German tourist Lucas Sielaff, 25, believes his ordeal may have stemmed from a misunderstanding caused by language issues. He was shackled, taken in for questioning, and then interrogated for hours. He spent 16 days in detention before being escorted to the airport and allowed to fly back to Germany earlier this month.© Stella Weiss/AP
Lucas Sielaff was in a car queue waiting to cross from Mexico into the US when a border guard, seeing his German passport, began bombarding him with questions.
The 25-year-old tourist, who had been travelling with his American fiancée, was shackled, taken in for questioning, and then interrogated for hours. He spent 16 days in detention before being escorted to the airport and allowed to fly back to Germany earlier this month.
“I still have nightmares [about the experience] and I’m not yet back to normal,” Sielaff told the Financial Times. “I’m trying to process everything properly. It’ll take a while.”
Sielaff, who had a valid visa waiver entry permit and had visited the US several times previously, is one of a string of high-profile cases of European and Canadian tourists to have suffered hostile treatment at the hands of border guards since Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Welsh backpacker Becky Burke was taken to the airport for deportation ‘in leg chains, waist chains and handcuffs’ © Becky Burke
Others have included Becky Burke, a Welsh backpacker who was detained for 19 days. Her parents complained she was taken to the airport for deportation “in leg chains, waist chains and handcuffs” after being accused of traveling on the wrong visa. “She’s not Hannibal Lecter,” her father, Paul Burke told the BBC.
Canadian Jasmine Mooney spent 12 days in US detention after trying to renew an expired work visa at a border © Jasmine Mooney/Instagram
Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney said she felt like she had been kidnapped and forced to take part in “some sort of insane … psychological, social experiment”. She spent 12 days in detention after trying to renew an expired work visa at a border.
The apparent shift has prompted several nations to change their travel advice and triggered a frenzy of questions in online travel forums about whether it is safe to go to the US.
“Every day I’m getting calls from citizens, visa holders, immigrants and travelers,” said David Leopold, chair of the immigration practice group at UB Greensfelder. “There’s huge concern out there … The administration is creating an atmosphere that is very restrictive to immigrants and even visitors and tourists.”
The publicised cases of detentions and deportations are part of a pattern of “more aggressive enforcement” at the border since the start of Trump’s second presidency in January, according to Noor Zafar, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Immigration lawyers said that, while some nationalities have long been subject to enhanced scrutiny, any non-citizen arriving into the US should now expect more questioning than they were previously accustomed to.
No rules have officially changed for most visitors, said Ted Chiappari, head of the immigration law group at Duane Morris. But he warned that border officers’ discretion was “being applied differently”.
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