I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks

Yes. This is the reality of how it is. It’s unfair that this woman was caught in this but CBP have ultimate power crossing the border can be scary.

My friend got her visa stripped and given a 10 year ban under Obama because of jokes in her text messages about a GC marriage. She didn’t get thrown in jail but she was refused entry back into the US and had to get someone to sell all her stuff while she flew back to her home country.

Most of you have no idea about how life is because you’re probably citizens but this is the reality at the border. It’s even worse in other countries.

Someone I know is from Australia and she said if you overstay your visa they track you down, arrest you and send you to jails outside of Australia mainland until you are eventually deported. Every country treats their border extremely strictly.

CORRECTION: I pinged my friend and I was wrong. They arrest them but don’t send to offshore jails. Those are for illegal immgrants that arrive on boats.

> Someone I know is from Australia and she said if you overstay your visa they track you down, arrest you and send you to jails outside of Australia mainland until you are eventually deported. Every country treats their border extremely strictly.

Honestly, this kind of abusive approach is predominant among certain of the major anglophone countries only, at least within the world of fully developed democratic countries, likely for reasons of shared media ownership/viewership and overlapping cultural/political attitudes but I don’t know for sure.

Yes, several other fully developed democratic countries do of course treat their borders strictly in the sense of who’s allowed in and under what circumstances, but not with these kinds of abusive treatment as a common pattern. And I do frequently read news in three languages plus a fourth occasionally, so I don’t think this is just me being biased toward news from countries that share of my native language of English.

> I do frequently read news in three languages plus a fourth occasionally

Impressive. Can you speak or understand by listening these languages as well? And if I may ask out of curiosity, which languages are they?

AFAIK, the Australian system doesn’t operate like this for visa overstays. Your friend may be confused with asylum applications for those who arrive by boat (which isn’t often used in practice).

https://www.unsw.edu.au/content/dam/pdfs/law/kaldor/factshee...

"It’s even worse in other countries."

It's not. I take you are comparing to western countries. If you have a valid visa and behave even remotely normal to the border agents you will have no issues. Only in the USA some border agents have the attitude of "I'm gonna get you" or making you feel unwelcome for no reason. Hell, even in "authoritarian" countries like UAE or Quatar I never experience anything but pleasant interactions on the border.

> Hell, even in "authoritarian" countries like UAE or Quatar I never experience anything but pleasant interactions on the border.

Wikipedia seems to indicate I couldn't go to the UAE because I'm transgender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_by_country_or_ter...

The offshore detention we do here in Australia is abominable, but it’s not accurate to say it’s “if you overstay your visa”, it’s generally only used for people who can’t be deported for whatever reason (usually around asylum claims, being stateless, etc.).

If you just overstay a visa you will just be deported fairly quickly, you aren’t going to go into offshore detention…

That’s not a defence of the practice, offshore detention should absolutely be abolished, it’s just worth being accurate.

You are ignorant about how life is crossing into other countries. In the 1990s, my friend who is a white Canadian drove into Buffalo for dinner with his family, and on his way back the Canadian border patrol asked him where he was going. He answered “Canada” instead of Toronto and based on that they detained him for hours and ripped apart his car.

Just recently a woman from the UK was denied entry into Canada and because of that was denied entry back into the US and found herself in the same mess as the person in the article.

This happens all the time, you just don’t hear about it until the news decides to make a thing about it.

Unfortunately that table has already started changing for the worse on the particular case of the United States :(

Be strong.

"woman from the UK was denied entry into Canada and because of that was denied entry back into the US"

You are proving my point, she was again detained by USA for 3 weeks when it could have been resolved much better and faster.

My friend went to University of NSW early 2000s and she said when her friends disappeared for a while, they knew they were caught by the border patrol and deported because of some sort of overstayed visas. They all knew how aggressive Australia was at enforcing visa violations. Maybe they changed the process since then but she said everyone knew they sent visa overstayers to the offshore jails to scare them and send a message to everyone else.

CORRECTION: you are right. I got my story mixed up so I was wrong. It’s illegal immigrants who arrived by boat that were sent to offshore jails. My friends friend was sent to a regular jail. He had a student visa and stopped going to uni so he got arrested and deported because his visa got cancelled.

Yes we agree then. Every country is strict at the border. That’s my point.

>because of jokes in her text messages about a [Green Card] marriage

Let this be a lesson to all those who think it's fine to unlock their phone and hand it to cops.

I'm not sure what customs and border patrol would do if you refused to unlock your phone for them. I doubt they would just let you go.

Yes they arrest them and throw them in jail but not offshore jails. I was wrong about that, I checked with my friend.

You would be detained and eventually denied entry. You have no rights when you cross the border no matter which country you're in. China and other countries have just as draconian enforcement.

Yes, though the degree varies by language. I'm a native US English speaker, usefully bilingual in French at least when things are being spoken relatively standardly, and have partial degrees of proficiency with German (hello from Berlin) and Spanish which nobody would confuse for fluency but which are still useful levels of each language.

"It’s even worse in other countries."

I imagine it would be, if you visited South Sudan.

It is not "even worse" in any of the western countries. The border control people in most western countries are actually friendly. They are polite, sometimes even, gasp, smile at you.

there's a difference between sending someone back where they came from (what Canada did) and torturing them (what the US is doing, sleep deprivation is torture).

>> If you have a valid visa and behave even remotely normal to the border agents you will have no issues.

This is the crux IMO: it should be an OR not an AND. Having to behave "remotely normal" where this is determined solely at the discretion of the TSA is impossible.

> Most of you have no idea about how life is because you’re probably citizens but this is the reality at the border.

The reality is that you can be denied entry for pretty dubious reasons, but most people with a valid visa/visa exemption who don't do sketchy shit like the woman in TFA don't get randomly denied or even interrogated beyond the basic purpose of visit questions. All my entries into the US (as well as other countries I have been to) have been pleasant except for the long queues.

> Every country treats their border extremely strictly.

Unfortunately not every country. Much of the EU has gotten used to lax borders.

Strict enforcement of borders is mostly in countries that get lots of people trying to enter illegally or overstay their visa. E.g. those with neighbors that are significantly less well off.

Detention for overstaying your visa is pretty reasonable. That's not something you do on accident.

> It is not "even worse" in any of the western countries. The border control people in most western countries are actually friendly. They are polite, sometimes even, gasp, smile at you.

That has also been my experience with the US. YMMV of course.

ESTA applications ask for your social media accounts even before you get to border patrol. You can of course omit them but that may or may not backfire. I have only ever listed GitHub since I don't really use anything else they have in the drop down.

It's either that, or get denied. Interestingly enough, however, it's quite easy to "prepare" for a phone search in advance since border agents can only search the actual content of your phone. You just need to delete apps and reinstall them after you passed the border. Their "advanced" forensics tools would likely find traces of those deleted apps, though.

"CBP officers can only search and access data stored on the device’s hard drive or operating system. The search does not include data that is stored remotely in a Cloud format. The officer must ensure that data and network connections are disabled before starting the search, for example, by asking the traveler to turn the device into airplane mode and disabling Wi-Fi."

[https://hselaw.com/news-and-information/legalcurrents/prepar...]