WASHINGTON—Corey El was watching The Office as the train he takes a few times a year from New York City to Niagara Falls, N.Y., pulled into Syracuse.

When he glanced up from his laptop last Thursday, he was startled. A U.S. Border Patrol agent was looking down at him from the aisle.

This has never happened to him before, and the reason seemed obvious. By land, Syracuse is more than 153 kilometres (95 miles) from the Canadian border.

“I had to look at the stop,” said El, 27. “Like, we’re in Syracuse. What are they doing here?”

It turned out the agent had a question for him and an assortment of other passengers. The question added anger to his bewilderment.

“Are you a citizen of the United States?”

El, a New Yorker born and raised, suspected he might not have to answer. But he also did not think it was worth taking the risk involved in being a Black man who refuses to co-operate with law enforcement.

Instead, he muttered a scoffing “yeah.” The agent turned to move on. El told him he was “pretty sure what he was doing was illegal.”

To the dismay of civil liberties advocates, the U.S. government says it is perfectly legal. And to the confusion of people on buses and trains in states near Canada — most of whom, like El, are not carrying passports — it appears to be happening with increased regularity in the Donald Trump era.

A U.S. law gives the Border Patrol the right to board and search any vehicle within a “reasonable distance” of the country’s boundaries. A 1953 regulation defines “reasonable” as within 100 miles (160 kilometres).

Because “boundaries” include coasts, the “100-mile zone” includes entire states — all or almost all of New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont, the American Civil Liberties Union notes.

The zone also includes Houston and Los Angeles. All in all, well over half of Americans, more than 175 million people, live in a place where the Border Patrol believes it has the right to question people, search their vehicles and detain people it believes are unlawfully present.

The bus and train checks are not new. But they appear to be happening more often near the Canadian border than they did in the five years prior to Trump’s tenure. And they have attracted renewed scrutiny around the country as Trump touts his crackdown on illegal immigration and gives the Border Patrol more money and leeway.

Miriam Aukerman, senior staff attorney at Michigan’s ACLU, said Border Patrol checks far from the border are a violation of Americans’ constitutional right against unreasonable search and seizure.

“From a legal perspective and from a common sense perspective, the entire state of Michigan is not a ‘reasonable distance’ from the border,’” she said. “Border Patrol belongs at the border, not in our communities.”

The legal director for the ACLU of Maine, where the Border Patrol now does daily bus checks, is advising citizens not to co-operate.

“I would hope that many of them will refuse to answer those questions,” Zachary Heiden said. “And will say, ‘This isn’t the kind of country I want to live in, where government officials are demanding our papers everywhere we go, and I’m not answering your questions.’ And would be polite but firm.”

Former president Barack Obama had reduced the use of the bus and train checks in Canadian-border states. After the New York Times reported complaints from passengers on a Chicago-to-New York train, Obama, according to the Associated Press, told the Border Patrol in 2011 to stop checking people on buses and trains everywhere but the “100-mile zone” adjacent to Mexico, unless they had specific intelligence.

The agents’ union was dismayed, arguing that no-cause checks were also effective near Canada and the oceans. Now Trump, who was endorsed by that union, has given agents a green light to resume.

A senior agent told Maine Public Radio in January that they had started daily checks on buses running from a border town to the state’s interior, plus periodic checks on buses starting in Bangor, more than 90 miles from Canada.

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In August, the Border Patrol set up its first highway checkpoint in New Hampshire in five years — more than 70 miles from the border, and near a local marijuana festival. It used drug-sniffing dogs, then turned over people suspected of drug possession to state police for arrest. The ACLU is challenging drug arrests from the checkpoint as a violation of the state constitution.

In late January, Border Patrol agents were filmed doing a check on a Greyhound bus from Orlando to Miami, asking passengers to produce identification. They ended up escorting a woman off the bus who had allegedly overstayed her tourist visa. The video went viral.

And in an August case that led to criticism from Republican Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, Border Patrol agents boarded a Greyhound in a village after midnight, asking every passenger if they were American. Danielle Bonadona, a Dartmouth College special instructor in film and media, said one of them blocked the door to prevent anyone from leaving.

The Border Patrol’s intensification in Vermont is “overreach,” Scott said later.

“People should be allowed to move freely in Vermont,” he told Vermont newspaper Seven Days.

Bonadona, 29, said the agent who questioned her moved on when she said she was American. She said he was not satisfied with the same reassurance from certain others.

“The only people they asked for identification from were the people who looked not-white,” she said.

ACLU officials say they are concerned 100-mile-zone checks are being used as a way to conduct racial profiling. And they say the people subjected to questioning, who are not told they have the right to refuse to discuss their citizenship, often do not see it as the voluntary exercise the Border Patrol says it is.

A Border Patrol spokesperson said the checks on vehicles are done “in direct support” of border enforcement efforts and as a way to stop “smuggling and criminal organizations from exploiting existing transportation hubs to travel to the interior.” Daniel Heibert, a chief patrol agent in Maine, told Maine Public Radio that agents “have to have a reasonable suspicion to think that somebody isn’t a citizen” to ask them more than initial questions.

It has never been clear how agents develop this suspicion, and critics say there is no evidence the Border Patrol can fight organized crime by asking people on northern buses if they are American. Chris Rickerd, policy counsel in the ACLU’s national office, said the government has not proven the checks achieve any priority other than “creating fear and deporting long-standing members of the community.”

The Trump-era intensification can be overstated. The Border Patrol doesn’t keep track of how many people it questions, but its data shows that the number of arrests near Canada during Trump’s first eight full months in 2017, 2,430, was less than half the number for those same months for Obama-era 2010: 5,125.

Still, the 2017 figure was a 44 per cent increase from 1,687 in Obama’s last year.

After the Florida check went viral, 19 Democrats demanded that Congress “conduct a comprehensive review of what ‘reasonable distance’ means.” An immigration reform package that was approved by the Senate in 2013 would have changed the definition of “reasonable” from 100 miles to 25 miles, but the package died in the House of Representatives.

With Trump in office, there is no current prospect for a change that is seen to ease up on the border in any way.

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