Teacher Detained At New Mexico Border Patrol Checkpoint For Not Answering Questions

A Southern California teacher was detained at a Border Patrol checkpoint for refusing to answer their citizenship question.

A middle school teacher from Southern California went viral after she was detained at a New Mexico Border Patrol checkpoint last week. San Diego Unified School District teacher Shane Parmely was traveling through the checkpoint on Interstate 10 between El Paso, Texas and Deming, New Mexico on Friday, July 21 when she was stopped and asked questions about her citizenship by agents. She recorded her interaction with the agents and posted the videos on her Facebook where they have now gone viral.

In one of the videos, you see the agent asking the woman if she and her children are U.S. citizens. The woman asked the agent if she is crossing a border, and the agent said no. She then refused to answer the question and the agent informed her that she is being detained for an immigration inspection. Parmely was detained for an hour at the checkpoint and she recorded various interactions with the Border Patrol agents.

In one of the videos, she questioned agents what would happen if she said yes she was a citizen:

“So if I just come through and say, ‘Yes, I’m a citizen,’ I can just go ahead? So if I have an accent, and I’m brown, can I just say, ‘Yes,’ and go ahead or do I have to prove it? I have a bunch of teacher friends who are sick of their kids being discriminated against.”

Parmely was eventually allowed to leave after over an hour, and she never answered if she and her children were U.S. citizens.

After this incident went viral, the Border Patrol released a statement:

Border Patrol checkpoints are a critical tool for the enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws.  At a Border Patrol checkpoint, an agent may question a vehicle’s occupants about their citizenship, place of birth, and request document proof of immigration status, how legal status was obtained and make quick observations of what is in plain view in the interior of the vehicle.  During the course of the immigration inspection, if an occupant refuses to answer an agent’s questions, the agent may detain the driver for a reasonable amount of time until he or she can make a determination regarding the occupant’s immigration status.  It is agency policy that all individuals with whom we interact are treated with dignity and respect.

Read more about this at the KRQE website.