Border Cops Detained Me for Hours Without Explanation. They Won’t Tell Me Why.

Around the fourth hour of my detention at the airport, I decided to ask for a lawyer. The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent at the front desk refused. I told him that he can’t indefinitely hold an American citizen. “It’s not indefinite,” he replied. “We’ll let you know.”

That little exchange captures the absolute power that CBP claims over travelers, including Americans, going far beyond any domestic law enforcement interrogation. You don’t have a right to contact a lawyer. Neither do you have a right to know why you’re being detained or what will happen next. It’s not “indefinite” detention; they just won’t tell you what the “definite” part is. Crossing the U.S. border is the closest most Americans will come to experiencing life under the foreign dictatorships I report on.

I am not the only American journalist or researcher to be held up at the border. Nor was my experience particularly bad. I got out in four hours with all of my possessions intact. But I decided to do something that most others don’t: I reached out to CBP and asked why they did what they did to me. And I asked them about an earlier interrogation, during the Biden administration, which in hindsight seemed inappropriate.

At first, CBP’s media office was quite helpful. The first spokesperson I spoke to promised to pull up the notes from my two interrogations, and pointed me to the hotline for travelers who have had excessive “difficulties during travel screening.” As days turned to weeks and I was passed between different CBP staff, it became clear that I wasn’t getting a straight answer. One spokesperson apologized for being “distracted” with more urgent stories. Another was on leave for several days. Et cetera.

It was clear that CBP had the information. One of the spokespeople actually corrected me on the date of my first interrogation—May 16, 2023—so they clearly had looked over my file. But I wasn’t getting anything other than generic, anonymous answers: “CBP officers have the authority to ask a wide range of questions, including about travel locations and contacts there. Officers may also ask questions out of curiosity about travel location or your work in media.”

The first time I wound up in an interrogation room was in May 2023, flying into John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York from a Fulbright study abroad in Jordan. As I wrote at the time, the process was quick and professional. But in hindsight, parts of it were disturbing. The agents wanted to know if I “have any family in any of those countries” that I was traveling in. When I mentioned that my Fulbright project involved helping Jordanian journalists with translation, they asked, “What kind of media?”

One of the beautiful things about America is that neither my journalism nor my ethnic background are the government’s business, except, apparently, at the border.

I reentered the country without incident every time after that, until last week. After spending the beginning of this year abroad—studying, getting married to a foreigner, setting up our new home, and hanging out with my in-laws—my wife and I wanted to visit my family in New Jersey. Worried that my wife would become one of the many tourists on valid visas turned away, we contacted a lawyer and wrote down his number before traveling.

To our surprise, I was the one who had trouble getting into my own country. After stamping my wife’s passport around 6:30 a.m., the CBP agent at passport control told me that I had to go “somewhere else.” That meant secondary inspection. I was handed my passport in a locked plastic box with a bright orange lid and pointed towards a seemingly endless corridor. I told my wife to contact the lawyer if it took “too long.”

The waiting room at the end of the corridor was a strange mix of professional courtesy and casual cruelty. I saw agents ask a young man what kind of food they should bring him and reassure an old man that everything will be sorted out. I also saw agents snap at someone who wanted to use the bathroom. “Did you think you could just do that without asking?” an agent shouted as the man walked towards the bathroom door.

An older Jordanian woman was there with her American husband. She had gotten an email informing her of a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services appointment, so she boarded the next plane from Amman to Washington that she could find. But at the secondary screening desk, a CBP agent told her that she wouldn’t be walking to that appointment as a free woman. He was taking away the woman’s green card for being outside America for too long. She could either sign away the green card on the spot, or be detained and taken to a judge.

As the woman broke down in tears and her husband frantically tried to contact a lawyer, the agent went back to laughing with his colleagues about football.

Wary of the stories I’ve covered about CBP searching electronics, I didn’t bring a working cellphone with me. Around 10:10 a.m., I walked up to the intake desk for the waiting room and asked to use their landline phone. “Our landline?” the agent replied, confused that I would even ask. I said that I wanted to contact a lawyer. He flat-out refused.

