Travelling to the US?

Here's my advice

I was on two podcasts recently: A Thousand Natural Shocks with

Gabe Dunn

and Legendary Lectures with Al Barnett. I talk about my US border encounter with both, but I especially appreciated having the time to expand into some broader thoughts about fascistic tendencies and rightward drift. I’m eager to tell new stories, and some of those will be coming your way soon. Hope you enjoy.

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Hello everyone,

I decided to lay low after my deportation and the media storm that followed, and I’m just now finding my feet again. The break was restorative—I had two weddings to attend and a bunch of friends to visit. They helped make a difficult time easier.

All that media attention was an mixed bag, emotionally. It was a great relief to see that so many people found my story outrageous. But it was a stress to the nervous system, too, and, well, my nervous system was already under plenty of pressure. After 12 hours in detention and 15.5 hours on the plane, I landed back in Melbourne pretty exhausted, fighting to understand what had just happened, and then was thrown immediately into the learning curve of television media. Soon I was on a train to Melbourne to record with The Project. Days later I was doing a live cross from my parents’ living room to All In With Chris Hayes. In my interview with Democracy Now! I found myself battling the challenges of regional Australian internet.

Part of me was flattered by all that attention, but another part was humiliated, fearful, and desperate to go into hiding. The stakes of each appearance felt high: the US Government started to accuse me of lying, and I did the same in return. At the same time, I worried I was risking a lifetime ban from the country by speaking out. Trolls, real and AI-generated, went at me on social media, and I got my share of hate mail from the usual sources.

And, on top of all that, the situation required me to discuss parts of my life I prefer to share on my own terms. Privacy is ultimately about autonomy—the ability to control the terms on which your life is shared with those around you. But my autonomy had already been violated at the border, and for the sake of transparency, trust, and truth, I had to be as forthcoming as I could.

So, an initiation by fire, but I didn’t really feel that I had a choice. Speaking out was my way of wrestling the power asymmetry between me and the CBP back towards something more dignified. And I was indignant on behalf of others, too. I knew that my own politically-motivated denial of entry wouldn’t be the last, and that other travellers needed to be informed of the risks.

That’s why I’ve also spent a fair bit of my time corresponding with readers on a one-to-one basis.¹ But bespoke advice is getting a bit unsustainable, and my advice is pretty consistent, so I thought I’d write to you all to tell you what I understand about the situation. I have in mind non-citizen tourists from countries like Australia, the UK, and across Europe, though, as the case of Hasan Piker showed, US citizens should be wary, too, when re-entering their country.

If you or someone you know has information about CBP, Palantir, Canary Mission, or Betar US, contact me on Signal:

kitchena.32

Ad hoc searching

Preparing for my trip to the US, I took it that CBP would be running ad-hoc searches and probes at the border. For that reason, I scrubbed my phone and my online presence of politically-sensitive material. I chose not to carry a burner phone, worrying that a too-sanitised device would provoke suspicion.

An ad-hoc phone search is how Mads Mikkelsen, a 21 year old Norwegian, was denied entry, detained, and deported not a week after my story broke news. In that equally-horrifying but even-more-ludicrous story, Mikkelsen was questioned heavily after CBP officials found this meme of JD Vance on his phone:

The CBP denies that the meme had anything to do with his deportation, and claims instead that Mikkelsen was deported because he failed to admit to having smoked weed in the past. But, as in my own story, drug use is the pretext by which CBP can deny entry to those it does not like. (In my own case, the government cannot get past the fact that its officer admitted to me that I was detained for one reason and one reason only: what I wrote about the protests at Columbia University.)²

Targeted searching

Mikkelsen and I might have been deported with the same pretext, but we got there different ways. All my preparation for an ad hoc search was wasted—I was pulled into secondary processing before I even entered the primary processing queue.

What terrified many about my particular case was that it revealed a whole new layer to CBP’s denial of entry protocol. CBP told me explicitly that they were interrogating me because posts that I had removed from the internet days before my flight. As I wrote in The New Yorker:

Because Officer Martinez had apparently read all of my material so long ago, he didn’t even know that I had taken all this material down. What this means is that, by the time a foreigner cleans his social media in preparation for a trip to the U.S., as much of our news media has been urging us to do, it may already be too late.

This revealed that CBP was using methods beyond an ad-hoc search of social media at the border to identify travellers for denial of entry. But what were those methods?

