'You don't have any rights': CBP agents interrogate US citizen and seize
his phone after Venezuela solidarity trip
The detention of a US citizen returning from Venezuela was an apparent
extension of the US government's efforts to punish citizens who have
protested its policy of regime change and economic warfare.
By Max Blumenthal
A US citizen has told The Grayzone that the United States Customs and Border
Protection (CBP) service detained him on his way home from Venezuela and
violated his privacy.
Sergio Lazo Torrez, a 31 year-old Nicaraguan-American, said the CBP forced
him to open his cellphone, grilled him about his political beliefs, and
demanded information about his contact with Venezuelan President Nicolas
Maduro.
Torrez was returning to the Washington, DC area on the evening of August 2
when he was detained by CBP at Dulles International Airport in Vienna,
Virginia. He had just participated in a week-long tour of Venezuela with
over a dozen US citizens, including this journalist and two other reporters
for The Grayzone.
During the trip, the group met with members of local social movements,
leaders of workers' cooperatives, artists, and elected officials. On August
1, the visitors accepted an invitation to meet with Maduro at the Miraflores
presidential palace in Caracas.
The meeting apparently triggered the US government's decision to target
Torrez.
"They said that while I was being held I didn't have any rights," Torrez
told The Grayzone, referring to the CBP. "I said, 'Can I call my lawyer?'
They said, 'No, you don't have any rights, it doesn't matter if you call a
lawyer. First of all, you can't even use your phone and second of all, you
don't have any rights to do anything.'"
Like the other US citizens on the trip to Venezuela, Torrez had participated
in the Embassy Protection Collective this April and May.
For over a month, peace activists residing in the Venezuelan embassy in
Washington, DC obstructed the seizure of the facility by the US-backed coup
administration of opposition leader Juan Guaido. They were besieged for
almost two weeks by a mob of right-wing Guaido supporters, who bombarded
them with racist, sexist, and homophobic invective.
On May 16, the four final embassy protectors were removed by force by
federal agents. They now face prosecution in federal court and possible
penalties of one year in prison and $100,000 fines.
Torrez displaying the flag of the Sandinista front in front of the
Venezuelan embassy in DC
The detention and interrogation of Torrez was an apparent extension of the
US government's efforts to punish citizens that have protested its policy of
regime change and economic warfare against Venezuela's elected government.
"They kept asked me what kind of relations I had with Maduro and I just said
I had none," Torrez recalled. "[The CBP officer] was like, 'What was the
conversation with him about?' I said, 'I just shook his hand and said hi.
That's all I did.' And they were like, 'You have pictures with all these
people from the government, all these officials.' And I was like, 'Yeah it
was a picture. We didn't need to have a conversation.'"
"I think they targeted me for being Latino"
Torrez said that soon after he landed at Dulles, he was subjected to a
secondary security check. Then, two CBP officers burst out of a room and
summoned him inside. He had been traveling with several other members of the
Embassy Protection Collective, but was the only one subjected to an
interrogation.
"I think they targeted me for being Latino," Torrez said. "There were no
[white] Americans in the waiting room. And I was one of two Latinos in our
group."
Inside the interrogation room, Torrez said a Latino officer addressed him in
Spanish and demanded to know how long he had been a US citizen. From there,
the agent began grilling him about his political views, asking if Torrez had
any relationship with the Nicaraguan government or had represented Nicaragua
at the Sao Paolo Forum that took place this month in Venezuela.
The Sao Paolo Forum is an annual gathering of leftist forces from across the
Western hemisphere, and has been caricatured as a confab of terrorists and
communists by right-wing Latin American political figures and
neoconservative Florida Senator Marco Rubio.
Torrez said he told the CBP agent, "Nope, I don't belong to any
organization."
"They were trying to go after me in every way possible," he recounted. "They
asked me how long I was married, if I belonged to any military
organizations. I said no."
Then, according to Torrez, the CBP asked him if he supported Maduro: "I said
I didn't vote for Maduro because I'm not Venezuelan, and I don't comment on
foreign politics."
Torrez told The Grayzone that the officers kept pumping him for info on
Maduro, demanding to know if he was friends with the president. Again, he
said no. "So they said to me, 'Why did Jorge Ramos get kicked out of
Miraflores when you didn't?'"
Ramos is the Univision ambush journalist who was briefly held at Venezuela's
presidential palace in February and deported after a hostile 20-minute-long
interview in which he attempted to humiliate Maduro, opening the encounter
by denouncing the president as a dictator.
Next, the CBP officers asked Torrez if his trip had been organized by
Venezuela's embassy: "I said, no, we don't even have a Venezuelan embassy
any more in the United States." He also explained to his interrogators that
the trip had not been financed by Venezuela's government, but instead by
peace groups operated and supported by US citizens.
"They started going through my browser"
Before long, a CBP agent ordered Torrez to hand over his cellphone: "He just
said, 'Give me the phone or I'm gonna open an investigation.' And I said,
'Ok, take it, I'm not gonna open it, that's my privacy. They said, 'What do
you have to hide?' And I said, I don't have anything to hide. The same thing
you're gonna find in my phone you're gonna find in public."
When Torrez refused to open his phone for the officers, he said they seized
it from him and took it into a separate room for five minutes. He does not
know what they did to the phone while it was out of his sight.
Torrez recalled the CBP officers warning him that they could detain him for
an extended period for refusing to cooperate. "They were being really
intimidating," he recalled. Eventually, he agreed to their demand to open
his phone.
"They started going through my browser," he said. "They opened my WhatsApp
but they didn't click on the messages. They did write down the email
connected to my phone."
According to journalist Seth Harp, who was detained and had his cellphone
searched by CBP while returning from a trip to Mexico City, the CBP
justifies invading the privacy of travelers through its Directive No.
3340-049A. This provision permits agents to search anyone's device without
any probably cause.
Those who refuse to relinquish their devices can have them seized. CBP
authorizes its agents to use surveillance technology to "not merely to gain
access to the device, but to review, copy, and/or analyze its contents."
Torrez said that throughout his interrogation by CBP, the officers were
holding a document containing information about participants in the Embassy
Protection Collective who had traveled to Venezuela. "They have all the info
already about the Collective," he noted. "On a piece of paper they had the
names of everyone in the collective. And they asked if we were all traveling
together."
At 11:50 PM, after two hours of waiting and interrogation, Torrez said he
was set free. But unlike his travel companions, he was told his bags had
mysteriously not arrived.
The CBP has not responded to an email from The Grayzone seeking a comment on
the detention of Torrez.
"It's funny how they criticize Maduro and [Nicaraguan President] Daniel
[Ortega], and talk about dictatorship and harassment, saying that Daniel or
Maduro are persecuting people all the time," Torrez reflected. "But in
reality, we're the ones being harassed over here for just thinking
differently than the government."
Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several
books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One
Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for
an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries,
including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a
journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous
domestic repercussions.