By Patrick Oppmann at CNN via Freedom Socialist Party:
Port Angeles, Washington (CNN) — On Washington state’s remote and wooded Olympic Peninsula, major commotion is usually limited to a log tumbling off an overloaded lumber truck.
But lately the peninsula has been roiled by a noisy debate over the expansion of a Border Patrol station in Port Angeles, a three-hour car and ferry ride away from the U.S.-Canadian land border.
The U.S. Border Patrol is spending nearly $6 million to renovate a Port Angeles building that could house up to 50 of its agents.
Prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, four agents were stationed in Port Angeles, a city of about 20,000 people some 15 miles across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Canada.
“It’s not needed, there’s nothing for them to do up here,” said Lois Danks, a local writer and organizer of Stop the Checkpoints, which last month staged a small protest near where the Border Patrol’s new station is being built.
She says border agents “drive around and hassle people without any reasonable suspicion of anything except for possibly the color of their skin.”
“They park across the street from Hispanic grocery stores and taco stands and watch who comes and goes,” according to Danks.
I know just the thing to wake up the border patrol at Port Angeles, WA. Take the ferry from Victoria, BC with a suit case saying “SUPPORT
FREE TRADE. SMUGGLE!?” [interrobang] as
an attached bumper strip. I did that once at Anacosta, WA and never left the United States
(since I took the ferry from Good Friday Harbor,
WA). Yet I was held there for 3 1/2 hours. because they took photos of every thing in my
suit case.
Do you think the officials at Port Angeles are any sharper than the ones at Anacosta, WA?
Sincerely, Mark Seidenberg, Chairman,
American Independent Party