After four years of Freedom of Information Act litigation, the ACLU has
prevailed and forced the Customs and Border Patrol to release 1,000
pages’ worth of training documents in which new agents learn when they
can stop people and what they can do after they stop them.
The documents are a window into the CBP’s legal gamesmanship, in which
the flimsiest of pretenses are spun into legal excuses to stop, search,
question and detain people within 100 miles of the US border and in any
city with an international airport.
Counsel for CBP has cherry-picked legal precedents to produce a
kafka-esque litany of excuses for stops, including being close to the
border, being on a “known smuggling route,” driving “inconsistent with
local traffic patterns,” being “from out of the area,” having a covered
cargo area; paying “undue attention to the agent’s presence,” avoiding
“looking at the agent,” slowing down on seeing the agent, being dirty,
etc.
The documents also shed light on CBP surveillance activities, though much of this section is redacted.
Of particular interest are the revelations of the CPB’s shadowy “city
patrol,” which does not target people who’ve made illegal border
crossings.
Also interesting is the CBP’s belief that it can force any civilian to
operate on its behalf on penalty of a $1,000 fine (previously the CBP
has used this authority to force doctors to perform medically
unnecessary rectal examinations, a practice now banned by the courts).
Evans suggested that when they bump into each other, they do what friends often do after being apart for a while: assess each other’s haircuts. In some ways, they’ve swapped styles. Thor has gotten a clean-cut trim, while Cap is sporting the ragged locks and beard.
“I’ll be like, ‘Short hair now? Good choice,’” Evans says, while miming a right hook against an invisible Outrider.
“And I’ll go, ‘Yours too. The beard. Very rugged,’” Hemsworth says.
— Behind the scenes of Avengers: Infinity War, EW
I feel like I scream this all the time. Thor speaks Groot. The language Groot. And he introduces his friend as Tree. His name is Tree, he is a Groot. He is a Groot named Tree in the MCU.
I read lots of comics but I haven’t stumbled across this character in my pull list yet, so I have no idea about his in comics.
