Trump Officials Used Secret Terrorism Unit to Question Lawyers at Border
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicle patrols the border fence in El Paso, Texas, on August 23, 2019.
Jinitzail Hernández/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images
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Taylor Levy couldn’t understand why she’d been held for hours by Customs and Border Protection officials when crossing back into El Paso, Texas, after getting dinner with friends in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in January 2019. And she didn’t know why she was being questioned by an agent who’d introduced himself as a counterterrorism specialist.
Levy was part of the legal team representing the father of a girl who’d died the previous month in the custody of the Border Patrol, which is part of CBP. “There was so much hate for immigration lawyers at that time,” she recalled. “I thought that somebody had put in an anonymous tip that I was a terrorist.”