• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 730 0

New Jersey law enforcement officials stopped Frank Barcia and Alphonse Siracusa during the height of rush hour at a police roadblock on the George Washington Bridge spanning from New York City to Fort Lee, New Jersey. The stated purpose of the roadblock was to detect persons under the influence of drugs or alcohol or transporting drugs. As would seem obvious to even the casual observer, the roadblock caused massive delays and traffic stalls. Captain Robert Herb of the Bergen County Police Department, who was the highest-ranking uniformed officer supervising the roadblock, testified himself that as a result of this roadblock, over one million motor vehicles came to a complete stop; or in other words, more than one in three hundred Americans—in some cases for in excess of four hours.

73

Most infuriatingly, a woman was forced to give birth on the shoulder of the West Side Highway in New York City, without the benefits of advanced medicine that a hospital would provide. People were prevented from returning home, from attending work, and from seeking proper medical treatment, all so the police could identify individuals carrying drugs. If we as Americans possess an unconditional right to travel freely, how are these government actions allowed to take place? Shouldn’t mothers in labor have a constitutionally protected freedom to travel to a hospital to give birth? By engaging in such police stops, the government is making a calculated decision that we the people are better off not making and executing decisions regarding where we should be going and what we should be doing.

Despite the seemingly absolute treatment of the right to travel by the Founders and the Supreme Court, sadly it is the right to travel which has been most victimized throughout our history. As noted before, the American system of slavery, in which slaves were confined to their owners’ plantations, is the most egregious restriction on the freedom to travel. Even the Constitution (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3) itself enshrined this circumscription of the freedom to travel by requiring that escaped slaves be returned to their “owners”: “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”

Nor did the freedom to travel become absolute with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which formally abolished slavery. During the height of World War II, the Supreme Court upheld the internment of Japanese American citizens in Korematsu v. United States (1944). In 1942, President Roosevelt issued an executive order which granted military officers the power to “prescribe military areas [from] which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions [the] Commander may impose in his discretion.” In other words, the natural right of individuals to move freely was subject to the whim of a military officer; there can be no clearer statement of the philosophy of Positivism. Subsequently, the military imposed a curfew on Japanese Americans, and shortly thereafter, the wholesale relocation of many to detention centers. Fred Korematsu, an ardent American patriot, was convicted of violating this military order after he refused to leave his home, as any true American understanding the Natural Law and the ideals of our Founders would.

74

The Supreme Court upheld Korematsu’s criminal conviction, upon a finding of military necessity, namely, “the presence of an unascertained number of disloyal members of the group, most of whom we have no doubt were loyal to this country.” In other words, so long as there was some subjective, nebulous threat that our enemies’ ideas had reached our shores, the government was justified in detaining every member of the racial group to which those enemies belong.

Even more infuriating, the Court referred to