Innocent Tourists Shackled and Jailed for Weeks at U.S. Borders

Lucas Sielaff was in a car queue waiting to cross from Mexico into the U.S. when a border guard, seeing his German passport, began bombarding him with questions. The 25-year-old tourist, who had been traveling 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 U.S. 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 convicted felon Donald Trump returned to the White House. 

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 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 U.S.  “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.”

This uptick in such warnings could damage the U.S. tourism and hospitality sector, which accounted for about 11 per cent of US jobs and contributed $2.36 trillion to the economy last year, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council. “Travelers are already in a stressful situation and they don’t want anything to make that journey tougher,” said Marta Soligo, an expert on the tourism industry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 

“People are seriously questioning whether they should travel to the U.S., and that’s a huge concern for the industry.” Roland Lescure, a French member of parliament who represents French citizens living in North America, said some expats were also reconsidering their decision to live across the Atlantic. He conducted a recent survey that found about 19 per cent were having doubts. Lescure said the message of recent weeks was travelers had to be increasingly careful in crossing the US border.  He warned: “The home of the free and the brave is turning into something very different.”