14 ms·

Pinay traumatized by horror trip to US

276 points by coolsank 13y ago

rajeemcariazo 13y ago
This story interests me because I'm a Filipino
- wyclif 13y ago
  Many, many Filipinos travel to the USA without incident, and many emigrate here, get their green card, and become US citizens with no problems. But I know sad, unfortunate incidents like this happen, and they make me embarrassed for my country. The agents that did this ought to be held accountable and fired. There is simply no excuse for this woman being treated this way. Americans are a very welcoming and friendly people, but I know the Federal bureaucracy is not.
  - mikkom 13y ago
    > The agents that did this ought to be held accountable and fired. That is the exact problem the US has, nobody is ever penalized for these actions.
    - pionar 13y ago
      Perhaps because instead of actually, you know, lodging a complaint, people just run to bad journalists who, instead of trying to get some kind of statement from the CBP, just parrot her statements without questioning any of it. This is a really sloppy journalism piece, and I'm surprised that no one's pointed out just how bad it is. This article is unresearched, anti-US junk.
      - wyclif 13y ago
        Citation needed.
        pionar 13y ago
        What? Citation needed for what?
        wyclif 13y ago
        You say it's sloppy and unresearched. I'd like to hear why that is, based on something more than just your opinion.
      - joncameron 13y ago
        Here's some good journalism with the same outcome: "Is there a time limit on how long someone can be detained? Do people have to unlock their phones, if asked? Do agents have to inform you why you're being detained? And I didn't even approach them as like an angry citizen. I approached them as a journalist, who had very straightforward questions just about the process and the protocol. And what I discovered, doing that, is that the lack of transparency that I saw during our detainment just continued up and up and up the ranks, all the way to DC, where nobody was getting back to me about anything." http://www.onthemedia.org/story/my-detainment-story-or-how-i-learned-stop-feeling-safe-my-own-country-and-hate-border-patrol/transcript/ http://www.onthemedia.org/story/my-detainment-story-or-how-i...
- ionforce 13y ago
  But why is it on Hacker News? And why did the submitter use the term Pinay? People barely know how to spell Filipino, so I don't expect them to know Pinay either. "Filipino visitor something something..."
  - cognivore 13y ago
    >> But why is it on Hacker News? << Are you new to Hacker News? The stories are posted by people who frequent the site, and stories like these are on the first page constantly. I would suspect such things are important to the Hacker News readership. You could make theories why, but that's for another post. >> And why did the submitter use the term Pinay? People barely know how to spell Filipino... << Well, now I know what it means, getting a little educated with my news - can't hurt. I don't think a place like Hacker News should be dumbing down the language, or spelling, of its posts.
  - poweribo 13y ago
    its "hacker news". not fox news. hackers can figure it out themselves.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    > And why did the submitter use the term Pinay? People barely know how to spell Filipino, so I don't expect them to know Pinay either. The title comes from the submitted article. The article comes from ABC-CBN, a Philippine news source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABS-CBN_News_and_Current_Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABS-CBN_News_and_Current_Affai... > ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs (formerly ABS-CBN News and Public Affairs) is the news division of Philippine media conglomerate ABS-CBN Corporation. The organization is responsible for the daily news and information gathering of its news programs. Its current slogan is Panig sa Katotohanan, Panig sa Pagbangon ng Bayan (Tagalog for Sides for the Truth, Sides for the Rise of the Nation). According to the SWS media trust survey, ABS-CBN News & Current Affairs topped the list among Philippines news and broadcast organizations, garnering 68% of the public trust. > But why is it on Hacker News? What stories should be on HN, and why do you think this doesn't fit?
adventured 13y ago
Stories like this seem to get worse as the years go by post 9/11. If I could give one piece of advice to foreigners for the next 20 or 30 years as it relates to America: stay out, we are not free here, the walls - both digital and physical - are going up to control us. The police state is becoming more aggressive, violent, and omnipresent. Save yourselves, pursue freedom and happiness, you won't find such here any longer. There are better countries for that future. I think this should be etched into the Statue of Liberty as a warning. Since it doesn't represent a beacon of liberty any longer, it might as well serve a purpose.
- znowi 13y ago
  I agree with your analysis. If one is so keen to visit America - welcome to Canada! :) Optionally, wait until Stephen Harper is ousted :) Also, a little reminder. It is the American citizenry that made the US "a beacon of liberty" in the first place. And I believe it can do it again. Do you say it will take 20-30 years to happen?
  - pivnicek 13y ago
    Canadian immigration controls can be just as bad, though you may get water. Like someone said above, it's all about people having power over others with zero accountability.
    - conformal 13y ago
      canadian CBP are a bag of cunts, as i can confirm myself. sorry, but fuck canada. if you don't let me through your border, your country is unbelievably fucked. maybe dismissing parliament one more time will help mr harper.
  - FBT 13y ago
    The difference now, perhaps, is that there is no longer a frontier left. 300 years ago, the people who wanted change and freedom from oppressive governments could sail away over the horizon and set up their own county in a new land. (That's not to deny there were limits to that: You needed to afford a ship, and to gather a large enough mass of people to actually build a successful settlement in the new world, and not to mention the ethical implications of the effects on the natives. All these were real issues, but despite them many people made their way to a new life in the new world, with perhaps a bit more "liberty and justice for all" than there was before.)
Amadou 13y ago
Ho hum. Just another day in the War on Dignity. This sort of thing is the inevitable result of giving people responsibility without accountability.
sneak 13y ago
