:02 PM
PUBLISHED: 6:18 PM 17 AUG 2018
UPDATED: 10:03 PM 17 AUG 2018

Four Children Stabbed In London, One Boy ‘Disemboweled’

A boy is fighting for his life after he was allegedly disemboweled when stabbed in London.
Martin Walsh by

Young boys were brutally stabbed in London.


Four children were stabbed in a south
London, United Kingdom suburb by a whole heap of attackers, who have been taken into custody and are being questioned. According toThe Metro U.K., one of the four boys was attacked so brutally that he was allegedly disemboweled by one of the attackers. Many would agree that there are no words for this type of savagery.

One witness stated a ‘whole heap of youths’ were running toward the place of attack a few minutes before it occurred, and other said “There were four or five black boys running. All of a sudden I could hear, ‘Help, help’,” she said.

The brutal attack on Thursday is indicative of the historic crime that has rocked London recently, where Mayor Sadiq Khan has banned knives, added more stringent measures to enforce the gun ban, and wants to prohibit cars from driving in certain areas to thwart potential terror attacks. However, apparently, making guns and knives illegal has had zero impact on lowering vicious crimes. Perhaps, he should look to the sorts of refugees and social environment the left has created?

Khan has arguably been tougher on innocent civilians than the criminals making the city almost completely unsafe.

On Friday, police gave an update on the attack and said one of the boys was in critical condition, another is in serious condition, and the other two did not sustain any serious injuries. One witness told police that she saw one of the boys’ collapse when his intestines were falling out of his stomach and onto the ground.

Witnesses who saw the end of the attack described it as horrifying, brutal, and unconscionable.

“That particular one, I hope he does live but by the looks of it and the way the ambulance had to struggle I would give it just an 8% (chance),” said one woman. “It was very traumatizing.”

The crime scene was reportedly littered with officers, medical staff, puddles of blood scattered everywhere, and bloodied clothing. Another witness said he saw the six kids run toward the group of four, and then a few minutes later, he saw the suspects running away. When he went around the corner to check it out, he saw the young boy had been brutally stabbed in the stomach and others were injured.

“He came to the corner and dropped. He was holding his belly and all of his intestines were falling on the ground,” the man said.

The chilling attack comes a week after a terror suspect attempted to mow down a group of cyclists in London. As noted by Conservative Daily Post, Khan’s solution to the terror attack is to ban cars from driving in certain areas, which would basically take away rights from law-abiding citizens.

By not allowing vehicles in certain areas, people could be protected from a possible attack. But, he cannot make the entire city car-free, and his idea shows that he is refusing to address the real issue raging across London: criminal terrorists.

This year alone, London has experienced a historic wave in crime. As unprecedented levels are recorded, Khan’s solutions have centered on instituting more stringent measures to enforce the gun ban, he has banned all knives, and now his office wants to forbid people from driving vehicles in certain areas.

He’s disarming the public and punishing them, while largely refusing to take any serious action against criminals and terrorists carrying out violence across the city.

CDP has detailed the historic violence in London, where the city not only has the strictest gun control laws in the world, the country is banning knives and deploying police to ensure citizens are completely disarmed.

The city has gotten so violent that kids apparently can’t even play outside without being stabbed.

A young boy was disemboweled and had his insides pouring out of his stomach, and Khan’s solutions are to be tougher on citizens than the criminals committing these heinous crimes.


(conservativedailypost.com)


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/19/2018 5:19:50 PM
In horrifying detail, women accuse U.S. customs officers of invasive body searches


Tameika Lovell, pictured in Queens on May 13, 2017, claims she was racially profiled and inappropriately searched at John F. Kennedy International Airport. (David Wexler)

Tameika Lovell was retrieving luggage at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport when Customs and Border Protection officers detained her for a random search. It was Nov. 27, 2016, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and the school counselor from Long Island had just returned from a short Jamaica vacation. Lovell, who is black, had been stopped before, but this time a CBP supervisor began asking questions she hadn’t heard previously.

“Don’t you think you’re spending too much money traveling?” Lovell, 34, recalls a CBP supervisor asking.

What happened next is the subject of a harrowing lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Inside a secure room, Lovell’s litigation alleges, a female CBP officer searched Lovell’s belongings, presumably for illegal drugs, and asked if she was using a tampon or sanitary pad. The question upset her, but Lovell replied “no” and complied when told to remove her shoes, lift her arms and spread her legs.

