I feel safer now
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Keeping dangerous people out of America.
Charlotte Pohl, 19, and Maria Lepere, 18, arrived in Honolulu from Auckland with plans to explore Hawaii before continuing to California and Costa Rica. However, their flexible travel style — including a lack of pre-booked lodging for their planned five-week Hawaii stay — raised red flags for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Despite having ESTA travel authorization, the two were accused of potential illegal work intentions, a common concern for border officials screening young travelers without fixed plans.
The German Foreign Office later reminded travelers that ESTA approval does not guarantee entry to the U.S. — a decision always left to border officials at the point of arrival.
What happens when travelers get detained in Hawaii.
The travelers described their detention experience as shocking and surreal.
After hours of questioning at Honolulu Airport, they said they were placed in handcuffs, loaded into a transport vehicle, and brought to what they later learned was a deportation detention facility.
There, they reported being subjected to full-body scans, strip searches, and issued green prison uniforms. They were placed in a holding cell overnight alongside long-term detainees, including individuals accused of serious crimes.
Conditions described included sleeping on thin, moldy mattresses, using rudimentary toilets, and being warned by guards to avoid expired food.
The following morning, the travelers were escorted back to Honolulu Airport in handcuffs and deported — not to Germany, but to Japan, at their request, avoiding a longer return trip to New Zealand.
https://beatofhawaii.com/why-these-hawaii-travelers-were-jailed-and-deported/
And a bit more info from the Independent:
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A U.S. citizen was arrested in Florida for allegedly being in the country illegally and held for pickup by immigration authorities even after his mother showed a judge her son’s birth certificate and the judge dismissed charges.
https://apnews.com/article/us-citizen-held-ice-florida-law-4b5f5d9c754b56c87d1d8b39dfedfc6c
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The arrest of an immigrant woman originally from Hong Kong by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has sent shockwaves through a small Missouri town that overwhelmingly backed U.S. President Donald Trump in the last presidential election.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/ming-li-hui-immigration-trump-deportation
TNR interview with Carol:
https://newrepublic.com/article/195959/transcript-trump-arrest-immigrant-shocks-small-maga-town
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Volleyball, band, honor student, friendliest kid in the school---disappeared.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/milford-student-detained-by-ice-massachusetts/64935176
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I don't think I can handle feeling so secure.
For 55-year-old U.S. Army veteran Sae Joon Park, this was the hardest moment of his life. Not getting shot in combat. Not the years battling post-traumatic stress disorder or addiction. Not prison. It was leaving the U.S., a country he called home for nearly five decades.
On Monday, Park, a green-card holder, self-deported to South Korea. His removal order was the result of charges related to drug possession and failure to appear in court from over 15 years ago — offenses that, he said, stemmed from years of untreated PTSD.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/24/g-s1-74036/trump-ice-self-deportation-army-veteran-hawaii
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Iranian immigrant who has lived in New Orleans nearly 50 years arrested outside Lakeview home
The arrest highlights how Trump's immigration crackdown has ensnared people who were long allowed to stay in the U.S. as their cases unfolded.A familiar pattern
Witnesses described Kashanian's arrest as following a familiar pattern under Trump's immigration crackdown — plainclothes agents, wearing body armor but without identifiable agency insignia, handcuffing people before placing them into unmarked vehicles and transporting them to detention facilities.. -
Thomas, a 35-year-old tech worker and father of three from Ireland, came to West Virginia to visit his girlfriend last fall. It was one of many trips he had taken to the US, and he was authorized to travel under a visa waiver program that allows tourists to stay in the country for 90 days.
He had planned to return to Ireland in December, but was briefly unable to fly due to a health issue, his medical records show. He was only three days overdue to leave the US when an encounter with police landed him in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody.
From there, what should have been a minor incident became a nightmarish ordeal: he was detained by Ice in three different facilities, ultimately spending roughly 100 days behind bars with little understanding of why he was being held – or when he’d get out.
a man sits on a pickup truck
Farm worker who died after California Ice raid was ‘hardworking and innocent’, family says
“Nobody is safe from the system if they get pulled into it,” said Thomas, in a recent interview from his home in Ireland, a few months after his release. Thomas asked to be identified by a nickname out of fear of facing further consequences with US immigration authorities.