They do this to me regularly, and I'm a US-born US citizen. My median time for being arrested and held with no food or water or use of a communications device is around six hours. ...all because I politely exercise my fifth amendment rights. This happens about 50% of the time I enter the country. I live abroad so I enter the US about a half-dozen times per year. I think my file is big enough now that they know not to ask me anything. http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/travel/customerservice/pledge_travel.xml http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/travel/customerservice/pledge_tra... > CBP’s Pledge to Travelers > We pledge to cordially greet and welcome you to the United States. > We pledge to treat you with courtesy, dignity, and respect. > We pledge to explain the CBP process to you. > We pledge to have a supervisor listen to your comments. > We pledge to accept and respond to your comments in written, verbal, or electronic form. > We pledge to provide reasonable assistance due to delay or disability. I often wonder which of these "threatening me with prosecution for interfering with a border control point", "lying to me by saying I'm legally required to answer their questions", "refusing to tell me the name of the city I'm standing in" and "throwing me out of the border control point (into the USA) on the highway in Vermont in February in a snowstorm" fall under. (It's the only time I've ever had to hitchhike in my life, as it'd been hours since they'd sent the Montreal-Boston bus on without me.) The one border cop in Detroit told me, after coming through the tunnel from Windsor, that "[she's] just doing her job, making sure the country is safe, and that [she's] there to prove [I'm] innocent and get [me] on my way quickly." I waited until I was given the all clear to leave the building before mentioning to her that "We're Americans, and this is America. I am innocent until I am proven guilty, and those representing our country would do best to remember that." Despite my opinions about the lot of them, I am calm, polite, professional, and courteous in my interactions with them. They respond in the most unprofessional manner possible, short of physically assaulting me. They've cost me thousands of dollars and caused me to miss important business meetings. (Before you say it: it's not my fault for exercising my basic rights or not "just answering the simple questions" that I missed my meetings. I'd have left except for the fact that men with guns on their belt arrested me after I'd already given them my passport and they'd searched my possessions.) Fuck the police. PS: Their invasive searches of my belongings were clearly punitive, too. I never travel with contraband but had I been doing so, they would not have found any of it. They were clearly just fucking with someone who had the nerve to tell them that his travel plans inside and outside of the US were and are "none of their business".
pkrefta 13y ago
Things like this really scary me, as a simple startup guy who wants to visit SV some day. I'm reading stories like this more often unfortunately and I'm starting to think if I really want to go to US. Getting a visa in Poland is also not very comfortable process since you've to give all information about your life to US authorities and still I've no guarantee that I'll be able to enter US.
- rainsford 13y ago
  Just be careful about drawing too broad a conclusion from stories like this. They're certainly bad events and the effort should be to make sure they never happen. But they are the only stories about entering the US that get reported on because they're news...and the uneventful instances are not. This is particularly true if you get your news from an aggregation site like HN where there is a certain level of interest in these stories and so they're even more likely to be reported on here. Millions of people travel to and within the US every year without incident, what gets reported is the admittedly terrible sounding times when that's not the case. Chances are very good that you'd have no problems.
  - glimmung 13y ago
    I have to say that visiting the US is out of the question to me because of stuff like this. I appreciate that the the chances of it happening to me are slim, but I'd be worried sick about it, and would find it hard to maintain my composure if it did happen. (Aside: I'm 10 miles away from the largest NSA base outside the US and the local pubs are full of spooks, so arguably the US has come to me!)
  - nraynaud 13y ago
    The problem is that these are low probability high impact situation, you want 0 occurrences. I mean wen we get to the US, we have our flight ticket info sent prior, we have to add more data because it's the US, the ESTA, last time I got harassed in Paris by the American Airline because I need to know the address I'm going to (I told her to check my file, I don't remember it), how long I knew my girlfriend and stuff, the NSA knows everything about me (I'm not an US citizen), the TSA checked me, the border police checked me out of the country. When I arrive in front of the CBP agent, my privacy had already been thoroughly shredded in the name of security, and my personal data including credit card is gone in the wild without any recourse or oversight, there is absolutely no need to physically harass people at the border.
vixen99 13y ago
On the other hand you might have this http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-eborders-scheme-catalogue-of-chaos-as-649000-border-alerts-about-possible-drug-and-tobacco-smuggling-deleted-8867427.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-eborders-s...
- toyg 13y ago
  To be honest, if the choice is between that and TSA, I'll take that every day. So they smuggle drugs and tobacco: big deal! With better policies, those activities wouldn't even exist anyway. Real policing is done with long-running investigations and intelligence on organised crime, not with coppers doing data-entry from passports.
Tepix 13y ago
This happens all the time, and it's a disgrace. It's also the reason why I haven't visited the US for more than a decade. The last time I went through this was before 9/11 and I can only assume it has gotten even worse since then.
- tokenadult 13y ago
  You could try gathering more data.
  - scarmig 13y ago
    I think a single data point of enduring multiple hours of abuse, having all your electronics taken from you, being cut off from contacting anyone else, and being lied to and accused of being a liar is enough data to form solid conclusions. "But we only harass some people who look a bit too brown not to be suspicious" isn't exonerating.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
- DrJokepu 13y ago
  Meh. I visit America relatively frequently and I can't remember the last time I spent longer than 60 seconds at the US Border Control (excluding the queue which can be a bit long sometimes). And you know, the border control officers were always very polite and professional with me. This is a silly reason to not visit America.
  - gadders 13y ago
    Me too. Never had an unfriendly one yet.
    - pantalaimon 13y ago
      Maybe you are just white enough.
davidw 13y ago
Outrageous. Really, it is - as an American, I'm ashamed to read stuff like this. However: does it really belong on HN? It's not germane to the stated topics of the site. And it is not "gratifying one's intellectual curiosity" - quite the opposite, it's a story that makes you mad without really telling you anything you didn't know already.
- djb_hackernews 13y ago
  Sure it does. You know, technology can be used to solve more problems than just sharing cat photos with your friends. I do believe this is a problem technology could solve.
- Udo 13y ago
  Well, it's an extreme form of what many of us go through on a regular basis when trying to travel to the US, hence I'd say it's relevant. By allowing these people to reign freely, the US is sabotaging itself in the long run, but in the short run it's just incredibly annoying, threatening, and expensive. I'm also in favor of keeping these stories coming, this should not ever be seen as normal or inevitable.
