Pay Any Price (30 page)

Political pressure mounted. Homeland Security began to zero in on the Canadian border. The border crossing at Derby Line had to get with the times and follow new rules. Canadians and Americans who had been living and working side by side for generations had to be treated the same as suspected al Qaeda terrorists. Homeland Security moved in and began to physically break apart Derby Line and Stanstead for the first time in over a century.

Officials demanded that the streets connecting Derby Line and Stanstead be closed down. New border gates were constructed. Additional customs and border patrol agents flooded into town. Just to run errands, townspeople now had to show their passports—many locals had to apply for passports for the first time—and submit to lengthy questioning.

 

Buzz Roy is a traditional Vermonter, a native of what locals call the Northeast Kingdom. Like most of his kind, he has no use for bureaucrats. And so when Homeland Security officials began to demand changes in Derby Line, Roy began to push back. Along with a few other local leaders, he fought the street closings. Eventually, the local leaders worked out what they thought was a compromise with Homeland Security: two of the three streets connecting Derby Line and Stanstead would be closed. New border patrol gates would be built on those streets to control access across the border. But the third—Church Street, which passed right by the Haskell Free Library as it crossed the border—would remain open, without a security gate. People walking or driving up Church Street would simply have to follow the traditional procedure of checking in later at the local customs office. The open road would mean continued access for both Americans and Canadians to the Haskell Library, and would recognize the landmark's historic importance to both Derby Line and Stanstead.

Roy didn't really like the compromise, since it meant that a new border gate would be built on Main Street, less than two blocks from Brown's Drug Store. But at least Derby Line had won a small concession from Homeland Security.

And then it got worse.

Homeland Security had to find ways to spend the billions of dollars Congress was providing for counterterrorism and border security, and one idea that the Obama administration came up with was called Operation Stonegarden. Homeland Security would give large grants to local law enforcement agencies in states along the northern and southern borders. In exchange, local police, sheriff's deputies, and other officers would help to patrol the border along with customs and border patrol agents. In June 2009, Homeland Security announced it was giving grants of $60 million for fiscal 2009 to thirteen border states, including Vermont, and to Puerto Rico. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that Operation Stonegarden would help ensure that “our first responders are equipped with the resources they need to confront the complex and dynamic challenges that exist along our borders.”

For police departments in Vermont and other states, the Operation Stonegarden grants were hard to refuse. For police chiefs, it was almost free money. All they had to do was send an officer up to the border for a while and the federal government would write a badly needed check. Vermont accepted $501,079 in Operation Stonegarden grants in fiscal 2009.

One of Operation Stonegarden's early targets was Derby Line, Vermont. Before long, law enforcement officers from all over the state—everyone from police from Vermont's larger cities to fish and wildlife agents—began to crowd into Derby Line. Unsmiling strangers with shaved heads and sunglasses were suddenly everywhere. It was as if the federal government had decided to conduct an experiment in Derby Line on how to create a mini–police state.

The Homeland Security surge into Derby Line had predictable and disastrous results. Dozens of out-of-town police officers, with no experience or training in how to work along the border, jammed into a village of eight hundred people. They had to find something to do and someone to arrest. It wasn't long before they were harassing Derby Line residents with nearly constant traffic stops and tickets for the most trivial violations. “They were enforcing all kinds of rules, they were stopping people for not having mud flaps on their trucks, for having rosary beads on their mirrors, all kinds of things,” said Karen Jenne, Derby Line's town treasurer. “People were just not coming to Derby Line anymore because there were so many police here.”

The police lurked on the village's downtown streets, barking at residents who wandered too close to the border. They barged into the Haskell Library, hunting for Canadians to arrest who had dared to park in front of the building—in the United States—rather than on the side safely in Quebec. At the new border gates, the out-of-town agents were rude to Canadians and Americans alike, demanding that locals submit to lengthy questioning when they were just going to the local mini-mart to buy gas and milk.

