So I was roving
(etc)
Monday. It was myself and another fellow who signed-up around the same
time. For reasons not entirely clear to either of us he had only been
roving five times in a year and a half, so I was kinda the lead officer.
We do some “random checks” on most of the flights – stop passengers and
check their documents and ask them a few questions. We don’t profile, but
if we did we’d be profiling against any one of a few hundred pieces of
intelligence. On a few flights we do “100% checks” and have everyone show
us their documents. This is partly to catch undocumented travelers at the
gated, partly to send a message to the smugglers, and partly because the
supervisor of the day “has a feeling” about a given flight.
A small handful of countries make up the bulk of our smuggling cases:
Albania, China, Nigeria, Macedonia, Mongolia, Philippines, Sri Lanka. Some
airports and airlines (and therefore flights) have more problems than
others. Because of the open design of the transit lounge in Tokyo, for
example, we have a lot of undocumented travelers on flights from Narita.
The whole strategy of undocumented (“No-Doc”) travelers is rather weird,
and I still don’t really understand it. What usually happens is the
smugglees will destroy the passport on the plane so that they arrive
without documents. I guess the idea is that we can’t send them back if
they don’t have a passport, but they all ask for political asylum so we
can’t send them back anyway. Some officers figure the smugglers just don’t
know that part. In some cases the smugglers are on the plane with the
smugglees, and they collect the passports so they can be recycled. This
too results in the arrival of undocumented travelers.
Anyway, it’s getting near the end of totally uneventful day and we’re
watching the passengers come off a low-risk flight:
College kid. Business traveler. Business traveler. Family visitor.
Business traveler. Newly-weds. Carlos Santana. Business traveler. College
kid.
There you go. That was the highlight of the day. No No-Docs. No
terrorists. No smugglers. No traffickers. No murderers or perverts. I
exchanged nods with Carlos Santana.