4th Amendment Rights

The general conversation today about the USA PATRIOT Act and its historical and legal significance must be contextualized with reference to a series of 1970s U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding the U.S. Border Patrol that directly undergird the PATRIOT Act. The Supreme Court long ago turned the U.S. borderlands adjoining Mexico into a permanent racial camp, and the borderlands is the "home," as it were, of the permanent state of legal, racial exceptionalism. This problem must be theorized as structural in nature, rather than historical or contingent, in order to confront the matter of exceptional sovereignty at its constitutional foundations. Readings of the Supreme Court decisions regarding Japanese American internment and of Charles Mills's Racial Contract provide a context for the elaboration of this problem. A final reflection on José Antonio Burciaga's poem "Green Nightmares" suggests an idea for justice at the limit of sovereign authority that must be relentlessly exposed in order to begin to imagine a future deracialized polity.