The teens claimed CBP targeted them because they hadn’t booked hotels for their entire stay in Hawaii.
“They found it suspicious that we hadn’t fully booked our accommodations for the entire five weeks in Hawaii,” Pohl said. “We wanted to travel spontaneously. Just like we had done in Thailand and New Zealand.”
Multiple horror stories is the weakest data set you can come up with.
How many tourists do you think come through the US in a single day? What percentage does “multiple” cases make up?
Yes, it is how its always worked that if you go through immigration and you get flagged for something suspicious you get detained for further questioning. Did you expect the immigration officer to let you through if you failed the initial set of questions like "where will you be staying for the duration of your trip? "
Let me throw this back at you for a sec. How exactly do you are the Trump administration organizing this? Did they suddenly hire a bunch of new immigration officers? Among the hiring and spending freeze and stupid Doge stuff, where did these new officers come from? Do the officers now have some detained quota they need to meet each day? Are all TSA secretly MAGA waiting for the chance to deny tourists?
Sometimes the simplest explanation is right in front of you. The girls were too truthful on their form and that for them flagged and detained. You need to account for where you will be while in the US ( or most countries honestly). Otherwise it is assumed you might do something like try to work and stay long term beyond your visa. When their answers didn’t add up they got sent home.
If you don’t believe this go ahead and try and travel to any country and tell them you don’t have a place to stay yet, don’t know when you will leave exactly, but you’ll just wing it. See if that flies.
You really are shockingly naive. Yes, CBP officers are assholes dispositionally eager to treat non-Americans harshly and changes in administration do change policy, both explicitly and implicitly. Like their comrades in ICE, they’ve been itching to “get tough” the whole time.
Do you seriously think German teenagers were regularly getting strip searched for muddled responses to whether they would do any work and it was just for some reason not reported on prior to a couple months ago?