{"id":2368,"date":"2010-07-12T07:54:59","date_gmt":"2010-07-12T11:54:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=2368"},"modified":"2010-07-12T07:54:59","modified_gmt":"2010-07-12T11:54:59","slug":"saranac-lake-womans-border-woes-revive-questions-about-us-canada-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/07\/12\/saranac-lake-womans-border-woes-revive-questions-about-us-canada-security\/","title":{"rendered":"Saranac Lake woman’s border woes revive questions about US-Canada security"},"content":{"rendered":"

We reported in May on the travails of Sylvie Nelson<\/a>, the Saranac Lake woman who keeps getting handcuffed at the US-Canada border.<\/p>\n

The Associated Press<\/a> revisited her case in an article over the weekend.<\/p>\n

In December, she was ordered from her car and handcuffed as she came back from a Montreal shopping trip with her children. Nelson was mortified and melted into tears but was soon told she was free to go.<\/p>\n

It happened again in February at a different New York crossing. Agents surrounded her car and her husband also was handcuffed. Again, she was let go.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Among the most troubling aspects of this case is the Department of Homeland Security’s unwillingness to apologize and explain its repeated errors.<\/p>\n

“They never apologize,” Nelson said. “They basically tell you that they’re doing their job for the better good of the world.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Americans tend to give big government bureaucracies something of a pass when those bureaucracies (the Pentagon, the FBI, Homeland Security, etc.) are there to protect us.<\/p>\n

But there are limits.\u00a0 There’s nothing that says a sense of humor, courtesy, and common sense are incompatible with vigilance.<\/p>\n

On the contrary, those might be the most valuable tools we can deploy on our northern border, more useful than drones and spy cameras.<\/p>\n

As a native Quebecois and head of the Saranac Lake chamber of commerce, Nelson is living proof of the need for a seamless and congenial border — for cultural reasons but also for the health of our region’s economy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We reported in May on the travails of Sylvie Nelson, the Saranac Lake woman who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2368"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}