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.”
Every time I’ve been to Cuba I show up in the airport and basically have a car rented, maybe first night in a hotel. Then we drive wherever we feel like and usually pick up a hitchhiker or two that will have a “sister” that has a room for rent.
It has almost always been clean, friendly, cheap, and a good breakfast. Rinse, repeat. I love travelling like this and have generally done this everywhere I’ve gone in the third world. Apparently the US doesn’t even measure up to third world.
I saw this in an episode of border patrol Canada when a guy was coming to help his friend in Canada do yard work\landscaping. The officers said he was trying to take a Canadian job, work illegally, and was barred from entering the country.
They’re lucky they were sent home instead of to an El Salvador concentration camp.
Oh no! This dastardly Europeans wanted to come here and work! How dare they! Deport them!
This country was cooked a long time ago.
From another story about the event, it wasn’t even like odd jobs for a host, it was small job remote work for people in Germany and Asia. Stuff they would be doing at home and just kept doing during downtime on a long vacation.
Don’t reply to any business emails while lounging by the pool, you need a work visa for that!
Travel advice to USA has pretty much always been to have your destination/hotel at hand for customs and your tickets for the flight back. They were also interested in how you would get to said destination, so better have a car rented in advance.
It was so silly when the immigration officer asked me (at the origin, not the destination because they want to avoid to fly you back): “And what if John won’t be there to pick you up at the airport?” Me: “I don’t know man, take an Uber?”
This has been happening for a long time. It’s just that they are from first world country. Welcome to how it feels to be from a third world country. Not only US but I have been stopped at Munich and Frankfurt airport and thoroughly scanned and document checked while everyone just walk through security.
I’m from Canada and had to explain to border officers what my accommodations and means of personal support would be for a two week stay in the US. I was almost denied entry because I wasn’t carrying sufficient cash on hand.
The was almost twenty years ago.
I don’t know the full context of your situation, but sometimes it’s easy to fall into the mindset of always feeling like a victim. I’ve seen people of all backgrounds get scanned or checked at airports. Have you considered if there might have been a specific reason you were stopped?
Personally, I’ve been stopped several times too, and in some cases, I later realized it was due to something simple, like forgetting to take keys out of my pockets, which triggered the sensors.
Both say they were handcuffed and sent to a detention center, which they claimed was more like a prison.
“We were searched with metal detectors, our entire bodies were scanned, and we had to stand naked in front of the police officers and were looked through,” Pohl said. “Then we were given green prison clothes and put in a prison cell with serious criminals.”
Among them was someone who had spent 18 years behind bars for murder, the women said, and they were left sleeping in a double cell with tiny barred windows and metal bunks with moldy mattresses.
I really want to know what changed that made the above happen much more often.
In December, if Customs had concerns about two teenagers trying to sneak into the US to work on a travel visa, where did they go? How was it handled? Because it feels like overkill and probably much more expensive than what we used to do.
Why are we sending backpacking teenagers with visa concerns to the same place as a murderer?
Why are they being strip searched like they were drug smugglers?
But the women — who were planning to continue on to Los Angeles and then Costa Rica after Hawaii — insisted they were interrogated by CBP for hours, and that transcripts show their words were “twisted” and outright falsified.
“They contained sentences we didn’t actually say,” Pohl said of interrogation transcripts they were sent home with.
“They twisted it to make it seem as if we admitted that we wanted to work illegally in the US,” she told the German outlet Ostee Zeitung.
And then this feels like the after-the-fact coverup. Whatever they held them on was super flimsy, so they tried to make it sound worse when they realized this was going to hit the news.
The most shocking thing about this is the five weeks. Like as Americans we have no clue how the rest of the world lives. The entire country of France stops working for 6 weeks in the summer. And we fight to get 2 weeks if we’re lucky.
I’m a middle aged American and have never had a paid vacation.
Pretty easy to take off 5 weeks when you are unemployed.
The entire country of France stops working for 6 weeks in the summer.
The French get 25 days off per year, which is on the higher side in Europe, but not quite 6 weeks.
Does the 25 days include national holidays like Xmas, etc? Perhaps it’s more than 25 once the national holidays are factored in?
Does the 25 days include national holidays like Xmas, etc?
Nope, those are all added on top.
I’m not trying to be mean, but the difference between 10 days and 25 days is the difference between night and day.
You successfully failed to be mean.
Why so many downvotes for this guy? I don’t understand. As a student I could easily do some courses next year and take time to travel. Even better when you’ve just finished studying and go travel before starting a job. It’s not that weird, right?
