You Are Not Free To Move About the World

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has a nice program for frequent international travelers who regularly use their frequent-flyer miles. It's the PreCheck and Global Entry system.  Having PreCheck and Global Entry privileges means you get to skip the lines at airports and go through with little if any trouble at all because you have proven that you are a  low-risk traveler someone who is not likely to set off a bomb in your shoe onboard the plane or hijack the plane and fly it into Mar-a-Lago. 

However, PreCheck and Global Entry is a privilege, not a right, and you can have your privilege revoked if the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) decides that you're an elevated risk to the safety of other travelers than previously believed due to violations of regulations, new criminal charges.  This means you have to go back to shuffling through standard security lines, though you can appeal DHS's decision.  In the meantime, should you travel abroad and return, you are not entitled to fast-track re-entry and you must have your travel papers processed through the standard lines.  Your traveler profile is no longer considered "low-risk" by federal authorities and you are subject to increased scrutiny.

And what could someone do to lose their low-risk traveler status?  Say something that offends Trump.  That's what happened  to Chris Krebs, who was Trump's director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in Trump's first term.  He had his travel privileges revoked this past April, and Trump ordered the revocation personally.  Why? Because Krebs declared in late 2020 that the presidential election that year, which Joe Biden won, had been fair and cleanly run, and that Trump lost fair and square.  Now whenever Chris Krebs travels abroad, getting back in the U.S. is much harder than it is for for others - that is, others who haven't posted a blog entry, a social-media meme, or a YouTube Video ridiculing Trump that Trump himself found while surfing the Net late at night.

Maybe when Krebs travels abroad again and gets stranded in Copenhagen or Vienna or some nice foreign capital like that, he should just rent himself an apartment, apply for asylum, and get himself a job cleaning offices.  Sort of like what happened to one Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, a Russian diplomat who represented Czar Nicholas II in London in early 1917 and was in the middle of negotiating an arms deal with the British government when he and his family were stranded in England in the Russian Revolution.  Mironov and his family never returned to Russia; when it became apparent that Lenin was in charge and was preparing to take Russia out the ongoing war in Europe, the Mironovs stayed in London and Pyotr Mironov became a cab driver.  His son Vasily had a daughter, Ilyena, who was born in 1945.  You might know Pyotr Mironov's granddaughter by her anglicized name . . . Helen Mirren.

As long as Trump is in charge of These States, I can imagine several stranded American travelers abroad staying where they are elsewhere in the world, because cleaning offices and driving taxis are increasingly becoming preferable to high-level jobs in der Amerikanisches Reich.  For now, though, Trump has merely made it difficult for Americans traveling abroad to return home, not impossible.  Once he makes it impossible, the only thing left for him to do will be to make it impossible for people to . . . leave.

And that's when the fun begins.