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If you have a valid visa to be in the US, be very careful. The Trump gang is starting to deport, detain, and perhaps even torture people in your situation! Here are some examples:
Dr. Rasha Alawieh is a kidney specialist working at Brown University. After visiting family in Lebanon, she was returning to the U.S. on an H-1B visa - a temporary visa that lets foreign professionals work in the US - when customs officials detained her at the airport in Boston. A federal court order was issued to stop her deportation. But she was deported anyway, sent off on a plane to Lebanon!
(1/n)
Fabian Schmidt is a lawful permanent resident of the US, but he too was detained by immigration officers at the same airport in Boston - Logan Airport. He had been visiting Luxembourg, and flew back to the U.S. on Friday. His partner had gone to pick him up at Logan Airport, and waited four hours before calling authorities.
His mother says Schmidt was “violently interrogated” for hours at the airport, stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.
She said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport, with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.
“He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well and he collapsed,” said Senior.
He was transported by ambulance to Mass General Hospital. Then he was transported to the regional headquarters for ICE in Burlington, Massachusetts, and then transferred to the Wyatt detention facility in Boston. Lawyers are attempting to get him out.
(2/n)
This is a somewhat different case. Tourists from Germany can generally visit the US for up to 90 days without a visa. But this one, Lucas Sielaff, made the mistake of driving to Tijuana, Mexico with his partner to get medical treatment for her dog. When they came back, he had trouble understanding the border control officer questioning him. He gave a muddled answer and got taken to an interrogation room.
After more than an hour of questioning, he was denied re-entry to the U.S. and was chained to a bench along with other travelers.
Outside, his partner was trying to get answers from officials. In response, she says, they searched her car. When she raised objections, two ICE officers detained her and took her to a separate room, where she was subjected to a humiliating body search.
“For the first time in my life, I’m in handcuffs,” she said. “As they’re walking me into a building, they’re twisting my arms.”
After the body search, she, too, was chained to a bench for a time before being released.
Lucas Sielaff was held at the border post for two more days, sleeping on a bench under a Mylar blanket, and then transferred to the Otay Mesa Detention Center. For two weeks, he shared a cell with eight other people. Eventually he was deported on a flight that cost him $2,744.
Something similar happened to another German tourist to the US, Jessica Brösche. She too made the mistake of going to Mexico and trying to get back into the US. She was held for 46 days.
(3/n)
And then there are hundreds of Venezuelans who were sent to the "Terrorism Confinement Center", a massive prison in El Salvador - even though a federal judge ordered that the planes reverse course and return the detainees to the United States!
The right-wing president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, made a joke of it on social media: “Oopsie … Too late.” And his post was recirculated by the White House communications director, Steven Cheung. So they are completely mocking the judicial system.
“This sure looks like contempt of court to me,” said David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University. “You can turn around a plane if you want to.”
Paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/us/constitutional-crisis.html
Free to read here: https://archive.is/2lXvG
(4/n)
Another case - I'm not keeping up with all of them:
Becky Burke, from Wales, was halfway through a backpacking trip across North America when ICE grabbed her and detained her for 19 days. She is now back in Wales. Her parents haven't asked her for many details yet, but they say she was "taken in leg chains, waist chains and handcuffs".
ICE says she violated "the terms and conditions of her admission". Her parents guess maybe it was because she was on a tourist visa and she'd been getting free lodging from people on her trip in exchange for helping them around the house... thus violating her tourist visa, which doesn't allow employment???
It raises lots of questions.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly67j35y99o
(4/n)
Another person with a valid visa getting detained by ICE, this time supposedly because she was working for a business that uses hemp. She was detained for 2 weeks, starting in an ice-cold cell with lights on all the time, and later an actual prison with 140 other women. She was allowed one phone call.
"They handed me a mat and a folded-up sheet of aluminum foil.
“What is this?”
“Your blanket.”
“I don’t understand.”
I was taken to a tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights and a toilet. There were five other women lying on their mats with the aluminum sheets wrapped over them, looking like dead bodies. The guard locked the door behind me."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-detained-us-immigration-jasmine-mooney
Bukele is a fucking fascist, ironically he had positioned himself as some kind of anti-american populist, not anymore, i'm very proud of current Honduras Gov for standing up to Trump despite the danger of a coup this presents for them
@big_louse - Trump is also an anti-american fascist.
@johncarlosbaez The key here is that the order wasn't directed at the pilots who were overseas, it was directed at the pilots' bosses who were still on American soil. If federal officials didn't get on the radio and instruct the pilots to turn around, then those officials should be going to jail.
Inspired by Musk’s attempt to sue advertisers who deserted Twitter, maybe Trump can launch legal action against tourists who decide not to visit the US?
“We can’t force them to come here, but at least we can make sure they burn a lump of coal in their garden to compensate for the CO2 their flights would have emitted.”
@johncarlosbaez
Non US foreign ministries: please post something like this on official websites, social media, travel ads and airports.
Warning: don’t go to or pass through the USA for any reason unless a straight, white, fascist, Christian male. Even those men shouldn’t go unless they will spend a lot of money. Otherwise they will be deemed enemy aliens to be chained, callously detained for weeks and then deported. To home if lucky. Otherwise, disappeared to some hellish gulag.
@AMilroy - the UK and Germany, at least, have issued warnings to people coming to the US. It seems people with green cards and people who visit the US, leave, and re-enter are the primary ones getting targeted and detained.
@johncarlosbaez There's a discussion on soylent news whether it is safe for a foreigner to go to the United States. https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=63763
I gather the Seattle Worldcon, the major annual science-fiction fan convention, is looking at reduced attendance.
@hendrikboom3 - it's not wise to come to the US now unless you really need to.
@johncarlosbaez George Washington says, "What?"
@johncarlosbaez I don’t think it’s particularly alarmist to suggest that if you appear anywhere on US-controlled and moderated social networks or comms apps, you should assume what you talk about, whom you talk to, whom they talk to, and where everybody is, is known.
You may say that’s been the case for ages, which it has. But now we’re all the enemy, and those Palantir scripts are now all aimed at us.
@BashStKid - sure, I assume I'm writing for the world to read, for better or worse.