“They were trolling the line and waiting to see if they could get you,” said Kim Prangley, a Stanstead native who had run the Haskell Library for twenty-four years. “People were not very happy with Stonegarden,” added Florence Joyal, the feisty longtime cashier at Brown's Drug Store. “But they didn't scare me.”

 

Things finally came to a head because Buzz Roy was hungry for pizza.

On a Saturday night in February 2010, Roy decided to order smoked meat pizza from Pizzeria Steve 2002, one of his favorite pizza places. It happened to be on Boul Notre Dame in Stanstead, two blocks into Canada.

Roy walked over to the pizzeria to pick up his pizza. When he started back home, he decided to walk up Church Street, the sole ungated road in the village. But just as he passed the Haskell Library, a Vermont state trooper, detailed to the border patrol under Operation Stonegarden, pulled up behind Roy in his cruiser, lights flashing, and ordered Roy to stop. The state trooper got out of his car and demanded to see Roy's identification. The trooper told him that it was illegal to use Church Street to enter the United States.

Roy knew that wasn't true—keeping Church Street open had been part of Derby Line's compromise with Homeland Security. But the trooper ignored his protests and insisted on seeing his identification. Standing in the cold Vermont night holding his pizza, Roy asked the trooper to hold the pizza box while he reached for his wallet. The trooper refused. Roy laid his pizza on the cruiser and finally found his ID.

Roy eventually made his way home, but as he sat eating his pizza, he grew increasingly angry. With each bite he thought about the indignity he had just suffered from a stranger in his own village. Like everyone else in Derby Line, he was fed up with Operation Stonegarden and the petty violations of the village's way of life. About halfway through his dinner, Roy decided to get up and do something about it.

He walked back to where he had been stopped on Church Street earlier that evening, and walked down the street across the border again. And then he walked up and down the street and crossed the border one more time for good measure. Finally, a sheriff's deputy pulled up and stopped him, and told him that he was breaking the law. Through gritted teeth, Roy said that it was his right as a U.S. citizen, that he had lived there all his life, and that Church Street had been kept open under Derby Line's deal with the federal government. The deputy pointed to a new sign that said it was illegal to cross Church Street. Roy, who had never seen the sign before, grew even angrier. Homeland Security had not talked to the village about closing off Church Street; they had just done it and then put up a sign without telling anyone. Roy told the sheriff that Derby Line had never agreed to it. As they were talking, a flock of border patrol agents descended on Church Street, gathered around him, handcuffed him, arrested him, and stuffed him in the back of a cruiser.

Roy's longtime partner, Sandra, watched the episode unfold with binoculars through the window of their home, and then listened on a police scanner as Roy was taken away.

“I was arrested for entering the United States at a nondesignated spot,” recalls Roy. “It was ridiculous.”

He was driven to a border patrol detention facility down Interstate 91 and placed in a holding cell for three hours. Finally, one longtime border patrol agent who had been stationed in the area for years and knew Roy discovered what was going on and drove him home.

 

News of the arrest spread like wildfire, and overnight, Buzz Roy became the hero of Derby Line. The quiet village, which had put up with so much from Homeland Security and Operation Stonegarden, was outraged and rallied to Roy's defense. At least two hundred people from Derby Line, along with some Canadians from Stanstead, held a rally at the border at Church Street to protest his arrest. They then marched through the village to a local park, many wearing masks with his picture plastered on them along with buttons that said “Free Buzzy” (many people in Derby Line call him Buzzy, even though he goes by Buzz).

Daria MonDesire, a local woman, then performed a song she had quickly written about Buzz: “The Feds say Derby Line's a big ole danger . . . / ‘Give up your freedom for security,' well Buzzy wouldn't do it.”

The Derby Line protest made the television news across Vermont, and Roy's case became a cause célèbre throughout the state. People from all over the state started sending Roy money to pay his $500 fine and help fight the government. He sent the money back, which only served to enhance his stature. Roy was now better known in Vermont than most local politicians, and Homeland Security and the border patrol were cast as the villains of the Northeast Kingdom.

