Checkpoint America: Monitoring The Constitution‐​Free Zone is a new Cato project designed to map Department of Homeland Security Custom and Border Protection (CBP) internal checkpoints and provide the public with information on their operations, as well as the chance to help improve our information on and understanding of activities at these checkpoints.

Simply stated, Americans living in or traveling through the so‐​called “border zone” can be subjected to motor vehicle stops and constitutionally dubious searches at internal checkpoints run by the CBP. Some of these checkpoints are located as much as 100 miles inside the country, and reports of CBP agent abuses of citizens at such checkpoints appear frequently in the press.

If you conduct a YouTube search utilizing the phrase “checkpoint refusal videos,” you will get thousands of hits—and you could easily spend days watching them. One Arizona man has created Roadblock Revelations, a website dedicated to exposing CBP abuses of motorists (the website operator has to travel through a CBP checkpoint daily in order to get to and from work). A ReasonTV piece documented the case of one American citizen who, upon refusing to disclose his citizenship at the Laredo, Texas checkpoint, was detained by CBP without charge for 19 days (the case was the subject of litigation). In some cases, CBP agents have used violence to remove motorists from their vehicles when they decline to answer questions after asserting their rights.

In October 2013, the Arizona ACLU chapter filed a complaint with the DHS’s Inspector General office regarding CBP mistreatment of multiple Arizona residents at checkpoints in the state. The abuses at these checkpoints have become so serious that the ACLU has initiated the Border Litigation Project, which seeks to monitor and combat in court CBP’s excesses at the checkpoints. A 2015 Freedom of Information Act request to CBP filed by Cato Policy Analyst Patrick Eddington for information on these checkpoints has been on administrative appeal for two years—a clear effort by CBP to block release of information related to the length of motorist stops for “secondary” inspections, as well as the number of use‐​of‐​force incidents.

On the map below, you can click on individual checkpoints to view overhead and ground‐​level photography of the facilities, physical descriptions of the checkpoints, and read (where available) press accounts, administrative actions, and court proceedings involving a given checkpoint.

If you have comments, questions, or suggestions about how this online CBP checkpoint monitoring tool can be improved, contact Patrick Eddington at peddington@​cato.​org. Share what you learned on Twitter with the hashtag #CheckpointAmerica.