First of all, there's no reason to think that it's a "Do Not Fly" list. He says that he did the US border control checks in his local airport. That is quite com

First of all, there's no reason to think that it's a "Do Not Fly" list. He says that he did the US border control checks in his local airport. That is quite common (at least in Europe) when flying to the US and just means that they check your visa (or visa-waiver in this case) at home instead of after physically getting to the US[0] I live in Ireland and at almost every (all?) flight from Dublin to the US you do the US border control check here to the point where they don't even check your passport on arrival. Second, there really is plenty of people with problems like that. A friend of mine travels frequently to the US and his name is the same as a relatively well known drug lord (it's a fairly common name, too). As far as I know, he's never been denied entrance to the US, but he routinely gets flagged, separated, his identity verified and his luggage checked. Usually, all it means is that when he travels with colleagues or family, they have to wait for him for an extra hour or two to get out of the airport. [0] I think that, technically, the area of the local airport where they do that is considered US soil and, for all legal purposes, you are in the US. As I said, not sure about this and I might be completely wrong, but that's what the signs lead me to think.