As a second female officer observed, hand on her firearm, the lawsuit says, the first officer touched Lovell “from head to toe” before ordering her to squat. Lovell was clothed, but the lawsuit claims that the officer squeezed Lovell’s breasts, and, “placed her right hand into [Lovell’s] pants ‘forcibly’ inserting four gloved fingers into plaintiff’s vagina” before parting Lovell’s buttocks “for viewing.”

Lovell has accused CBP officers of violating her constitutional rights and sidestepping the agency’s rules prohibiting officers from conducting invasive body searches. Her case is one of at least 11 since 2011 examined by the Center for Public Integrity. Each raises unsettling questions about authorities’ considerable power to detain people at the nation’s 328 ports of entry, underscoring critics’ concerns about CBP officer accountability as the Trump administration seeks to expand the agency andsignificantly enhance immigration enforcement.

These alleged invasive searches “should give everyone pause,” said Adriana Piñon, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in Texas. “The touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness,” she said. The Constitution, she said, protects people from having their bodies searched based “on a whim.”

The government has settled some of these cases before they could go to trial, thus avoiding potentially incriminating testimony from CBP officers accused of wrongdoing. Six of the lawsuits resulted in financial settlements costing taxpayers more than $1.2 million. Others are pending. One claim lost in a jury trial.

In Lovell’s case, the Justice Department has sought to dismiss CBP and the individual officers, but not the U.S. government, as defendants. CBP officials declined to comment on any specific litigation, settled or pending. A spokesman said that misconduct is taken “seriously” and that “our mission is to facilitate legitimate travel and trade while preventing illicit drugs, weapons or other contraband from entering our country.”

If they can justify suspicions, federal officers at U.S. ports of entry are authorized, without the need for warrants, to require some disrobing for genital and rectal inspections, and monitored bowel movements to check for drugs, according to a CBP handbook. At the same time, the detention-and-search handbook instructs officers to record a solid justification for every step beyond a frisk, and to respect detainees’ dignity and “freedom from unreasonable searches.” The handbook also warns against what could be considered a “visual or physical intrusion” into body cavities.

The women who’ve brought these lawsuits, including two minor girls, say CBP officers subjected them to indignities — such as strip searches while menstruating and prohibited genital probing — despite finding no contraband. Four women further allege they were handcuffed and transported to hospitals where, against their will, one underwent a pelvic exam and X-rays. In one of the cases, the woman’s lawsuit asserts she was intravenously drugged at the hospital, according to lawsuits.

Such invasive medical procedures require a detainee’s consent or a warrant. In two cases, the plaintiffs say they were billed.

A lawsuit filed in San Diego federal court on behalf of a Hispanic 16-year-old identified as C.R. alleges CBP strip-searched her last September as she and her adult sisters returned from a family visit to Mexico through the San Ysidro pedestrian port. The sisters were flagged after a false drug-sniffing dog alert, the lawsuit asserts. Female officers took C.R. aside and allegedly told the tearful girl to disrobe, hand over a sanitary pad, and squat and cough “while officers probed and shined a flashlight at her vaginal and anal areas,” the lawsuit says.

Justice Department attorneys representing officers have filed to dismiss C.R.’s suit, arguing that it was not filed properly.

Sixteen-year-old C.R.’s lawsuit details an alleged strip-search by CBP last September at the San Diego-Mexico border. Since September, two other Hispanic minors also reported to rights activists that they were detained and forced to strip upon entry. (Center for Public Integrity/Washington Post Illustration)

The CBP handbook says officers should “weigh all factors” before an officer, who should be of the same gender, searches a minor. Officers are told to seek parental consent for a strip-search and refrain from touching or inspecting a minor’s body cavities. If a parent refuses consent, officers should seek advice from CBP legal counsel.

C.R.’s alleged experience is one of three alleged strip-searches at the San Diego border crossing involving Hispanic minors and a 42-year-old Hispanic woman reported since last September to the American Friends Service Committee, a rights group.

Records reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity show that in 2015 the U.S. government settled a lawsuit for $500,000 with a woman who said she was subjected to a prolonged ordeal that began as she entered the Otay Mesa port and continued after she was handcuffed and transferred 10 miles away to the San Ysidro port.