  - davidw 13y ago
    > I'm also in favor of keeping these stories coming, this should not ever be seen as normal or inevitable. Perhaps people could post them elsewhere. This site does not need to be the be-all and end-all of one's online news consumption, you know?
    - Udo 13y ago
      I don't disagree. It's just that I can see why it's relevant with people who by necessity of their jobs travel a lot. All in all there are unworthier subject matters on HN.
    - theklub 13y ago
      I don't think the site should be flooded with these types of stories but there are also few places on the web to get intelligent conversation on such topics.
tokenadult 13y ago
The article reports, "It was her 13th time to visit the US in a span of more than two and a half decades." All that is reported here sounds like an aberration, an officer who mistook the situation and abused his authority. For context, the United States continues to be second only to France as a destination for international tourist visits, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings and just last week my wife and I enjoyed a meet-up in another part of the United States with several of her high school classmates from back when she lived in Taiwan, who arrived from Taiwan, Malaysia, and China, all without incident. When peaceful, hassle-free visits number in the millions per year, a few visits that are abuses of the process will certainly make news, but they don't appear to discourage tourism to the United States over the long haul.
- kubiiii 13y ago
  Who can tell? The rank of the US for tourism might be high but could be higher. The same applies to France where I am from. It's ok to be complete assholes with tourists, to charge them 3x times the standard rate, to restrain from learning english, because we are ranked #1 anyway.
  - CaptainZapp 13y ago
    I'm visiting Paris fairly often and my French (Swiss German school french) can easily be described as rotten. It's serviceable enough to buy a carnet of metro tickets, or to ask directions. I noticed, however, that it's highly appreciated when I try to speak French with Parisians and I very rarely get snide answers. I observe this actually in almost every country. Try to speak a few words of the language and you're usually rewarded. (And compared to my Czech, my French is easily on Camus level). I think one of the issues is that the French are especially touchy when it comes to language and radiating an attitude of "Are those natives actually to dumb to speak proper English" definitely won't win the French over.
    - graue 13y ago
      Interesting. I had a different experience in Montreal (and my mother when she visited Paris): we would try to say a few words of French, and people would immediately realize we were American and switch to English in response. Maybe your French isn't quite as rotten as you think.
kubiiii 13y ago
More and more people are reluctant to go to the US for this. People who undergo such treatment should be compensated. This would be the fair price for security and maybe would focus the security effort on real threats.
nailer 13y ago
> "While doing this, another officer passed and shouted 'Who is she, a TNT?'" she said. What is a 'TNT'?
- Maxious 13y ago
  According to the Racist Slur Database http://www.rsdb.org/race/filipinos http://www.rsdb.org/race/filipinos > "Tago Nang Tago" It's a filipino thats an illegal alien. Translates to "hides and hides" (from the I.N.S.)
  - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
    You know, the name of that database labels everything in it in a very negative way. I'd say the database itself is a slur. It contains a lot of stuff; its not all racist. Some of it is self-identification; some is slang.
- ionforce 13y ago
  TNT stands for the Filipino phrase "tago nang tago" which means "always hiding", describing an undocumented immigrant. Hoy, TNT ka? Hey, are you an undocumented immigrant? It's slang.
- nols 13y ago
  Slang for illegal Filipino immigrant. I can't remember what it stands for but it's a play off a tagalog word for "hide".
willvarfar 13y ago
Being a white male I've passed fairly fast through US borders when I visit. But people who've travelled on business with me who are non-whites have been severely delayed and eventually meet up at the hotel hours later with harrowing stories. From my samples I'd say that the border agents routinely racially profile.
mahranch 13y ago
Am I the only one who would like to hear the other side of the story? We're only hearing her side. Stories like this are beyond useless because they don't present all the facts. It's a sensationalist one-sided narrative of what happened. Without the other side's version of events, we cannot look at the story critically and evaluate the merits of both sides.
- waqf 13y ago
  Yeah, well, if the CBP opened a dialogue about their side of the story I'm sure we would listen to them. A big part of the problem is that the authorities do not talk honestly about their view of the proceedings. The TSA at least makes gestures in that direction, but CBP not so much. (An honest view from their side would talk about subjects like "What percentile of our employees are competent to do their jobs? How much would it cost to improve this?")
conformal 13y ago
overall, i am reminded of how sad i am to be a US citizen when i hear these stories. i have been harrassed by security personnel on a few occasions but have managed to avoid being stuck in the "private screening" room. the irony of having someone who is of puertorican decent and does not speak english as their first language giving me shit when coming into the US from the caribbean is not lost on me. unfortunately, the characterization of people in the US being (1) ignorant, (2) rude and (3) obnoxious is rather accurate. the USG should make an effort to have competent people manning the border since it makes the US look _awful_ when stuff like this happens. obama, or whoever is president, should make this shit a priority since we look like a bunch of fucking jerks when it comes to CBP/ICE.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
eyeareque 13y ago
Is this a reliable news source? I've never heard of the site before. The URL looks like a play on abc and cbs news. I don't think it seems that far fetched, but it does come across as being a fake story. It sadly doesn't surprise me that something like this could happen, I just question the site this is hosted on.
- lessnonymous 13y ago
  Major Philippines news org.
  - eyeareque 13y ago
    That's good to know; thanks for clarifying.
- poweribo 13y ago
  im from PH and ABS-CBN is or one of the biggest media company.
- olalonde 13y ago
  It seems to be a reliable news source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABS-CBN_Interactive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABS-CBN_Interactive
auggierose 13y ago
Well. I actually do like America, I mean, which programmer would not? But during my various stays there, people have been murdered in front of my house, naked people have been thrown out of cars onto the pavement in front of me, bank roberies happened right across the street of me. The US is the most barbaric and uncivilised of the western countries. That might come as a surprise to some.
- DougWebb 13y ago