I think maybe the phrasing? Calling them unemployed might have bad implications, even though it is accurate for recent graduates. I’m not sure.
Really I just find it interesting. Lemmy works in mysterious ways sometimes :D
Don’t understand why you’re being downvoted. Because you’re exactly right. They just finished school and very likely don’t have a job. Very likely they are going to want to study later on and are spendig their time between the final school exams in spring and the start of the winter semester at university travelling, as man young Germans do.
Vacation time in Europe is a lot better than the US, but this has nothing to do with it. Depending on your contract you could get 30 days off in Germany, and since you don’t have to count the weekends or state holidays, if you work a regular Mo-Fr work week, you can arrange for a 6 week trip, but they had already spent 5 weeks in Thailand and NZ, were planning 5 weeks in Hawaii and then keep going other places. The way they are travelling is out of reach for most employees in Germany and it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity for many.
Heavily depends on whether you’re backpacking and staying at hostels or expecting all the usual vacation bells and whistles. But yes unless you become a digital nomad it’s not sustainable into adulthood, this is probably a gap year kind of thing. Saving up a couple of thousand working while in secondary education while still living with parents can get you quite a ways.
Also, there’s still tradespeople going on journey, with actual work visas. Tough luck doing such a thing abroad without a guild with the right contacts into state structures, staying within the EU is significantly easier.
Why go to US, Germany is far more wonderful
Germany is not tropical.
How about France ?
Why would anybody travel to that shithole country?
I guess they learned their lesson.
I think it is sad, I would really like to travel in the USA as I think the nature and the culture are really interesting. But for my entire adult life the USA actually would have been a gamble to travel to.
The laws around entry to the country are also really weird, as the immigration officer that checks your visa has the ultimate authority of whether you are allowed entry. There are no concrete laws that limit their say over this.
Because people booked last year and can’t get a refund.
Ah yeah, that’s fair.
Is losing your non-refundable booking a worse outcome than a few nights in a detention cell?
To anyone who was paying attention this was already a pretty clear possibility last year. Not to mention that all the people voting for this outcome also make it an unpleasant place to visit on a more personal level, even if the election had gone the other way.
You have to understand that there are people who have better things to do with their time than keep up with foreign politics or arrange their lives around it. You could just say nothing and not shit on people who don’t want to lose a thousand dollars because a nation decided to have shit for heads this season.
People who travel to shitholes like the US for several weeks at the time clearly don’t have “better things to do with their time”.
Well, then they have to face the consequences of not paying attention to the things happening in the place they intend to go to
Like, yeah, ideally you wouldn’t need to worry about this, but this is always a risk when traveling, and politics has that trait of being interested in you whether or not you are interested in it back
“We wanted to travel spontaneously.”
This is how my sister and I do our road trips. We get in the car and drive until we are tired then search for a hotel. If we find a town we like we might stop there even if the day is young.
Criminal scum
lol, that’s how I did my trip to Germany. I got my first hotel for only a few days, then decided when/where to go next based on that. Rinse-Repeat for a few weeks
On bike? Believe it or not, also jail.
Yeah, I’ve always travelled like this. You just get a ho(s)tel for the first few nights, and then you just stay longer if you like where you are or you move on to the next place based on what locals/other travellers recommend.
Having not fully booked your accommodation for the entire trip could get you denied entry to the US before Trump. Just saying. Especially if you aren’t white. Same with not having an outbound ticket.
Not allowed to go camping unless you’re a citizen I guess
Likely they did not have enough fund to stay in Hawaii that long. It becomes a liability.
You just call daddy and get another thousand on your account. This is not hard.
So we just making shit up to make it make sense now?
With this administration, the most likely thing is another fuckup.
I’m sure it happens occasionally but I’ve never actually heard of CPB asking for hotel bookings, just outbound flight number. This is stuff you’d submit on a visa application. If the US wants to make Europeans get visa to travel then they should just do that.
They have asked for both and in one case they have asked for bank statement. This happens very often to citizens of third world country. We just knew what to carry with us all the time and no issue.
I met a good chunk of Europeans and Aussies while thru hiking on the AT a few years ago.
All of those folks did not have full accommodations booked in advance, that would have been impossible. They seemed to find that pretty normal and were not turned away.
This. It also gets you denied in Australia and other countries. This is non-news.
Source: Previously my guilty pleasure was watching Border Security Australia Not so much anymore.
Denied entry is far different than being strip searched and locked up in a jail with serious criminals.
