Winooski School District Superintendent Wilmer Chavarria has made the long trip from Nicaragua to Vermont countless times without incident. And so he was immediately concerned when, upon presenting his passport at the port of entry at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston on Monday evening, a customs official radioed for someone to escort him away.
“I knew that something was very wrong,” he said.
What followed, according to Chavarria, who has been a U.S. citizen since 2018, was “nothing short of surreal and the definition of psychological terror.” The educator said he was separated from his husband, Cyrus Dudgeon, and interrogated by multiple agents over the course of four to five hours.
Chavarria said he was asked whether his marriage was real, whether he was really a school superintendent, and questioned about everything he had done while out of the country. And again and again, he said agents demanded that he hand over the passwords to his phone and district-issued laptop.
The superintendent said he told agents they were free to search his personal files and devices, but that he couldn’t allow them to look at his work laptop, which contained private student information.
“They spent a long time basically, in lots of different ways, threatening me and making me feel like I was going to get into a lot of trouble. They said they were going to make me lose my job,” he said. “All sorts of things — saying that I was being extremely suspicious because I didn't want to release those files.”
Eventually, Chavarria said agents promised not to look at his student files, and he gave them access to his devices. But since his phone and laptop were searched out of his eyesight, he said he has no way to know whether confidential files were reviewed.
“They said ‘We did not open this. We did not open that. We noticed that you had this thing open from your work — we didn't look at that.’ But that's only — they're saying that. I don't have any guarantee that that is factual,” he said.
In a statement, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Rusty Payne said the agency “follows strict policies and directives when it comes to searching electronic media.” Such searches, he added, “are rare,” and “highly regulated.”
But civil liberty advocates say such searches are on the rise, and have gone as far as to recommend that travelers with sensitive information on their devices consider traveling without their phones or with burner devices.
The Department of Homeland Security has a mandate to ensure national security. And over the years, the courts have “found that that power is absolute,” Jill Martin Diaz, the executive director of the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, said Wednesday.
“It is virtually unaccountable to any checks and balances in the government. It is basically unaccountable to checks and balances by courts,” they said. “And now we're seeing the extreme consequence of that unfettered power.”
A U.S. citizen cannot be denied entry into the United States because they refuse to give customs officials the passwords to their devices. But that can prolong an individual’s interrogation, and officials can then seize those devices and hold on to them long after someone has left the airport.
“Barring ‘extenuating circumstances,’ (the government claims) the authority to hold onto your device for five days — though ‘extenuating circumstances’ is an undefined term in this context, and this period can be extended by seven-day increments,” the ACLU of Texas recently wrote in a public advisory. “We’ve received reports of phones being held for weeks or even months.”
After his devices were searched, they were released back to Chavarria, who was allowed to reunite with Dudgeon at baggage claim. For years, Chavarria has been a member of CBP’s Global Entry program, which allows frequent travelers that undergo a special background check expedited clearance at ports of entry. As he was boarding a flight back to Vermont, he received an email notifying him that his permission to be in Global Entry had been revoked.
The reason? He did “not meet program eligibility requirements.”
Chavarria said he’s had students of color ask him in the past whether they should be worried when they cross the border into the United States. In the case of U.S. citizens, he’s always assured them they had “nothing to worry about.”
“Clearly, this is a change for me in my understanding, and now I'm no longer giving that advice,” he said. “From my own experience, I know that they should be worried.”