  Where are you staying?!? I've lived in and around NYC my whole life and never had any experiences even remotely like that. Perhaps you need to choose nicer hotels? Every country has some bad areas.
  - auggierose 13y ago
    Sure, you can be unlucky and get into bad situations in every country. Strangely these things happen to me only in the US. I would compare the feeling of safety when walking the streets of major American cities like San Francisco or Pittsburgh with the feeling of safety when walking around in Rio de Janeiro. You feel much safer in London, Paris, Berlin, or Munich.
    - DougWebb 13y ago
      I've been to London twice and Berlin once. For the most part I felt safe in both cities, but one night getting off the tube in London on the way back to my hotel my friends and I were verbally accosted by a bunch of locals because they overheard our American accents. Being New Yorkers, we ignored them because they were a bunch of drunks being stupid, which we're pretty used to. Still, if I had been alone, or female, it would have been a lot scarier. I'd still go back though; that was one experience one night that could happen anywhere. I've been to San Francisco too, but my wife and I didn't do much wandering around at night. During the day it seemed fine everyplace we went, though there was a small alley right by our hotel that was apparently used as a toilet. Again, as a New Yorker I'm pretty familiar with being around homeless people, so what I found odd was that the leakage across the sidewalk wasn't cleaned up by the city, hotel, or shopowners around the alley first thing in the morning. Instead, it was just left there for days as far as I could tell. At the time I didn't know how common that is is SF. I didn't feel unsafe by it though, except for the threat to the cleanliness of my shoes.
JackFr 13y ago
As far as I can tell, the only source for this story is an unverified email sent by Carina Yonzon Grande to local (Phillippine) news outlets. While can't believe someone would make the story up from whole cloth, I suspect there are important details which may have been altered or omitted. I think it would be prudent to reserve judgement until more information is available.
pinaceae 13y ago
so where are the other sources confirming this? right now there is a single source of info, which is the woman in question. stories like this are very emotional and very often not exactly following the truth. HN gobbles them up, especially those readers who rarely travel themselves. i am deeply skeptical about this account. this year alone i have entered the US about 10 times, coming from European and Asian destinations. not a US citizen. I have never witnessed any impolite behavior by CBP personnel towards passengers - and I was standing in the blue line for hours with them. using the very specific term TNT is very strange for non-filipino officers. if you worked in retail this reminds me of certain customers from hell that complained to your manager and told a story that was outrageously one sided. all the while having been openly abusive to you.
jmilloy 13y ago
I think it's unfortunate that there are false positives. On the other hand, we are free to complain about our government, and that is fortunate. But to those of you complaining, are you sure this isn't just another anecdote that supports your stereotypes? Or is our anti-authoritarian fetish getting in the way of the data (or lack there of) again? Have any of us worked with a effective and practical system that never has false positives? Are you unhappy with the rate of false positives? Do you even know what that rate is? Are you saying you would you rather have more false negatives and fewer false positives? Surely anecdotal evidence is biased towards nasty false positives: we don't read about stories when someone triggers suspicion and is reasonably investigate before being released, but are you sure it never happens? I'm not saying that I think it's acceptable to be wrong sometimes, or to treat people this way. But I'm also not convinced by anyone who doesn't have answers to the above questions.
- honzzz 13y ago
  I think that you are completely missing the point. The problem is not about false positives, the problem is about the abusive behaviour to false positives. I can totally understand that there are false positives but racial slurs, threats, shouting, refusal to provide water etc. are never ever justified. Abusive behaviour of this kind might be just a personal failure of some employee... in that case they need to be fired and severely punished. If those things happen on multiple occasions and nothing happens, nobody is fired/punished, nobody apologises... than you have a reason to believe that it is a systematic failure to uphold to certain standards commonly associated with states that are not police states. That seems to be the case in the US.
  - jmilloy 13y ago
    That's fair. I tried to include this perspective as well. Personally I want to agree that this behavior is never ever justified, but do you know that being respectful has no impact on the number of actual violators that are caught? Instead, I expect there is a trade off, and I would sacrifice respect for increased efficacy, to an extent. Furthermore, the resources required to remove agents that misbehave compete with the resources to find violators. Ultimately, I think it's hard to tell from here if we're sacrificing too much respect given the results. I'd rather not have to become an expert in border control; I pay taxes so that someone else can do that. I can see, however, that many people find it hard to trust that someone else might know more than them. I think it's a shame that there is not enough transparency; is assuming the worst and crying foul without proper data really the best we can do?
ctdonath 13y ago
"The immigration officer then returned to the room and accused Grande of being a liar. He claimed that he talked to her aunt, who allegedly told him that Grande will take care of her as a caregiver." I've seen the same up close. Seems it's a standard tactic: when someone is suspected of immigration transgression, lie about the suspect's prior statements to others; reason is to throw the person off-guard, increasing the chance they'll say something actionable. This is very effective, and VERY disturbing to the suspect. The guards are under no obligation to tell the truth, and use lying as a standard tactic...but anything YOU say can and will be used against you, with lying to a federal official being one of the worst things you can do.
bonemachine 13y ago
Don't know what to say. This is just beyond infuriating: The immigration officer then returned to the room and accused Grande of being a liar. He claimed that he talked to her aunt, who allegedly told him that Grande will take care of her as a caregiver. She said the immigration officer's allegations are not true because her aunt didn't even know she was arriving in the US. "While Officer Mam kept on repeating his questions about why I was in the US, a fellow officer by the name of Chang, joined and shouted, calling me a liar. He even searched my purse where I had wedding cards (with money) for my daughter and future son-in-law, and a birthday card for Joshua (also with money) and other stuff. He scattered all the items in my purse on the table, asking why they should believe me, when my aunt, according to him, seems to be the honest one," Grande said.

