A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a legal permanent resident who was arrested because he shared a common name with a suspected illegal immigrant. It illustrated how the E‑Verify program would foul things for legal workers, a prominent subject of this paper.

Here’s another story of legal permanent resident mistreatment. This illustrates how overblown terror fears can cloud officials’ judgments and foul things for … well, everyone.

It seems that a woman in Florida asked her relatives in Monterrey, Mexico to ship her the birth certificates of two relatives who want to apply for their Mexican passports at the consulate in South Miami. At the behest of U.S. Customs and Border Security, the envelope is being held by the United Parcel Service in Louisville, Kentucky until she identifies herself further.

Asked to explain, a CBP spokeswoman in Washington asserted the U.S. government’s right to examine everything entering or exiting the country and said, “Identity documents are of concern to CBP because of their potential use by terrorists.”

This is a terrific example of poorly generated suspicion. In our paper on predictive data mining, Jeff Jonas and I wrote about how suspicion is properly generated in the absence of specific leads: “[T]here must be a pattern that fits terrorism planning … and the actions of investigated persons must fit that pattern while not fitting any common pattern of lawful behavior.”

False identities and forged documents have been used by terrorists, but with little purpose or effect. There just isn’t a proximate relationship between false identification and successful attacks. But obviously some terrorists have believed that they need false or fraudulently-gotten IDs. So there is a weak but plausible relationship between shipping identity documents and terrorism planning.

But that doesn’t end the inquiry. We have to ask a second question: Does shipping identity documents fit any common pattern of lawful behavior? Yes it does, such as the example here: legal permanent residents seeking to apply for home-country passports at consulates in the U.S. There are probably dozens of other reasons for shipping identity documents as well. CBP’s suspicion of this woman and her documents is not well founded.

One is reminded of the cases where photographers have been harassed or arrested for photographing buildings and monuments. Yes, photography of big things is potentially consistent with terrorism planning! Oh, but it’s also consistent with having an interest in architecture, having an interest in photography, taking a vacation, working as a photographer for a newspaper, and so on, and so on …

This woman should get her documents without further delay.