Homeland Security officials tried to act like nothing had happened, but they could not ignore the fact that Roy had been turned into a martyr. Without any public announcement, a top regional manager for the border patrol was moved out of his job and replaced. The new manager called Derby Line officials to apologize. “A new guy came and said we're sorry, we won't do that again,” recalls Karen Jenne. Operation Stonegarden came to an abrupt end in Derby Line, and Homeland Security transferred the project to other towns along the border. The customs and border patrol agents who remained toned things down and dropped some of their arrogant ways. “They aren't hassling people as much anymore,” said Jenne. “I think Buzzy's protest really had an effect.”

 

But Derby Line still cannot return to the old ways—Homeland Security won't allow it. Crossing the border on Church Street continues to be prohibited. After the Buzz Roy protest, a border patrol agent was assigned to sit in a cruiser, all day and all night, on Church Street just outside the Haskell Library to stop anyone from following in Roy's footsteps. Border patrol agents still yell at locals who don't immediately check in at customs after passing through a border gate. The unsmiling men with shaved heads and sunglasses haven't all left town. Crossing the border still means demands for passports and secondary questioning and even searches, and many on both sides have decided to avoid it as much as possible. “They don't treat locals any better than anybody else,” said an exasperated Karen Jenne.

In an ironic twist, Canadian officials moved in late 2012 to close off the Canadian side of Church Street to stop people from illegally entering Canada from America. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police installed a row of flowerpots across the road, because illegal immigrants in the United States were seeking refuge in Canada, which has easier rules for obtaining political asylum.

 

The fortress-like mentality damaged businesses on both sides of the border. Fewer Canadians are willing to cross to shop in downtown Derby Line, and fewer Americans run errands in Stanstead. “Our business from the American side has gone down drastically,” said Amber Stremmelaar, the daughter of the owner of Pizzeria Steve 2002. “It's a hassle for Americans to come over. If you have leftovers they won't let you bring them home with you across the border.”

Fewer Canadians come to shop at Brown's Drug Store as well. Buzz Roy believes that Homeland Security is slowly killing his village, all in the name of an absurd concept of perfect security. “There's no negotiating with these people,” says Roy. “It's totally senseless. There is no thought put into it. Al Qaeda has won. They have changed our lives.”

 

For decades, the wooded campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, was a quiet, public oasis near one of the busiest suburban commercial districts in the Washington, D.C., area. Its 300 acres were open to all, and its long, narrow, winding streets, where researchers walked from one red-brick science building to the next, gave NIH the feel of a sprawling state university. A subway station built nearby gave people from all over Washington easy access to the campus. The academic atmosphere at NIH made it both an intellectual magnet for world-class scientists as well as a welcoming, cultural jewel for the entire community, with outdoor film festivals, picnics, and theater and orchestral performances that drew enthusiastic audiences from the surrounding neighborhoods.

For Gary Daum, a computer science and music teacher at a nearby prep school, NIH gave him the opportunity to fulfill his dream of conducting an orchestra. In the late 1990s, Daum, whose wife worked at NIH, helped found the NIH Community Orchestra, which was open to any and all amateur musicians, both employees and nonemployees alike. The orchestra rehearsed and performed on the NIH campus, and its concerts quickly became a fixture on the NIH cultural calendar. The highlight of the year came each December when the orchestra, along with an NIH community choral group, performed Handel's
Messiah,
including the Hallelujah Chorus, in NIH's Masur Auditorium, attracting large, joyous audiences including top NIH officials.

The events of September 11, 2001, abruptly and permanently altered life at NIH. Its traditional culture of openness was suddenly ended. Newly empowered security officials dictated that the campus be closed off from the public. Very quickly, new rules were interpreted to mean that outside organizations like the community orchestra were no longer welcome on the NIH campus. With its tight new security procedures, NIH would not allow outsiders—like nonemployee amateur musicians—access to the campus in the evenings or on weekends. And it would not open itself up to the crowds of nonemployees who would come to listen to the concerts at the auditorium. NIH was assuming a fortress mentality, just like Homeland Security had done in Derby Line, Vermont, and the unintended consequences were piling up.