276 points by coolsank 13y ago

rajeemcariazo 13y ago

This story interests me because I'm a Filipino

wyclif 13y ago
Many, many Filipinos travel to the USA without incident, and many emigrate here, get their green card, and become US citizens with no problems. But I know sad, unfortunate incidents like this happen, and they make me embarrassed for my country. The agents that did this ought to be held accountable and fired. There is simply no excuse for this woman being treated this way. Americans are a very welcoming and friendly people, but I know the Federal bureaucracy is not.
- mikkom 13y ago
  > The agents that did this ought to be held accountable and fired. That is the exact problem the US has, nobody is ever penalized for these actions.
  - pionar 13y ago
    Perhaps because instead of actually, you know, lodging a complaint, people just run to bad journalists who, instead of trying to get some kind of statement from the CBP, just parrot her statements without questioning any of it. This is a really sloppy journalism piece, and I'm surprised that no one's pointed out just how bad it is. This article is unresearched, anti-US junk.
    - wyclif 13y ago
      Citation needed.
      - pionar 13y ago
        What? Citation needed for what?
        wyclif 13y ago
        You say it's sloppy and unresearched. I'd like to hear why that is, based on something more than just your opinion.
    - joncameron 13y ago
      Here's some good journalism with the same outcome: "Is there a time limit on how long someone can be detained? Do people have to unlock their phones, if asked? Do agents have to inform you why you're being detained? And I didn't even approach them as like an angry citizen. I approached them as a journalist, who had very straightforward questions just about the process and the protocol. And what I discovered, doing that, is that the lack of transparency that I saw during our detainment just continued up and up and up the ranks, all the way to DC, where nobody was getting back to me about anything." http://www.onthemedia.org/story/my-detainment-story-or-how-i-learned-stop-feeling-safe-my-own-country-and-hate-border-patrol/transcript/ http://www.onthemedia.org/story/my-detainment-story-or-how-i...
ionforce 13y ago
But why is it on Hacker News? And why did the submitter use the term Pinay? People barely know how to spell Filipino, so I don't expect them to know Pinay either. "Filipino visitor something something..."
- cognivore 13y ago
  >> But why is it on Hacker News? << Are you new to Hacker News? The stories are posted by people who frequent the site, and stories like these are on the first page constantly. I would suspect such things are important to the Hacker News readership. You could make theories why, but that's for another post. >> And why did the submitter use the term Pinay? People barely know how to spell Filipino... << Well, now I know what it means, getting a little educated with my news - can't hurt. I don't think a place like Hacker News should be dumbing down the language, or spelling, of its posts.
- poweribo 13y ago
  its "hacker news". not fox news. hackers can figure it out themselves.
- DanBC 13y ago
  > And why did the submitter use the term Pinay? People barely know how to spell Filipino, so I don't expect them to know Pinay either. The title comes from the submitted article. The article comes from ABC-CBN, a Philippine news source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABS-CBN_News_and_Current_Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABS-CBN_News_and_Current_Affai... > ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs (formerly ABS-CBN News and Public Affairs) is the news division of Philippine media conglomerate ABS-CBN Corporation. The organization is responsible for the daily news and information gathering of its news programs. Its current slogan is Panig sa Katotohanan, Panig sa Pagbangon ng Bayan (Tagalog for Sides for the Truth, Sides for the Rise of the Nation). According to the SWS media trust survey, ABS-CBN News & Current Affairs topped the list among Philippines news and broadcast organizations, garnering 68% of the public trust. > But why is it on Hacker News? What stories should be on HN, and why do you think this doesn't fit?

adventured 13y ago

Stories like this seem to get worse as the years go by post 9/11. If I could give one piece of advice to foreigners for the next 20 or 30 years as it relates to America: stay out, we are not free here, the walls - both digital and physical - are going up to control us. The police state is becoming more aggressive, violent, and omnipresent. Save yourselves, pursue freedom and happiness, you won't find such here any longer. There are better countries for that future. I think this should be etched into the Statue of Liberty as a warning. Since it doesn't represent a beacon of liberty any longer, it might as well serve a purpose.

znowi 13y ago
I agree with your analysis. If one is so keen to visit America - welcome to Canada! :) Optionally, wait until Stephen Harper is ousted :) Also, a little reminder. It is the American citizenry that made the US "a beacon of liberty" in the first place. And I believe it can do it again. Do you say it will take 20-30 years to happen?
- pivnicek 13y ago
  Canadian immigration controls can be just as bad, though you may get water. Like someone said above, it's all about people having power over others with zero accountability.
  - conformal 13y ago
    canadian CBP are a bag of cunts, as i can confirm myself. sorry, but fuck canada. if you don't let me through your border, your country is unbelievably fucked. maybe dismissing parliament one more time will help mr harper.
- FBT 13y ago
  The difference now, perhaps, is that there is no longer a frontier left. 300 years ago, the people who wanted change and freedom from oppressive governments could sail away over the horizon and set up their own county in a new land. (That's not to deny there were limits to that: You needed to afford a ship, and to gather a large enough mass of people to actually build a successful settlement in the new world, and not to mention the ethical implications of the effects on the natives. All these were real issues, but despite them many people made their way to a new life in the new world, with perhaps a bit more "liberty and justice for all" than there was before.)

