On The Media dedicated its whole program this week to addressing a growing and disturbing problem: the suspension of constitutional rights at the US border, where Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) can detain US citizens for hours and seize their electronic devices without any suspicion of wrong doing. Perhaps worse, the policies and practices of CBP are extremely secretive and in many ways unaccountable, and Freedom of Information Act requests to the agencies are largely stonewalled or ignored.

As our board member Josh Stearns wrote recently, “The U.S. border may be the next battleground for press freedom.”

On The Media’s coverage of the subject started when US Customs and Border Protection detained their own producer Sarah Abdurrahman, her family, and her friends for hours on their way home from Canada last year. But this week’s program expanded on her experience to document, as they put it, some of the “countless stories of inhumanizing intrusions and detentions at the border that would seem to be unconstitutional anywhere else.”

Ms. Abdurrahman is far from the only journalist this has happened to in recent years. Huffington Post journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin wrote a powerful piece last month about his experiences repeatedly being detained while going over the border for the crime of having a Muslim name.

New York Times reporters were detained and questioned before leaving on a reporting trip to Syria last year and have since sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the agency that oversees CBP, after it refused to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests about the nature of the questioning.

In one of the best essays of 2013, author and journalist William Vollman described in Harper’s Magazine his repeated dust-ups at the border that included being detained for hours with no explanation.

David House won a lawsuit against DHS last year after he was detained and his devices were confiscated merely for being associated with the news organization WikiLeaks. The same experience has repeatedly happened to journalist and security researcher Jacob Appelbaum.

And in perhaps the most notorious case, filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras has been detained going over the US border over forty times since the release of her Academy award nominated film My Country, My Country in 2005. And this was before her reporting on the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden. She and her reporting partner Glenn Greenwald have yet to return to the US in part because of the risk of having their devices seized as they enter the country.

As Poitras told the New York Times last year, she has had the same experience many interviewed by On The Media also reported: