SECRETIVE CBP COUNTERTERRORISM TEAMS INTERROGATED 180,000 U.S. CITIZENS OVER TWO-YEAR PERIOD – By Melissa del Bosque (The Intercept) / Sept 4 2021
Records from an ongoing FOIA lawsuit shed new light on the operations of CBP’s Tactical Terrorism Response Teams.
MORE THAN FOUR YEARS have passed since Aaron Gach, a sculptor and installation artist, was detained at San Francisco International Airport. He was interrogated by U.S. border agents, and his cellphone was searched. He still doesn’t know why. “It has absolutely had a chilling effect on myself and my art practice,” he said. “They wouldn’t tell me why I was stopped or why I was detained.”
Gach is one of tens of thousands of Americans caught up in an effort by the Department of Homeland Security to collect personal information about travelers at land borders and airports. To further this goal, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the DHS agency responsible for policing America’s borders, relies on secretive units called Tactical Terrorism Response Teams, documents from an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit reveal.
A CBP spokesperson told The Intercept and Type Investigations that the teams, which are trained to conduct counterterrorism interrogations, currently operate at 79 ports of entry and in all 20 of the Border Patrol sectors nationwide. The units consist of CBP officers and Border Patrol agents who work closely with CBP’s National Targeting Center, which gathers and vets intelligence. Since its inception in 2015, the TTRT program has expanded its scope beyond counterterrorism, the spokesperson added, to include other areas such as “counterintelligence, transnational organized crime as well as biological threats.”
CONTINUE > https://theintercept.com/2021/09/04/cbp-border-tactical-terrorism-response-teams/