CBP officers mistook the woman, who had been volunteering at a Mexican orphanage, for someone of the same name who was wanted on a drug arrest warrant issued in California’s Contra Costa County. The woman, who was 52, said that even though some officers suspected she was not the person named in the warrant, she was lined up with three other female detainees, invasively searched by a CBP officer and later driven to a county jail.

“This officer squeezed my breasts hard and went into my underwear and in my vagina with her finger. She did this with the same glove that she did three other women before me!!” the woman later wrote in an email to a CBP official, according to her lawsuit.

A lawsuit was settled for $500,000 after CBP officers mistakenly detained and jailed an American returning from Mexico, according to U.S. Treasury Department records. One of the CBP agents who thought the woman was wanted on an arrest warrant allegedly subjected the woman to prohibited vaginal searches using the same gloved hand the agent used to probe other detainees. (Center for Public Integrity/Washington Post Illustration)

“Plaintiff was visibly upset, crying and professing her innocence during and after the search,” the suit alleges. The officers allegedly called her a “basket case,” it says.

According to the lawsuit, after 20 minutes the same female officer allegedly repeated a vaginal search.

Contra Costa County officials allegedly included erroneous information on the arrest warrant and advised CBP to detain the woman overnight. The county settled with the woman for another payment of $450,000.

'Professionalism and courtesy'

Shortly after he took office in 2017, President Trump told officials at the Department of Homeland Security that he thought border enforcement officers hadn’t been able to do their jobs properly, and that from now on, he expected laws “to be enforced and enforced strongly.” He aimed to hire 5,000 more Border Patrol agents, who work under CBP, but that goal hasn’t been met because of staff attrition and concerns in Congress about funding.

CBP declined to discuss whether the accused officers named in settled or pending lawsuits have been investigated, absolved, disciplined, retrained, fired or moved to other jobs. The agency referred questions to the Justice Department, where officials also declined to comment.

CBP also refused to discuss the rate at which officers discover drugs secreted in travelers’ bodies. At a May 30 congressional hearing focused on opioid seizures at the border, CBP’s acting field director for Tucson, Guadalupe Ramirez, told lawmakers that officers “regularly find drugs concealed in body cavities.”

In a written statement, a spokesman for the agency said CBP has “policies, procedures and training in place to ensure officers and agents treat travelers and those in custody with professionalism and courtesy, while protecting the civil rights, civil liberties, and well-being of every individual with whom we interact.

“Unfortunately,” it says, “CBP officers encounter persons attempting to smuggle narcotics into the United States internally, a very dangerous smuggling method that comes with the risk of great personal harm.”

Lawyers representing the women who have sued the government say these relatively modest number of suits should not be considered a measure of how frequently detained people are invasively searched. “Instances like these are traumatic and people feel sexually assaulted. Filing a lawsuit requires detailing a significantly painful incident in a public forum,” said Piñon, of the ACLU in Texas.

A person’s ethnicity is not grounds for a search, but lawyers who have represented travelers assert that officers do seem to consider factors such as travel to certain countries, unusual travel patterns and behavior that seems evasive or suspicious. Canine contraband alerts also are a factor — but it’s not uncommon for them to prove false, the ACLU has argued.

Officers’ ability to initiate warrantless searches on “reasonable suspicion,” a lower threshold than “probable cause,” is grounded in arguments that U.S. ports of entry merit greater scrutiny. Additionally, a 1985 Supreme Court ruling, U.S. vs. Montoya, found that a rectal exam revealing cocaine-filled balloons did not violate a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights because officers considered various factors and had “reasonable” concerns that she had concealed drugs.

Settled civil suits accusing officers of failing to wisely act on suspicions don’t establish guilt or criminal liability. But documents do reveal how searches escalated, and how attorneys attempted to defend CBP before settling. In an Arizona case, Justice Department attorneys argued that the detention handbook was simply “guidance” for CBP officers.

A 24-hour ordeal

A Pennsylvania case also illustrates how CBP scrutiny of a female traveler led to graphic allegations of abuse. An African American woman, 36, flew into Philadelphia International Airport from a one-day trip to Punta Cana, the Dominican Republic, on Dec. 4, 2012 — and allegedly suffered through a 24-hour ordeal in a fruitless search for hidden drugs, her 2015 lawsuit says.

