How my coverage of protests in Colombia led to my deportation

Many people were detained at U.S. airports for discovering arbitrary and mysterious. I was lucky – when I was stopped by Customs and Border Protection last week after I flew from Melbourne to Los Angeles, the border broker explicitly and proudly told me why I was evacuated from the Customs Line. “Look, we both know why you’re here,” the agent told me. Although his colleagues called him Officer Martinez, he identified himself as Adam. He looked surprised when I said I didn’t. “It’s because of what you wrote online about the Columbia University protests,” he said.

When I got off the plane, they were waiting for me. Officer Martinez intercepted me before I entered the main processing and immediately took me to the interrogation room behind him, and he picked up my phone and asked for my password. When I refuse, if I don’t comply, I’ll be sent home immediately. I should have taken this deal and then opted for a quick deportation. But at that moment, I was drowsy from the 14-hour flight, and I believe the CBP would get me into the US once they realized they were dealing with middle-class writers from the Australian region. So I abide by it.

Then the first “interview” began. These questions are almost entirely focused on my coverage of the protests of Colombia students. From 2022 to 2024, I participated in the MFA program in Colombia and took it on a student visa. Alternativealmost no blog (apparently the U.S. government) seems to have not read. For Officer Martinez, these works are very worrying. He asked me what I think of “everything”, which means conflicts on campus and conflicts between Israel and Hamas. He asked me what I think of Israel, Hamas, student protesters. He asked me if I had become friends with any Jews. He asked me for my opinion on a two-state solution. He asked who was at fault: Israel or Palestine. He asked what Israel should do. (Any allegation that the Department of Homeland Security, which ruled the CBP, claimed that I was arrested for my political beliefs was wrong.)

He then asked me to name the students who participated in the protest. He asked me which WhatsApp group I was, a member of the student protesters. He asked who gave me “information” about the protests. He asked me to give up my identity as “the person I work with.”

Unfortunately for Officer Martinez, I didn’t work with anyone. I participated in the protest as an independent student journalist and one day I stumbled upon a tent on the lawn. My book (now publicly available) certainly expresses sympathy for the protesters and their demands, but it constitutes an accurate and honest document of the Colombian incident. Of course, this is the problem.

Last February, I booked a trip from Melbourne to New York, stopping in Los Angeles, so I could visit some friends for a few weeks. At that time, stories about tourists being detained and refusing to enter the United States had begun to appear regularly in Australian media. I began to think about the precautions I should take when crossing the U.S. border. I chose the burner phone, a move suggested by some legal experts in the media that would raise suspicion and just decide to give my phone and social media a superficial cleanliness.

I designed my own strategy around the fact that I lived in the United States for five years and traveled between Australia, and lived in the United States again and again, the CBP was fundamentally uneducated and temporary in its methodology, and I would have to be very unfortunately searched. I know if I have any difficulties, it is because the main processing officer at the end of the long term at Los Angeles International Airport (Lax) would notice that I was a former Columbia student and asked to see my phone. If he searches for it, he will encounter the messy and personal digital life of a worrying thirty-three-year-old man. But he won’t find photos from protests, signal conversations or my alternative posts, which I deleted during the week before the flight.

But CBP was ready for me before I arrived. They don’t need to identify me on the LAX road as someone worth investigating: they’ve obviously decided on those weeks. mine Esta Applications (many visitors are eligible to access the U.S. system under the visa waiver program – they must be triggered. Perhaps the CBP now has the technical flexibility to check everyone’s network history Esta applicant. Or maybe I’m named List– In the far-right pro-Israeli organization, we want to see representatives of visa holders and hope to see deportation. In either case, U.S. government officials had to read my job and decided that I was not suitable for entering the country. Because Officer Martinez had obviously read all my materials, he didn’t even know that I had taken all of them. down. This means that when a foreigner cleans up his social media in preparation for a trip to the United States, our news outlets have been urging us to do so, which may be too late.

For me, this mistake was a disaster. Because I designed a strategy to pass the standard passport pipeline, I was completely inadequate about what was going on in the interrogation room. Even though I didn’t know at that time, I was attending an interview that I would never pass. It doesn’t matter what I think of Israel-Palestine seems to disappoint Officer Martinez’s lack of division – I told him it was a conflict, and everyone had the blood in their hands, but could and should end immediately with a dominant force. He asked other Australians if they felt the same way, and I told him yes, most people do it. It seemed to just disturb him. When he had no questions about Israel, he disappeared in the back room and started downloading my cell phone content.

