Just read your post.....entertainingly written, by the way. One of your respondents described your wife's character in response to that situation as "spirited". I agree. And please understand I am not dumping on her because she indeed sounds "fetching", as you described her.........BUT......."spirited" is not always "wise". Whenever I am personally tempted to get loud and proud in the face of authority, I remind myself of that Biblical injunction to be "quiet as doves, and wise as serpents". Loud and proud often creates more problems than it solves.....even if it is justifiable on some level. My guess is that her spiritedness is part of what you love about your wife. My ex-wife was spirited that way, and it was part of why I loved her; but that spiritedness caused me some headaches along the way that I would have been better off without, even if she thought she was doing it on our (or my) behalf. There was one time where she confronted my boss—at my work, in my presence, and without warning me that she was going to do it—about how poorly she thought I was being paid and how under-appreciated I was for what I did, and that a
decent man would not have allowed that injustice to continue. I wanted to hide in the wastebasket. In the basement. Of the building next door. She was right on some level, but she also permanently poisoned my work atmosphere; and it wasn't long before I was transferred into another department............same job, same pay grade, worse boss.
She got to voice her considerable opinion, but it made things worse, not better.
Every single time I have an interaction with law enforcement (or anyone else for that matter in which the encounter is semi-adversarial), I ask myself, "is this the hill I want to die on today?".........and I have had MUCH worse happen than a simple "are you an American citizen" asked by a federal officer. I once patiently endured a nearly-literal 3rd degree interrogation by INS agents at DFW for about 40 minutes, nearly missing my connecting flight to Burbank, on my way home from France. I was separated from my terrified family and whisked off to an interrogation room........all because I was traveling on a newly issued passport post-9/11, and have the misfortune of having been born in Morocco. The passport was newly issued because my previous passport was issued when I was 18 years old, and my mother had lost it, and I had not required one
since then until we started planning that trip. The experience is enough for a separate thread, so I won't bother with the details, but the fact remains that my "papers" were all in order, I had valid ID, I had no contraband, I had violated no laws, and I had been nothing but respectful and cooperative right up until the very end. At the end, I finally tired of the game of being asked the same questions over and over again, rephrased each time, and answering them consistently, and I told the interrogating officer that my patience was running thin, my family was worried about me, we were about to miss our connecting flight, and that he was either going to have to arrest me or let me go.......and did I need to phone a lawyer? He had nothing to arrest me for, and he had to let me go. Sometimes the word "lawyer" has magical powers.
But I put up with that crap for 45 minutes because they had ALL the power, ALL the authority, and ALL the guns from which government authority flows, to detain me for as long as THEY wanted to. That was NOT the hill I wanted to die on that day, as there were much larger practical considerations, like a terrified family and a plane that wasn't going to wait for me. Were my 4th Amendment rights violated? Yes, to some extent they were. Was I happy about it? No, I was not. Am I still a little PO'd today about having been treated that way 10 years ago? Yes, a little bit. Did it contribute to the contempt I have today for all things federal? Very much so. BUT...... it taught me one thing, and that is that a simple answer of "Yes" to the question "are you an American Citizen" is a LOT easier than getting dragged off to some back room for a session of quality face-to-face time with a federal official whose goal it is to try and trip me up on my answers so that he can find a reason to put me behind bars.......because he doesn't like the cut of my jib.
There's a lot of loose talk from people who have never had to actually confront the consequences about what they
might do or say if their papers are demanded of them, or advise
others to do or say in any such confrontation with federal law enforcement. But until they have had to answer 45 minutes worth of pointless questions from a hostile armed federal official with bright lights shining in their eyes in a back room deep in the bowels of the INS offices at an international border entry point, separated from their worried family and about to miss a connecting flight, I most heartedly invite them to shut the heck up, because they
don't know what they are talking about.
Pride goeth before the fall, but "yes" gets you home on time.