4/17/25: ICE detains citizens while RFK nutty on autism

**David Pakman** (0:07)
Welcome, everybody. It seems every day the line is being pushed further and we now have reports of ICE detaining US citizens for hours as they attempt to reenter the United States. We were told it would just be the criminal illegals that any US citizen had nothing to worry about, that this was about safety and not about profiling. But this week, a US citizen was detained by Customs and Border Protection after coming back from a weekend trip in Canada, a trip I've done many times as a naturalized American citizen. The individual to whom this happened is essentially no different than me. This is Bakura Tala, real estate attorney from New Hampshire, has lived in the United States for nearly four decades, has been a naturalized American citizen for over 10 years. And after crossing the Vermont border with his wife, maybe at the exact same crossing that I've done 30 or so times when coming back from Montreal, he was pulled aside by CBP agents told to get out of the car. And when he hesitated for clarification, an agent reached for his gun. Atala complied but was handcuffed, wrist twisted, dragged away while his wife watched from the car. He asked, why am I being detained? The response is, we don't know. It's the government agents demanded access to his phone and to his email. He invoked attorney client privilege as a practicing lawyer. They pressured him into signing a statement, allowing them to search through it anyway. Under duress, he gave in and five hours later, he and his wife were released. No charges were filed. No explanation was given, just disbelief and the trauma of such an event. Now, this is not an isolated incident. Last month, we learned about ICE detaining Genzi Machado, another naturalized US citizen. And by the way, one that actually supports or at least did support Donald Trump. We learned of a student with a green card tackled in front of his pregnant wife. And now a decade long citizen coming back from Canada, detained and interrogated for hours. So we're in a new phase. The line keeps pushing forward. Only criminal illegals. Well, maybe it's anybody who's undocumented. Well, maybe it's people here with visas. Maybe it's permanent residents. Maybe it's a naturalized American citizen, just like me. So we're now in a phase where apparently not even citizenship protects you. First it was undocumented immigrants and green card holders. And then now we are pushing the line further and further. And of course, everybody's insisting that all of this stuff is being done by the book. Now here is what Bachir Attala's sister, who's an immigration attorney, said. It is not about immigrants. It's coming to us Americans and it's going to go after all of us. This is what the Trump deportation machine looks like, even if not everybody being encountered is even subject to deportation legally. When a citizen with a US passport, no criminal record, legal credentials can be treated like this at the border. We are beyond the is this going to far phase? It's happening right now. And so for everybody, you know, I was on with the Don Lemon with Don Lemon yesterday, alongside Brian Tyler Cohen and Cenk Uygur. And our consensus was this has already gone far enough where now is the red alert. Now is the five alarm fire. Serious legal questions, of course, about what happened to Atala Customs and Border Protection, of course, does have broader authority at border crossings. That's what they do. It includes the ability to do a secondary screening. There are constitutional limits, especially when it comes to American citizens. You know, we sort of encountered this to a degree during the covid era because remember in the covid era, with all of the travel restrictions as applied to citizens coming back to the United States, at the end of the day, what was determined was that the United States cannot block a citizen from coming home. And so all of the testing guidelines and all of the different stuff that the right wingers were furious about, the right wingers ultimately came down on the side of you really can't keep an American citizen out of the United States. You can't reject their reentry to the United States if they show up and they haven't done the covid test. You've got to let them back in. That's how it applied then. But now a different standard being applied. Well, I don't know. Maybe the five hours of questioning is OK.
Maybe the allowing search of the phone under duress is OK. So this should be setting alarm bells off in every courtroom in the country. At minimum, we have a violation of attorney client confidentiality. At worse, you know, it's a case study and rights being trampled in real time. Now later, CBP has really kind of focused in on this. Attala consented to the search of his phone. We've talked about this before. Consent given under duress after being handcuffed and threatened. I don't know that that's really consent in any meaningful legal sense. And courts have long recognized that these coercive environments can invalidate consent in exactly this sort of situation. But it keeps happening. Very little oversight, almost no consequences. Finally, we have to talk about the biggest chilling effect that can't be ignored.