He walked for a long time. I imagine him in his office, using some new software to surface all the dirty details of my life. Although I removed a lot of material related to the protests in the device, I kept a lot of personal content. Probably Martinez browsed all of this – embarrassing, shameful sex.

This fear was confirmed. Martinez came out and said I needed to unlock the hidden folder in the album. I told him it would be better for him if I didn’t. He insisted. I don’t think I have any choice. Of course, I do have a choice: the option of not complying with and deportation. But then my bravery left me. I am afraid of this man and the power he represents. So instead, I unlocked the folder and watched him scroll all my most personal content in front of me. We looked at a photo of my penis together.

Once he was finished, he disappeared in another room again. I sat there trying to understand why, despite my hardship and comfort in myself, overall, I felt so violated. I am proud of my life and identity. This doesn’t seem to help. I realized that I had no privacy to invade at that time.

This time, Martinez walked for a longer time. Fifteen to twenty minutes later, the man who was left in the room to guard me, a carpenter without a badge of names, goatskin, turned to me and said, “God, man, what are you on the phone? This usually takes five minutes.”

This is when I really knew I was having sex – not because the guard was telling the truth, but because I felt he wasn’t. My feeling at that time was that he was playing his own role, which was part of the purpose of increasing stress, intimidating pressure.

When Martinez finally came out, he bouncing towards me excitedly like a kid with a lollipop. He said they found evidence of drug use on my phone. Do I realize I have failed to acknowledge my drug use history Esta?

After a few seconds I moved away from my desire and desire to lie. In the gray area between the arrival door and passport control, you are beyond the scope of the U.S. Constitution. Within the boundary, you have less protection than the criminal decimeter. It turns out that people with legal status will suffer abuse. In the CBP interrogation room, I haven’t completely dropped to statelessness, but I’m below the criminal.

If I hadn’t been tired from long flights and long interrogations, and I wasn’t stressed and scared, I would recall that my phone was indeed the case no There is clear evidence of drug use. I want to think of myself as a better version, which would call nonsense on this bluff. But at that moment, I couldn’t explain every one of the more than 4,000 photos on my phone. What I imagine is a photo that does not exist, a message that does not exist, proving that I am some kind of drug king. So, I admit that I have purchased THC Gummies in other countries and in the United States in the past at a pharmacy in New York.

Cannabis is legal in New York, but not in the federal government, so in the eyes of CBP, I broke federal law in New York and then once again didn’t declare it on me Esta. Martinez now seems to bubble up with excitement, and he returns to his supervisor’s “promotion” with his words. When he came back he told me that I would be taken to my next flight to Australia.

Martinez and another officer took me back, pushed me towards the wall, and patted me. Martinez made sure there was no weapon between my penis and scrotum. They took the laces off my shoes and took the rope out of my elastic pants, probably so I couldn’t hang myself. This made me feel very cautious, but when I entered the detention room, I changed my mind. We are so deep in the building, clearly underground, that the concept of windows begins to feel like something from a semi-remember dream. Three months ago, a Canadian woman disappeared for nearly two weeks. Then I don’t know if I’m going out in an hour, one day or a month. When I was taken to the room, I met a young woman crying and begging the guard for information. He told her that he had no information to give her, and that there was no information. “That Woman,” he said, pointing to a pile of blankets in the corner, “it has been four days here. ”

After that, I started spiraling. We detainees are prohibited from talking. I have no one to communicate with anyway-the barriers in the room separate men from women, and I am the only man. One of the guards told me there was a vending machine with M&M and Coca-Cola and a vending machine with Coca-Cola, one of the guards told me. The room was so cold that we were all wrapped in CBP blankets.

The light bulbs buzz, the sky adjusts the sky, the night or now buzzes. Then I learned that the detention room is a place where time itself is detained, and the clock behind the guard (I am sitting behind the plexiglass) is mainly to laugh at us. We work hard to not look at that clock because although hands move, we have no idea about their development. The horror of this is that no one knows where we are and we can’t tell them. We are isolated from each other and from the world.

At that time, a few hours after my first detention, I realized that CBP had to be Some Regarding the internal procedures for information allocation, I contacted the guards and asked if there was any way to get me to detain my outside world.

“You can call the consulate,” he said.

I exercised immediately. He called and I stood on his desk and spoke so loudly that the others I suspected knew their rights and could hear me. The woman on the other end of the phone told me that I would most likely be on the plane that night, and after about six hours, she would notify them for me if I knew the number of any of my contacts in my mind. That’s how my mom found out.