Despite immediately agreeing to deportation when he was first arrested, Thomas remained in Ice detention after Donald Trump took office and dramatically ramped up immigration arrests. Amid increased overcrowding in detention, Thomas was forced to spend part of his time in custody in a federal prison for criminal defendants, even though he was being held on an immigration violation.
Thomas was sent back to Ireland in March and was told he was banned from entering the US for 10 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/15/irish-tourist-ice-detention
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The Trump administration is stripping protections of some asylum applicants who filed as far back as 2019.
NPR has learned that dozens of immigrants across the U.S. have received letters in the mail notifying them that their asylum cases have been dismissed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a branch of the Department of Homeland Security.
The reason, according to the letters: These asylum-seekers, many of whom entered between 2019 and 2022, did not receive a mandatory screening, known as a "credible fear" interview, at the border.
The interview is conducted by an asylum officer once someone has been detained or has arrived in the United States. It is meant as an opportunity for a person to describe any fear of persecution they may face if they are returned to their home country.
The U.S. didn't have enough asylum officers to do credible fear interviews for every person crossing the border, given the huge influx of border-crossers starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, at the end of the first Trump administration and during the Biden administration, experts told NPR. Now it appears that the new Trump administration is dismissing applications, effectively making people start over on a process they began years ago.
This round of asylum case dismissals is the latest effort by the Trump administration to strip protections from those who have been in the U.S. for years. In the past few months, the administration has limited the ways in which people can seek asylum, has made the process more expensive and is now reviewing already filed claims and dismissing them if parts of the complex application are missing. But as officials expand the scope of whom they are arresting, detaining and deporting, lawyers fear their clients who have been waiting years for their asylum interviews may get caught up in the effort to conduct mass deportations.
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I don't believe in 'open borders' or what's the point in having a sovereign nation state. Yeah, I'm probably being idealistic and naive, but bear with me.
This administration is doing it wrong, although I'm not naive enough to believe, as has been pointed out to me in a a different post, that they have a sound theory or any sound method.
It seems they have ulterior motives and the only 'reason' I can see behind these is the creation of and reinforcement of authoritarianism.
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Well, that is the definition of colonialism. It draws arbitrary lines at the behest of imperial powers. This is no less true of the US, as it is of the UK, as it is France, as it is of... you name it.
Btw, this why a genocide is committed against a people, not a nation.
I listened to Diana Spencer carefully, not only because I admired her so much, but because she was a living exemplar of an ancient amount cultural knowledge.
You can notice in her most famous interview (in fact, her only public interview) that she referred to the the U.K. as, "this country."
My concerns are shared by many, though. If you are going to, de facto, have nation states, you will have borders by definition. What are the implications of having borders, if the borders have no real meaning.
Having watched three administrations in a row mangle border policy, this most recent being the worst, all my naive illusions about national sovereignty and identity amount to nothing more than a migraine headache.
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Local green card holder, mother, US resident for 33 years, with health issues, is "arrested" at Boston's Logan airport after a family vacation to Mexico, hospitalized twice, detained for 10 days with no information given to her family and is finally released on her own after dark and in the rain with no phone at an ICE office near me.
Border Patrol Agent told husband, "if she dies we'll notify her next of kin."
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Well, dumb question, but what do you think about this, rf?
I know it's harder when it hits close to home.
I think the whole thing is terrifying but I don't want to be terrified. I feel emotionally detached. I feel numb.
I don't know whether I feel this way because I'm resisting being terrified (probably doubtful) or because I'm refusing to occupy my mind with this to the detriment of meeting challenges I happen to have in a transitional time in my life.
Although I feel detached, I am very concerned.
You can tell from my posts, I'm not hesitant to speak out when I feel strongly and want to do so.
Though, I think a person's brain can withstand the stress of a finite number of horrible topics.
There seem to be more and more horrible current events with each passing day.
I notice this problem is getting worse. I'm hope something will counterbalance it and the sooner the better.
I saw a CNN story that said Trump is forming "specialized units" of the National Guard in DC.
Yikes.
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It's horrifying. And getting worse and it's happening everywhere. So when it's in my neighborhood it seems even more real.