“Since the international arrivals inspection is an administrative function, CBP policy and federal regs do not permit the presence of lawyers during secondary examinations,” CBP spokesman Stephen Sapp tells me. In other words, when I’m under an administrative rather than a criminal investigation, I have fewer rights than someone accused of a crime.

Sitting back down in the waiting room, I saw another American waiting with his foreign wife, and asked to use his phone to text my lawyer. My lawyer told me to hang tight, because as an American, they have to let me in eventually. (Unfortunately, there is no legal limit to how long “eventually” can be.) He was also busy reassuring my wife, who was sitting in baggage claim asking herself, Where can they possibly deport my husband? New Jersey?

Finally, at around 10:30 a.m., an agent at a secondary screening desk called my name. He asked me a few basic questions about my itinerary for the past year. Although it would have been my right to refuse even those questions—all I have to demonstrate to CBP is that I’m an American citizen—I saw no harm in telling him information that the government already has. The agent was quite polite, apologetic about the wait, and offered to help me find my wife in the arrivals hall after clearing me for entry. He also offered no answers about why I was being held up in the first place.

“They let my wife through but took me. I don’t know why,” I told the agent in response to his question about who I traveled with. “I don’t know why either,” he responded, facepalming.

When I later texted the same information to a source who used to work in immigration, he responded, “????” He speculates that I’m either “on a list but a vague one,” or my itinerary triggered some kind of automatic alert. As Reason has covered, automated border control systems often take away the personal discretion that officials have, and even deprive them of knowing the reasons behind decisions the computer is making. And the government is moving toward AI-generated watch lists.

In theory, CBP has no right to stop Americans from coming home. There is no condition for a U.S. citizen to enter the U.S. other than proving their citizenship. CBP does have authority to search anyone, citizens or otherwise, for contraband goods at the border. (Controversially, the agency claims that right extends to electronic data.) So-called “secondary screening” is often an opportunity to squeeze information out of Americans, especially because exhausted travelers might not know or assert their rights.

Last year, CBP detained lawyer Amir Makled and demanded to search his phone, which he was partially successful at refusing. A few months later, immigration attorney Andrew Lattarulo sued CBP for seizing his phone, claiming that it was retaliation for criticizing the Trump administration. A judge ruled that the feds can’t look at the data on it. Last month, CBP demanded that Vermont school superintendent Wilmer Chavarria give up the passwords to his work phone and work laptop, claiming that it would “stain” his record, according to Chavarria.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledges maintaining a variety of databases and watch lists on travelers, including the Automated Targeting System and the Secure Flight lists. And then there are the lists that the government doesn’t even acknowledge exist. During the first Trump administration, CBP compiled a secret list of journalists and lawyers to question at the border. Earlier this year, an immigration lawyer accidentally discovered a document titled “watch list” on a DHS Security website, which appears to be a list of immigration lawyers.

Of course, travelers don’t have any way of knowing they’re on any of these lists until they run into problems. That’s part of the arbitrary power CBP and other Homeland Security agencies exercise: You, the humble citizen, have no way to predict or prepare for how you’ll be treated.

For all the dictatorial powers that CBP and its Skynet-like systems have at the border, America is still a democracy domestically. I let CBP’s press office know that I was going to exercise my First Amendment rights to write about my two experiences in secondary screening, and the spokesman seemed quite eager to get me information, a tone I previously hadn’t experienced from CBP spokespeople.

The same source who explained my potential watch-listing told me that “no DHS person wants to be noticed…especially if they have pulled in the ‘wrong’ kind of person.” Unlike many of the other reporters and academics detained at the border, I’ve written a lot for publications on the political right, including ones that are close to the Trump administration’s base.

But Americans shouldn’t have to be a specific kind of journalist to get answers about why the government is hassling them. (And frankly, neither should foreign guests who are following the rules.) Going home after a long trip is not a crime. And however much CBP insists that secondary inspection is an “administrative function,” not a criminal investigation, that’s a distinction without a difference for someone who’s being asked intrusive questions and can’t leave.

Fortunately, there’s a route that’s open to everyone. I have filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all the data that CBP has on me, from agents’ field notes to any automated system hits. However long it takes for CBP to respond, and however heavily they redact the documents, I’m legally entitled to a response. And so are you.