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smtimelevi wrote:The Dept of Parks and Wildlife may have great jurisdiction but their scope stops at Parks and Wildlife.

This is a very common error, but in Texas it is an error. Game wardens are full peace officers with the same authority to investigate and arrest for any violation of the laws as any other peace officer. So are school district officers, college officers, park police, airport police, water police, dental board investigators, and so on. Texas has a list of more than 35 different types of peace officers contained in Article 2.12 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. With regards to authority to enforce the law, there are very few restrictions or differences between the various types. City and county officers (of certain classes) may not write traffic tickets outside of their county, and Game wardens have the extra search authority that was already posted. I cannot think of any other differences though there may be some. I would bet they are as minor as these if they do exist.

sjfcontrol wrote:Thanks for the explanation, Steve -- It just seemed to me that a vehicle isn't normally much more moveable than a house once you remove the people from it.

And you thought you were not as smart as a SCOTUS justice. That is where they are moving to, based on one of the more recent rulings. The ruling last year (IIRC) was to deny the right to search the car based on an arrest of the driver once the driver was secured in the police car. They reasoned that if the driver was already secured, there was no reason to do the frisk of the car for officer safety since the car could not hurt them. They said that the search incident to arrest was only good for evidence of the offense being arrested for. If you thought there was evidence of something else, you could wait and get a warrant. It was one of those perfect cases that showed the lack of logic in the way some previous rulings could be twisted. The case was one of those were the subject was suspected of other things and when they saw him driving, the police decided to arrest him for driving on a suspended license. He got into his driveway and about 20 feet out of the car when he was arrested and the police tried to use a search incident to arrest to search the car. SCOTUS said no.

sjfcontrol wrote:Why couldn't the same thing be done with a vehicle that is done with a house?

The basic difference is that the car is moveable and the SCOTUS has looked at it differently. To stop a person from traveling (i.e. driving his car somewhere) constitutes a seizure and this also requires probable cause. If they have that much probable cause, the logic of the courts is to allow the search anyway to minimize the interruption time of the car owner when he is innocent and the PC turns out to be wrong. While the seizure of the house is also a seizure, it doesn't rise to the same level of interruption because they don't stop the person's movement. You can leave the scene if you want to and continue about your daily business. If you were just lounging at home, then this is less of an interruption, as the court sees it. A side note is that the court may see seizure of this type of a business as more of an interruption than a home, event though they generally allow more police latitude with businesses.

The 4th Amendment does not forbid searches without a warrant. It forbids unreasonable searches without a warrant. SCOTUS has ruled that this means a search is unreasonable without a warrant unless some other factors are present. The most common is exigent circumstances. While backing off slightly from the concept in recent rulings, SCOTUS had said in the past that a car was prima facie exigent circumstances because of the mobility of it. It was easy to get the evidence out of the jurisdiction or destroy it.

I have some questions on what the Border Patrol did, and the whole concept of the flexible border that allows for checkpoints away from the border itself. But from what I read of the original post, the BP acting in accordance with the current state of the law and court rulings as I understand them.

And, to answer one other question, the dog may have been trained only for marijuana or may have been trained to respond differently for different classes of drugs. This is much harder training, but it can be done. Some dogs alert by barking, some alert by scratching and digging, and some alert by sitting back and taking some position. It depends on the training and the dog's personality it displayed when it was being trained.