A webscrape of politically disfavoured speech?

My first guess was that CBP is becoming increasingly sophisticated in its use of technology, and had begun running ESTA visa waiver applications against a web-scrape of disfavoured political speech. If that were the case, many readers of this blog would have reason to fear their names being called over the loudspeaker at LAX.

I now think that’s pretty unlikely. It’s not technically difficult—some of you could build that tool in an afternoon. But it’s not particularly useful. That sort of tool would be, in a sense, too effective. If the CBP ran a webscrape of anti-Trump social media, they’d produce a very, very long list of traveller names, far more than they’d be willing to turn away, and they’d then have to find some way to choose among them. You and I would then have to figure out how they were choosing people from among that list.

It’s possible that they’re using that list to randomly select names to harass, but the base fact is that the vast majority of travellers vocally critical of Trump or Israel continue to cross the border unencumbered.

The list

We now know, thanks to testimony provided in AAUP v Rubio, that the government relied upon the hard-right, pro-Israeli organisations Canary Mission and Betar US for a list of names of students to target and possibly deport on grounds of “antisemitism”. These organisations, like the Trump Administration, cynically weaponise the charge of antisemitism to intimidate pro-Palestinian voices.

This is to say that the US government is treating politically-motivated hitlists as a starting place for deportation targeting.

To my mind, the list is the best explanation for why I, specifically, was targeted—for why the CBP had read my posts days before I got on the plane, and others have been able to cross the US border without trouble.

It’s possible that some other explanation is available, but I haven’t been able to uncover it. If you or someone you know has more information, please contact me on Signal: kitchena.32

Under this theory, I was targeted at LAX exactly because I was at Columbia at the time of the protests, and because my writing caught the attention of someone at, or connected to, one of these organisations.³

What this means for you

My story understandably caused a lot of fear for people with their own US travel plans. It suggested that CBP was more sophisticated, and more thorough, than previously known.

My sense is that those fears are overinflated. Rather than a highly sophisticated and methodical screening system, it is still better to think of CBP as a large, clumsy, and capricious institution that is occasionally instructed by more intentional parts of the administration.

My advice for tourists travelling to the US is this:

• If you do not have reason to believe that your name has already been flagged, you are unlikely to be targeted specifically and directly. (If you do have reason to believe you will be targeted, probably don’t travel.)

• If you are like the majority of travellers, you are nonetheless subject to CBP’s clumsy and capricious searches.

• If that’s you

  • Always travel with Face ID turned off.

  • Always accept immediate deportation rather than hand over the contents of your phone.

  • Always be polite, clear, and honest but never admit to, volunteer, or concede to accusations of any form. CBP interviewing depends upon entrapment and self-incrimination.

  • Always travel with emergency phone numbers memorised.

• If you are detained and are told you will be deported

  • Ask to call your consulate as soon as you can, and do so as many times as you like.

  • Ask the consulate to call your emergency phone numbers.

  • Wrap yourself in a blanket early, and opt for cup noodles to stay warm.

  • Breathe deeply and know that you will probably be okay.

Many of you have been vocal, in public and in private, about the current US administration, and just as many of you have been vocal about the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state. Still, you’re probably going to be fine crossing the US border.

But, if you get a border guard in a bad mood, or a new order has come down from Marco Rubio, or if the guards are struggling to hit their quotas for the week, you could find yourself in a basement detention centre. You have no power there. Accept that, stay warm, and breathe deeply.

1. Though some commenters online advise a full disavowal of the US, including a refusal to travel there, many of you have strong reasons to visit, and an organised boycott of the country, though perhaps justified, is not yet here.

2. My view is that the ESTA visa waiver application form asks you about your past use drug so as to expand the scope of power guards have over you at the border. The CBP knows as well as you and I that this question is almost never answered honestly—that we foreigners believe near-universally that the US government does not have a right to know whether or not we’ve consumed THC, or any other intoxicant. Instead, the question exists for the sole purpose of encouraging a lie that can be targeted under interrogation if border guards hope to deny you entry.

3. I scoured Canary Mission’s website, where all of their targets are publicly listed, but couldn’t find my name listed, which means that if my name was fed to the government, it mostly likely came via Betar US. Betar US did not respond to comment, but Canary Mission told me, simply “All Canary Mission profiles are published on the Canary Mission website.”