This is incorrect. There have been many documented incidents of US Citizens being detained and harassed upon US entry for what they say online. You can disagree about politics all you want, but the facts remain that USCBP has begun persecuting people for all sorts of things, both political and otherwise.
They have not "begun" persecuting people for all sorts of things. Individual CBP agents have always had extreme authority relative to their position and have always had cases of denying people for extremely stupid reasons every year.
The idea that US citizens need to scrub their phones before entering the US is just a hysterical media narrative related to the drama around a certain middle east conflict right now (which I shall not mention because it will further devolve into a flame war).
I can tell you with certainty the amount of border agents who have a strong opinion about this certain middle eastern conflict is exceedingly small.
> The idea that US citizens need to scrub their phones before entering the US is just a hysterical media narrative related to the drama around a certain middle east conflict right now
This seems to imply that public discussions about cleaning phones wasn't a meaningfully common occurrence before now.
But it's been a spontaneous topic for as long as devices have been at risk from border agencies - since at least 2017.
Does reporting on stories more often when the number of actual incidents stay the same really mean that anything is actually different besides political rhetoric?
> has begun
ICE has been arresting, detaining and exiling US citizens for at least 10 years:
I think its a pretty big deal when a UK citizen who is entirely willing and capable of buying a ticket to return home is needlessly detained[0] by ICE. Same goes for the Irish guy who was injured so missed his flight home and was over his visa by three days[1]. They detained him for 3 months and barred re-entry for 10 years.
My life is given meaning by my relationships with my partner and family, pursuing my passions and hobbies, semi yearly bicycle trips, petting my cat etc. Its meaning is chipped away at when I hear about random grandparents black bagged at the home depot; the idea that immense and pointless suffering is being meted out an underclass supposedly for my benefit, without any significant way to protest or stop it without focusing those dark forces upon myself.
"They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."
They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1933-45 - Milton Mayer