Amadou 13y ago

Ho hum. Just another day in the War on Dignity. This sort of thing is the inevitable result of giving people responsibility without accountability.

sneak 13y ago

They do this to me regularly, and I'm a US-born US citizen. My median time for being arrested and held with no food or water or use of a communications device is around six hours. ...all because I politely exercise my fifth amendment rights. This happens about 50% of the time I enter the country. I live abroad so I enter the US about a half-dozen times per year. I think my file is big enough now that they know not to ask me anything. http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/travel/customerservice/pledge_travel.xml http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/travel/customerservice/pledge_tra... > CBP’s Pledge to Travelers > We pledge to cordially greet and welcome you to the United States. > We pledge to treat you with courtesy, dignity, and respect. > We pledge to explain the CBP process to you. > We pledge to have a supervisor listen to your comments. > We pledge to accept and respond to your comments in written, verbal, or electronic form. > We pledge to provide reasonable assistance due to delay or disability. I often wonder which of these "threatening me with prosecution for interfering with a border control point", "lying to me by saying I'm legally required to answer their questions", "refusing to tell me the name of the city I'm standing in" and "throwing me out of the border control point (into the USA) on the highway in Vermont in February in a snowstorm" fall under. (It's the only time I've ever had to hitchhike in my life, as it'd been hours since they'd sent the Montreal-Boston bus on without me.) The one border cop in Detroit told me, after coming through the tunnel from Windsor, that "[she's] just doing her job, making sure the country is safe, and that [she's] there to prove [I'm] innocent and get [me] on my way quickly." I waited until I was given the all clear to leave the building before mentioning to her that "We're Americans, and this is America. I am innocent until I am proven guilty, and those representing our country would do best to remember that." Despite my opinions about the lot of them, I am calm, polite, professional, and courteous in my interactions with them. They respond in the most unprofessional manner possible, short of physically assaulting me. They've cost me thousands of dollars and caused me to miss important business meetings. (Before you say it: it's not my fault for exercising my basic rights or not "just answering the simple questions" that I missed my meetings. I'd have left except for the fact that men with guns on their belt arrested me after I'd already given them my passport and they'd searched my possessions.) Fuck the police. PS: Their invasive searches of my belongings were clearly punitive, too. I never travel with contraband but had I been doing so, they would not have found any of it. They were clearly just fucking with someone who had the nerve to tell them that his travel plans inside and outside of the US were and are "none of their business".

pkrefta 13y ago

Things like this really scary me, as a simple startup guy who wants to visit SV some day. I'm reading stories like this more often unfortunately and I'm starting to think if I really want to go to US. Getting a visa in Poland is also not very comfortable process since you've to give all information about your life to US authorities and still I've no guarantee that I'll be able to enter US.

rainsford 13y ago
Just be careful about drawing too broad a conclusion from stories like this. They're certainly bad events and the effort should be to make sure they never happen. But they are the only stories about entering the US that get reported on because they're news...and the uneventful instances are not. This is particularly true if you get your news from an aggregation site like HN where there is a certain level of interest in these stories and so they're even more likely to be reported on here. Millions of people travel to and within the US every year without incident, what gets reported is the admittedly terrible sounding times when that's not the case. Chances are very good that you'd have no problems.
- glimmung 13y ago
  I have to say that visiting the US is out of the question to me because of stuff like this. I appreciate that the the chances of it happening to me are slim, but I'd be worried sick about it, and would find it hard to maintain my composure if it did happen. (Aside: I'm 10 miles away from the largest NSA base outside the US and the local pubs are full of spooks, so arguably the US has come to me!)
- nraynaud 13y ago
  The problem is that these are low probability high impact situation, you want 0 occurrences. I mean wen we get to the US, we have our flight ticket info sent prior, we have to add more data because it's the US, the ESTA, last time I got harassed in Paris by the American Airline because I need to know the address I'm going to (I told her to check my file, I don't remember it), how long I knew my girlfriend and stuff, the NSA knows everything about me (I'm not an US citizen), the TSA checked me, the border police checked me out of the country. When I arrive in front of the CBP agent, my privacy had already been thoroughly shredded in the name of security, and my personal data including credit card is gone in the wild without any recourse or oversight, there is absolutely no need to physically harass people at the border.

vixen99 13y ago

On the other hand you might have this http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-eborders-scheme-catalogue-of-chaos-as-649000-border-alerts-about-possible-drug-and-tobacco-smuggling-deleted-8867427.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-eborders-s...

toyg 13y ago
To be honest, if the choice is between that and TSA, I'll take that every day. So they smuggle drugs and tobacco: big deal! With better policies, those activities wouldn't even exist anyway. Real policing is done with long-running investigations and intelligence on organised crime, not with coppers doing data-entry from passports.

Tepix 13y ago

This happens all the time, and it's a disgrace. It's also the reason why I haven't visited the US for more than a decade. The last time I went through this was before 9/11 and I can only assume it has gotten even worse since then.

tokenadult 13y ago
You could try gathering more data.
- scarmig 13y ago
  I think a single data point of enduring multiple hours of abuse, having all your electronics taken from you, being cut off from contacting anyone else, and being lied to and accused of being a liar is enough data to form solid conclusions. "But we only harass some people who look a bit too brown not to be suspicious" isn't exonerating.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
DrJokepu 13y ago
Meh. I visit America relatively frequently and I can't remember the last time I spent longer than 60 seconds at the US Border Control (excluding the queue which can be a bit long sometimes). And you know, the border control officers were always very polite and professional with me. This is a silly reason to not visit America.
- gadders 13y ago
  Me too. Never had an unfriendly one yet.
  - pantalaimon 13y ago
    Maybe you are just white enough.

davidw 13y ago

Outrageous. Really, it is - as an American, I'm ashamed to read stuff like this. However: does it really belong on HN? It's not germane to the stated topics of the site. And it is not "gratifying one's intellectual curiosity" - quite the opposite, it's a story that makes you mad without really telling you anything you didn't know already.