The woman’s complaint against CBP defendants was settled in 2017 for $189,500, paid by the U.S. Treasury Department, government records show.

CBP officers intercepted the woman at customs and took her to a screening room to search her belongings and allegedly interrogate her about suspicions that her short trip might indicate drug smuggling. The woman allegedly explained that she travels often on airline employee discounts available to family members.

Her suit says that she was told she would be released after a pat-down. But after seven hours — and attempts to get her to consent to an X-ray — the woman was allegedly handcuffed, shackled and “dragged” from the airport and taken to a hospital, court documents say.

Officers “provided false and misleading information” to staff suggesting she was packing drugs, the woman’s suit alleges, and that she would have to remain in a room “until she had urinated and defecated into a plastic container in the presence of an officer.”

After a staff shift change, the suit alleges, a nurse announced that the woman’s heart rate was elevated, and doctors “involuntarily” admitted her due to “possible drug toxicity.”

According to the suit, the woman was tied to a bed with restraints, stripped naked by medical staff and had a tampon removed from her vagina during a body search. In court filings, the hospital does not deny conducting an exam, administering sedatives intravenously, catheterizing the woman to collect urine, and conducting X-rays and abdominal and pelvic CT scans.

“The agents had no basis for their suspicion,” her suit says. “Medical personnel confirmed what [the plaintiff] had told CBP agents from the moment she encountered them: that she had no contraband on her person.”

Justice Department attorneys, however, argue in a filing that the “federal defendants deny that CBP officers had no basis for their suspicions,” and that the Dominican Republic is “a known illegal drug source country.” CBP officers, the response alleges, asked the woman to “consent to an X-ray that would expeditiously determine” if drugs were inside her and “explored whether to seek a warrant” but did not because she was involuntarily admitted to the hospital.

“Plaintiff was afforded all constitutional rights and protections to which she was entitled at all material times to the incidents alleged,” the response also argues.

After she woke from sedation, the woman’s suit asserts, she was driven back to the airport and suffered a vehicle accident while driving her car.

Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital in Darby, Pa., where the medical procedures were conducted, declined to comment on the case, but said “we strive to honor the sacredness and dignity of every person.” Documents show the hospital system agreed to close the case for what the woman’s attorney said is an undisclosed settlement.

Racial profiling 'absolutely constant'

Racial profiling is another concern. A 1997 lawsuit on behalf of 87 black women alleged racial profiling and illegal strip-searches and pat-downs by customs officers at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The suit was settled in 2006 for $1.9 million.

In 2000, the Government Accountability Office found that two years earlier, black American women were nine times more likely than white counterparts to be X-rayed by customs officers after airport frisking, although they were less than half as likely to be found with contraband compared with white women also X-rayed.

“The racial profiling issue was absolutely constant,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a CBP commissioner during the Obama administration. Kerlikowske said he tried to improve a complaint system and began regular meetings with the ACLU and other rights groups.

Piñon, of the ACLU, said: “I worry that the cases we represent underestimate how often this [invasive searching] occurs.”

Government records don’t address such concerns. Within the Treasury Department database that documents settlement amounts, three lawsuits alleging unconstitutional searches are listed as “false arrest” claims and three are labeled “miscellaneous.” Records also show scores of false-arrest or miscellaneous complaints filed directly and settled with CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the past decade. Such settlements leave no publicly accessible court trail revealing precisely what was alleged.

Timothy Scott, the lawyer who represented the woman mistakenly detained in San Diego, said many immigrants are “from countries where there’s no profit in criticizing authorities. . . . There’s no doubt in my mind that this [invasive searching] is underreported.”

Freedom for Immigrants, a volunteer group that aids detained immigrants, obtained documents alleging rough treatment in ICE detention centers between 2010 and 2014, including claims of guards allegedly ripping clothes off detainees if they refused to disrobe.

In a statement, ICE said it has “already initiated several steps to bolster the division’s quality assurance process” and plans more detention inspections this year.

In New York, Lovell is just beginning her legal journey. She said she understands why people hesitate to publicize their grievances about getting searched. “Even though you are the victim,” she said, “there’s always that shadow of a doubt that people have about you.”

Lovell was so shaken by her experience, she said, that she was unsure whether she could assert her rights. “I didn’t know if what they were doing,” she said, “was legal or not.”

This article is from the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative media organization in Washington.


(The Washington Post)


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