Hasan Piker, the biggest progressive political streamer in America, was detained by Customs and Border Protection for hours of questioning upon returning to the U.S. from a trip to France this weekend. Piker posted about the incident on X and later talked about it on stream.
He was detained in Chiago and questioned for two hours about protected journalistic activities like who he’s interviewed and his political beliefs. He was asked whether or not he’d interviewed Hamas, Houthis, or Hezbollah members. He was questioned about his opinions on Trump and Israel and asked about his history of bans on Twitch. His phone and laptop were not confiscated.
And what happen when the people questioning you find your answers to be not in line with the current political climate? When you’re being detained in a separate room with no lawyer or witness capable of providing an independent account of the questioning and the consequent actions taken by the police? I personally am much more scared of state enforced violence rather than of citizen actions given the disparity in power these two type of violence entail.
All border questioning today usually take place in a well lit room full of other people keeping the law enforcement accountable and under scrutiny. If you don’t think moving these kind of interactions in a closed room to be alarming or, at least, unprecedented I’m sorry to say you haven’t thought about the extreme consequences this new policy may bring us to.
Lastly I return to my previous point: who has the right to identify a group of people as “terrorists”? Because if the answer is the same entity who then enforces the punishment against this group we are circular situation unacceptable for the legal standard we have set for our societies
I am not talking about the method in which the questioning took place or how lit it was. If the problem was “Hasan’s room was too dim, there were not enough witnesses, and not recorded properly” that’s a different though serious issue. We’re not going to remove questioning altogether because of that. Again, we’re discussing whether him being questioned is reasonable or expected, not the method in which it happened. Of course these things should be monitored by multiple people or at least logged.
Same goes with your other point. If you have an issue with who should decide and who should enforce, that’s not a Hasan problem. If we’re shitting on the trump administration, then let me get the turd clipper, because I’m all for it. But there was nothing outrageous about Hasan being questioned.
Again, you’re narrowing the discussion by focusing on this specific administration, my reasoning is general and should be referred to any presidency or state. These kind of authoritative behaviour can be enacted both by the left and the right, we should always be against them no matter what.
Questioning someone coming to your country makes no sense, if he has ill intentions he’ll conceal them to enact on them once inside the country. The reasoning behind the questions you face entering a state is that, if you tell a lie, the state can arrest you for having commited a felony. What’s the advantage in that if you have made yourself explode in a supermarket? You’re gonna put bit and pieces of the terrorist in a cage for 40 years?