djb_hackernews 13y ago
Sure it does. You know, technology can be used to solve more problems than just sharing cat photos with your friends. I do believe this is a problem technology could solve.
Udo 13y ago
Well, it's an extreme form of what many of us go through on a regular basis when trying to travel to the US, hence I'd say it's relevant. By allowing these people to reign freely, the US is sabotaging itself in the long run, but in the short run it's just incredibly annoying, threatening, and expensive. I'm also in favor of keeping these stories coming, this should not ever be seen as normal or inevitable.
- davidw 13y ago
  > I'm also in favor of keeping these stories coming, this should not ever be seen as normal or inevitable. Perhaps people could post them elsewhere. This site does not need to be the be-all and end-all of one's online news consumption, you know?
  - Udo 13y ago
    I don't disagree. It's just that I can see why it's relevant with people who by necessity of their jobs travel a lot. All in all there are unworthier subject matters on HN.
  - theklub 13y ago
    I don't think the site should be flooded with these types of stories but there are also few places on the web to get intelligent conversation on such topics.

tokenadult 13y ago

The article reports, "It was her 13th time to visit the US in a span of more than two and a half decades." All that is reported here sounds like an aberration, an officer who mistook the situation and abused his authority. For context, the United States continues to be second only to France as a destination for international tourist visits, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings and just last week my wife and I enjoyed a meet-up in another part of the United States with several of her high school classmates from back when she lived in Taiwan, who arrived from Taiwan, Malaysia, and China, all without incident. When peaceful, hassle-free visits number in the millions per year, a few visits that are abuses of the process will certainly make news, but they don't appear to discourage tourism to the United States over the long haul.

kubiiii 13y ago
Who can tell? The rank of the US for tourism might be high but could be higher. The same applies to France where I am from. It's ok to be complete assholes with tourists, to charge them 3x times the standard rate, to restrain from learning english, because we are ranked #1 anyway.
- CaptainZapp 13y ago
  I'm visiting Paris fairly often and my French (Swiss German school french) can easily be described as rotten. It's serviceable enough to buy a carnet of metro tickets, or to ask directions. I noticed, however, that it's highly appreciated when I try to speak French with Parisians and I very rarely get snide answers. I observe this actually in almost every country. Try to speak a few words of the language and you're usually rewarded. (And compared to my Czech, my French is easily on Camus level). I think one of the issues is that the French are especially touchy when it comes to language and radiating an attitude of "Are those natives actually to dumb to speak proper English" definitely won't win the French over.
  - graue 13y ago
    Interesting. I had a different experience in Montreal (and my mother when she visited Paris): we would try to say a few words of French, and people would immediately realize we were American and switch to English in response. Maybe your French isn't quite as rotten as you think.

kubiiii 13y ago

More and more people are reluctant to go to the US for this. People who undergo such treatment should be compensated. This would be the fair price for security and maybe would focus the security effort on real threats.

nailer 13y ago

> "While doing this, another officer passed and shouted 'Who is she, a TNT?'" she said. What is a 'TNT'?

Maxious 13y ago
According to the Racist Slur Database http://www.rsdb.org/race/filipinos http://www.rsdb.org/race/filipinos > "Tago Nang Tago" It's a filipino thats an illegal alien. Translates to "hides and hides" (from the I.N.S.)
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  You know, the name of that database labels everything in it in a very negative way. I'd say the database itself is a slur. It contains a lot of stuff; its not all racist. Some of it is self-identification; some is slang.
ionforce 13y ago
TNT stands for the Filipino phrase "tago nang tago" which means "always hiding", describing an undocumented immigrant. Hoy, TNT ka? Hey, are you an undocumented immigrant? It's slang.
nols 13y ago
Slang for illegal Filipino immigrant. I can't remember what it stands for but it's a play off a tagalog word for "hide".

willvarfar 13y ago

Being a white male I've passed fairly fast through US borders when I visit. But people who've travelled on business with me who are non-whites have been severely delayed and eventually meet up at the hotel hours later with harrowing stories. From my samples I'd say that the border agents routinely racially profile.

mahranch 13y ago

Am I the only one who would like to hear the other side of the story? We're only hearing her side. Stories like this are beyond useless because they don't present all the facts. It's a sensationalist one-sided narrative of what happened. Without the other side's version of events, we cannot look at the story critically and evaluate the merits of both sides.

waqf 13y ago
Yeah, well, if the CBP opened a dialogue about their side of the story I'm sure we would listen to them. A big part of the problem is that the authorities do not talk honestly about their view of the proceedings. The TSA at least makes gestures in that direction, but CBP not so much. (An honest view from their side would talk about subjects like "What percentile of our employees are competent to do their jobs? How much would it cost to improve this?")

conformal 13y ago

overall, i am reminded of how sad i am to be a US citizen when i hear these stories. i have been harrassed by security personnel on a few occasions but have managed to avoid being stuck in the "private screening" room. the irony of having someone who is of puertorican decent and does not speak english as their first language giving me shit when coming into the US from the caribbean is not lost on me. unfortunately, the characterization of people in the US being (1) ignorant, (2) rude and (3) obnoxious is rather accurate. the USG should make an effort to have competent people manning the border since it makes the US look _awful_ when stuff like this happens. obama, or whoever is president, should make this shit a priority since we look like a bunch of fucking jerks when it comes to CBP/ICE.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

eyeareque 13y ago

Is this a reliable news source? I've never heard of the site before. The URL looks like a play on abc and cbs news. I don't think it seems that far fetched, but it does come across as being a fake story. It sadly doesn't surprise me that something like this could happen, I just question the site this is hosted on.

lessnonymous 13y ago
Major Philippines news org.
- eyeareque 13y ago
  That's good to know; thanks for clarifying.
poweribo 13y ago
im from PH and ABS-CBN is or one of the biggest media company.
olalonde 13y ago
It seems to be a reliable news source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABS-CBN_Interactive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABS-CBN_Interactive

auggierose 13y ago

Well. I actually do like America, I mean, which programmer would not? But during my various stays there, people have been murdered in front of my house, naked people have been thrown out of cars onto the pavement in front of me, bank roberies happened right across the street of me. The US is the most barbaric and uncivilised of the western countries. That might come as a surprise to some.

