"Papers, Please"

We've seen this sort of thing before:

Passengers of a domestic Delta flight from San Francisco to New York were told to show their identity documents to uniformed agents of the Customs and Border Protection agency upon their arrival at John F. Kennedy airport on Wednesday evening.

CBP officers are border agents, whose statutory authority is generally limited to international arrivals.

CBP agents inspected passenger identifications on the jetbridge by the door of the aircraft. A CBP spokesman insisted to Rolling Stone that this action is "nothing new" and that there is "no new policy." But the unusual – and legally questionable – search of domestic travelers comes days after the Department of Homeland Security outlined its plans to implement President Trump's sweeping executive order targeting millions of "removable aliens" for deportation.

CBP has no legal authority to demand that passengers on domestic flights show identification.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer's border search authority is derived from federal statutes and regulations, including 19 C.F.R. 162.6, which states that, "All persons, baggage and merchandise arriving in the Customs territory of the United States from places outside thereof are liable to inspection by a CBP officer." Unless exempt by diplomatic status, all persons entering the United States, including U.S. citizens, are subject to examination and search by CBP officers.

Last I heard, both San Francisco and New York are American cities (no matter what the Republican base thinks).

This is fairly chilling:

Rolling Stone asked CBP to clarify whether the CBP document search was truly a "request" – or instead a legally binding demand by the agents. The spokesman again could not clarify CBP's legal authority, warning only, "It is always best to cooperate with law enforcement, so as to expedite your exiting the airport in a timely manner."

(Emphasis added.)

Take that in tandem with this story, and you can see where we are headed: now that they're in charge, the GOP is implementing everything they accused Obama of doing.

Both stories via Crooks and Liars.