4 ms·
Something along these lines (although by far not that bad) happened to me when I traveled to NYC for vacation of New Years Eve 2016/2017(this was before Trump t
by timeu 10y ago
Something along these lines (although by far not that bad) happened to me when I traveled to NYC for vacation of New Years Eve 2016/2017(this was before Trump took office). At the border control I was asked to follow the officer and wait in a room. I was waiting with a couple of other people but most people there were only waiting because of small formalities with their passports and they could leave after a couple of minutes. I thought it will be the same for me. However in my case the officer who was also checking my passport at the border control asked me to follow him into a separate room where I had to do a 40 minutes interview telling him basically my entire life history (names of all my relatives, where they live, which countries I have visited, all my social media accounts). I did so and the officer was friendly and after the interview I asked him why such a thorough interview. He responded that this is above his pay grade. the computer spits out names randomly and this was a level 1 interview. If he had been more suspicious of my answers the interview would have taken much longer. This was probably due to my background and name. My mother is from Iran and my father from Turkey.
One month later (Trump was already in office) I had to travel again to the US (this time to LA) and I had zero problems but probably because they already had all the information.
- clubm8 10y agoIt may have been random. I'm pretty sure they pick a small # of people to do these do regardless of what intelligence says.
- DyslexicAtheist 10y agoI'm not so sure. seems to be human bias on top of data bias. great for context https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdCJYsKlX_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdCJYsKlX_Y
- rhapsodic 10y ago> Something along these lines (although by far not that bad) happened to me when I traveled to NYC for vacation of New Years Eve 2016/2017(this was before Trump took office). Incidents like this have probably happened hundreds of thousands of times throughout history, at customs checkpoints for many different countries. But now that Donald Trump is the president of the United States, a certain percentage of the ones that pertain to entry into the US will become international news stories that will routinely make it to the front page of HN.
- strictnein 10y agoAnecdotal incident: My friends and I were held for 2+ hours driving into Canada once, ~16 years ago. All 4 of us were questioned separately. Vehicle repeatedly searched very thoroughly. shrug I've always chalked it up to it being a fairly boring and unrewarding job and they made a wrong judgement on who we might be or something.
- timeu 10y agoI still think that it became "worse" over time although and that's started to happen way before Trump. I February 2002 I traveled to NYC and back then I had a glaring visa stamp from Iran on the first page of my passport. At the border control the officer asked me about that visa and why I had it. I told him that I was visiting relatives and he was satisfied with that answer. Approx. 2 years ago I was traveling to Boston and then had another check at the border and this time I was asked some basic questions (where I go, what my purpose of visit, etc) for 10 minutes in a separate room. The last visit to NYC in 2016 was a thorough 40 minute of questioning. So in my experience it definitely got "worse"
- desireco42 10y agoThank you for sharing this, it is useful to know what they might ask in such interview.