DougWebb 13y ago
Where are you staying?!? I've lived in and around NYC my whole life and never had any experiences even remotely like that. Perhaps you need to choose nicer hotels? Every country has some bad areas.
- auggierose 13y ago
  Sure, you can be unlucky and get into bad situations in every country. Strangely these things happen to me only in the US. I would compare the feeling of safety when walking the streets of major American cities like San Francisco or Pittsburgh with the feeling of safety when walking around in Rio de Janeiro. You feel much safer in London, Paris, Berlin, or Munich.
  - DougWebb 13y ago
    I've been to London twice and Berlin once. For the most part I felt safe in both cities, but one night getting off the tube in London on the way back to my hotel my friends and I were verbally accosted by a bunch of locals because they overheard our American accents. Being New Yorkers, we ignored them because they were a bunch of drunks being stupid, which we're pretty used to. Still, if I had been alone, or female, it would have been a lot scarier. I'd still go back though; that was one experience one night that could happen anywhere. I've been to San Francisco too, but my wife and I didn't do much wandering around at night. During the day it seemed fine everyplace we went, though there was a small alley right by our hotel that was apparently used as a toilet. Again, as a New Yorker I'm pretty familiar with being around homeless people, so what I found odd was that the leakage across the sidewalk wasn't cleaned up by the city, hotel, or shopowners around the alley first thing in the morning. Instead, it was just left there for days as far as I could tell. At the time I didn't know how common that is is SF. I didn't feel unsafe by it though, except for the threat to the cleanliness of my shoes.

JackFr 13y ago

As far as I can tell, the only source for this story is an unverified email sent by Carina Yonzon Grande to local (Phillippine) news outlets. While can't believe someone would make the story up from whole cloth, I suspect there are important details which may have been altered or omitted. I think it would be prudent to reserve judgement until more information is available.

pinaceae 13y ago

so where are the other sources confirming this? right now there is a single source of info, which is the woman in question. stories like this are very emotional and very often not exactly following the truth. HN gobbles them up, especially those readers who rarely travel themselves. i am deeply skeptical about this account. this year alone i have entered the US about 10 times, coming from European and Asian destinations. not a US citizen. I have never witnessed any impolite behavior by CBP personnel towards passengers - and I was standing in the blue line for hours with them. using the very specific term TNT is very strange for non-filipino officers. if you worked in retail this reminds me of certain customers from hell that complained to your manager and told a story that was outrageously one sided. all the while having been openly abusive to you.

jmilloy 13y ago

I think it's unfortunate that there are false positives. On the other hand, we are free to complain about our government, and that is fortunate. But to those of you complaining, are you sure this isn't just another anecdote that supports your stereotypes? Or is our anti-authoritarian fetish getting in the way of the data (or lack there of) again? Have any of us worked with a effective and practical system that never has false positives? Are you unhappy with the rate of false positives? Do you even know what that rate is? Are you saying you would you rather have more false negatives and fewer false positives? Surely anecdotal evidence is biased towards nasty false positives: we don't read about stories when someone triggers suspicion and is reasonably investigate before being released, but are you sure it never happens? I'm not saying that I think it's acceptable to be wrong sometimes, or to treat people this way. But I'm also not convinced by anyone who doesn't have answers to the above questions.

honzzz 13y ago
I think that you are completely missing the point. The problem is not about false positives, the problem is about the abusive behaviour to false positives. I can totally understand that there are false positives but racial slurs, threats, shouting, refusal to provide water etc. are never ever justified. Abusive behaviour of this kind might be just a personal failure of some employee... in that case they need to be fired and severely punished. If those things happen on multiple occasions and nothing happens, nobody is fired/punished, nobody apologises... than you have a reason to believe that it is a systematic failure to uphold to certain standards commonly associated with states that are not police states. That seems to be the case in the US.
- jmilloy 13y ago
  That's fair. I tried to include this perspective as well. Personally I want to agree that this behavior is never ever justified, but do you know that being respectful has no impact on the number of actual violators that are caught? Instead, I expect there is a trade off, and I would sacrifice respect for increased efficacy, to an extent. Furthermore, the resources required to remove agents that misbehave compete with the resources to find violators. Ultimately, I think it's hard to tell from here if we're sacrificing too much respect given the results. I'd rather not have to become an expert in border control; I pay taxes so that someone else can do that. I can see, however, that many people find it hard to trust that someone else might know more than them. I think it's a shame that there is not enough transparency; is assuming the worst and crying foul without proper data really the best we can do?

ctdonath 13y ago

"The immigration officer then returned to the room and accused Grande of being a liar. He claimed that he talked to her aunt, who allegedly told him that Grande will take care of her as a caregiver." I've seen the same up close. Seems it's a standard tactic: when someone is suspected of immigration transgression, lie about the suspect's prior statements to others; reason is to throw the person off-guard, increasing the chance they'll say something actionable. This is very effective, and VERY disturbing to the suspect. The guards are under no obligation to tell the truth, and use lying as a standard tactic...but anything YOU say can and will be used against you, with lying to a federal official being one of the worst things you can do.

bonemachine 13y ago

Don't know what to say. This is just beyond infuriating: The immigration officer then returned to the room and accused Grande of being a liar. He claimed that he talked to her aunt, who allegedly told him that Grande will take care of her as a caregiver. She said the immigration officer's allegations are not true because her aunt didn't even know she was arriving in the US. "While Officer Mam kept on repeating his questions about why I was in the US, a fellow officer by the name of Chang, joined and shouted, calling me a liar. He even searched my purse where I had wedding cards (with money) for my daughter and future son-in-law, and a birthday card for Joshua (also with money) and other stuff. He scattered all the items in my purse on the table, asking why they should believe me, when my aunt, according to him, seems to be the honest one," Grande said.