Not long after taking the picture above, I had one of two run-ins with law enforcement on my recent trip through the Southwest.

(I attended the Society for Neuroscience annual conference last week in San Diego. I got there and back by flying in to and out of Albuquerque, N.M., and driving 2,200 miles back and forth in a very ugly orange rental car [pictured above]. Yeah, and I did all this during NBC’s “Green Is Universal” week. Ironic.)

Moments after snapping a few pictures along the side of Route 8, which runs East-West close to the Mexican border in southern California, a Highway Patrol cruiser pulled up behind me. I was half worried and half relieved (if you catch my drift) that I wasn’t doing anything stupider than taking pictures.

The officer asked me what the problem was. I told him there was none. He proceeded to inform me that I was in a “high-crime zone,” where people stopped along the side of the highway to pick up illegal immigrants and shipments of drugs. The implication was not that a stupid New Yorker like me shouldn’t be in such a place, with regard to my safety. The implication was clearly that I might be picking up illegal immigrants and/or drugs (little does he know, I support the free and legal importation of both!). He spent a few minutes poking around in the bushes next to the road to see if there were any illegal immigrant drug mules hiding — there weren’t (though how bad would my luck have been if there had been?).

The cop definitely did seem to be telling the truth about things; he pointed out to me a foot path that clearly saw a lot of use heading off into the hills along the border. Still, I was mostly just glad he didn’t ask to search my car. As a libertarian, I would have felt a definite responsibility to refuse such a request (I can’t see how he would have had probable cause). But it probably would have meant getting thrown in the back of a Highway Patrol cruiser.

All in all, though, I thought this cop acted reasonably. It was my second run in, with Border Patrol, that left me pissed.

I don’t remember if this happened in Arizona or New Mexico, but it was on Route 10, which runs from Tucson, AZ, to Las Cruces, NM (an amazing drive — I recommend it). Chalk it up to my own ignorance about border enforcement, but I was pretty surprised to run into a Border Patrol checkpoint on a road that never gets closer than 90 miles to the Mexican border. It turns out, though, that within 100 miles of the border, the government can set up checkpoints to question and harass people traveling entirely within the United States (for instance, from San Diego to Las Cruces to points north).

“Are you an American citizen?” the BP agent asked me.

“Yes,” I answered, only half having turned my stereo down (I did not want to miss “Cherub Rock.”). Of course, Americans don’t yet have to carry their papers everywhere they go (at least until Rudy Giuliani becomes president), so he would have to take my word.

“Where are you headed?,” the BP asked.

Intrusive, but I answered Albuquerque.

“What for?,” he asked.

“To catch a flight.”

“Why aren’t you flying out of El Paso?,” he asked, now really pissing me off.

“Because I’m flying out of Albuquerque,” I answered, growing uncooperative.

“This is a long way out of your way,” he said.

“Look, I had a conference to go to in San Diego,” I said. “I wanted to drive around some, so I flew in to Albuqurque and am driving back and forth.”

“Drive around?,” he asked, quizzically.

“Look at the scenery,” I said. The “jackass” was implied.

Finally, I guess he decided he wasn’t going to search my car. Again, I don’t know what I would have done had he decided otherwise. But after this exchange I was probably pissed off enough to go to jail to avoid cooperating. I only learned later, online, that the Supreme Court has upheld warrantless searches within 100 miles of the border.

I must say this all strikes me as completely outrageous. And obviously not just because I was inconvenienced (I’m a white guy, and the whole thing probably lasted 30 or 40 annoying seconds — I can’t imagine the shit I would have been put through if my skin were darker and my explanation for what I was doing just as eccentric). The fact is that we have a Bill of Rights, and it’s supposed to protect us from harassment by the federal government. The Fourth Amendment, of course, springs to mind (one might also invoke the Ninth Amendment’s right to privacy).

The Supreme Court has deemed these checkpoints constitutional, in United States vs. Martinez (1976), but that doesn’t mean the court decided the case correctly. American citizens simply shouldn’t be subject to daily harassment inside their own country. But that’s what we get when we pursue an insane war on drugs and a racist war on immigrants.