Would it be terribly OT for me to bring up issues with US Customs when returning home from Mexico recently, though I suppose it could have happened coming back from Canada or elsewhere? If it is, then a mod can move it to anywhere that seems suitable.

Last month, in the eternal quest for EQM and status, and egged on by a UA
"triple miles in July" promo (probably the last I'll ever see of those babies), I made 3 trips to Mexico in a relatively short space of time. (Was set to make a 4th, but too weary to flog myself to get up at 4AM and take a transcon red-eye a couple of days later, I bailed at the last minute.) On the second of those, an ICE agent and I locked horns and kept going around and around.

The first trip was a 10-day MR cum vacation with the missus along and there were no hassles. On the second, however, I was grilled persistently, and quite stupidly, by the first ICE person encountered. He rather somberly asked me the routine opener about the purpose of my trip ("vacation," later off-handed mention of "MR" that he paid no attention to), and then over and over demanded to know whether I didn't think it unusual for a "young man" such as myself (flattering to think I look younger than my years, but I am in my 7th decade of life and the passport attested to that) like myself to do so much traveling. I told him no, it didn't strike me as unusual, that I was retired, etc. But with a long line waiting behind me and me in no great hurry, since my connecting flight wasn't for another 5 hours, we did this idiotic dance, which progressed nowhere, for what seemed a remarkably long time. I did say once or twice that I was an American citizen returning home, to which he replied more than once that he too was an American citizen. Perhaps it was because rather than say I had spent my time on the beach I said I hadn't done much other than read while I was away, which was true, and I was rather non-chalant rather than quaking in the face of his authority, he was giving me the third degree. (I was not impolite, and certainly not rude, though it did start getting testy between us, and finally I asked if he had a supervisor, who as it happened was walking by at that moment, and we were then done.) No surprise, I was sent for secondary screening, but I had little with me and that was no big deal. (I was afraid it was the digital rectal exam for me.)

I was concerned that somehow I would be flagged for special scrutiny in the future, and then I started wondering if it could land on the no-fly list. My next return through there 8 days later was unremarkable, though.

So, this was not me seeking entry to a country not my own, this was me returning to the US after a short trip to Mexico with no obvious reason(s) to single me out for special attention other than perhaps the brevity of the trip (did his computer tell him that I had come in from Mexico only a week before?) and that I was traveling by myself. (My wife things I might be mistaken for a native of one of those places hostile to the US.) They can't deny me, someone born in the States and traveling with a valid passport, re-entry, nor do much of anything to me without articulable reasons, right? (I don't doubt that I am subject to search pretty much at their whim, so long as they have no clearly improper motive, but how long can they interrogate me with no grounds for suspicion?)

Have others had similar experiences returning to the US? (Mine was no great horror story, but it was like nothing I had experienced before in the course of 40 years of traveling abroad and returning home.)