Is it that common? How do they handle backpackers?
I’ve literally never gone on a single multi-week vacation in my entire life with fully booked accommodation for the whole thing. I book the majority of the first week and I know when I’m flying back, but in between I’m mostly guided by the wind.
I can’t book hotels in places I don’t know I’ll be going.
It’s not the only thing. It’s a combination of limited/no living accommodations and no income. If you don’t have the income to stay for 5 weeks for example, they will send you back.I’m talking like going to Australia or US with just $500 or something for 5 weeks. I can cite some episodes when I get off work today and you can see the process.
I doubt it’s common. I’ve traveled to Australia and the US (and a bunch of other places) with just a few nights in a hostel booked, sometimes even without a return flight. Might be different if you’ve got a middle eastern name or something like that, but pretty much every backpacker travels this way.
Imagine booking 2 years ahead when you’re on a writing holiday visa, that’s just nuts.
How do people get multi week vacations?
Just book some of your +5 weeks per year together. What, are you American or something?
You get a minimum of 24 days paid vacation in Germany. Up 28 days are common.
Double income, single household, no kids. (and even then just barely, i will add)
Or, if you’re talking time wise, live in a country that isn’t run by and for corporations and you can still enjoy some paid time off.
When I started my last job (big multinational corporation) after an internship, I got 3 weeks of paid vacation right off the bat, with 1 more week every few years, up to a maximum of 7 weeks.
Plus 1 more week if I chose to “buy” a week by estimating the vacation I would accrue throughout the remainder of the year and subtracting 1 week’s pay from that.
A few years back my 19 yo American son had a great experience working the summer as a camp counselor here in the states. It is a religious camp (not that my son is that religion) that draws in campers from the states and Europe. Many of those campers as they get older come back as counselors. They get the appropriate visas, make money working the camp for 8 weeks, then take the few weeks after camp before they have to leave and blow that money on traveling the States and their trip home. It was an incredible experience and inspired my son to bust his ass, save money, and a few years later took a self funded trip to Europe where he couch surfed these homes of the friends he made.
I think about those kids this year. There’s no way I’d risk traveling back to this shit hole country if I were them.
yeah, it is not newsworthy when CBP does their normal, admittedly rather annoying job
I completely believe these women, and I am sure Border Patrol invented sentences and put them in the transcript, altering what the women said in some parts and outright making stuff up in others. People assume transcripts are correct, but any corrupt authority can alter them or attribute anything to anyone. I called the Border Patrol to find out more and they surprisingly admittted to this corruption, saying “Yep, we alter transcripts all the time in between felching each other and praising Moloch.”
I don’t get it. Why would anyone still travel to the US without being forced to?
There’s a significant amount of the US population who still don’t realise how bad things are, you really expect everyone outside the US to be any better?
I assure you, everyone outside of the US knows how bad the US is… the US is the laughing stock of the world right now. We get daily reminders how shit it is, how shit the economy is, how many mass shootings there were today. The world is fascinated by it, sometimes bored.
In this case with the young travellers, they have probably had the holiday booked for ages. Some people just think it wouldn’t happen to them. These sorts of checks would seem random anyway. These sorts of things appear on near every episode of Border Patrol (in Australia) where someone is being sent home because of lack of funds to sustain their length of stay etc…
Ah yes, the hive mind of all non US citizens sharing the same knowledge.
Which bit are you objecting to? If you don’t believe that the US is being portrayed by every news agency (worldwide) as a dumpster fire, you are deluded
You’d be surpised by how many people don’t follow international news.
It’s not just in the news. My husband is a lawyer. He was on a training conference today. Part of it was about how the rule of law needs to be followed and society only works when it is. They then discussed how important it was to upkeep that using America as an example of a government no longer following rule of law. This wasn’t internet memes. This was senior legal minds discussing how American democracy is failing.
Most people aren’t lawyers.
don’t follow international news
… don’t use social media, and don’t talk to anybody that does those things (because it’s basically impossible for it to not enter normal conversation).
Yeah, there certainly exist some people like this. But I doubt they are the ones booking international trips.
… don’t use social media, and don’t talk to anybody that does those things (because it’s basically impossible for it to not enter normal conversation).
Oh, they definitly on social media and talk to people. But that still doesn’t mean you’re exposed to US politics. People have their own domestic politics to talk about. What happens in the US really isn’t as relevant to the daily life of the average foreigner as you might think.
I would guess we as outsiders think it’s worse than it is, hearing only the bad stuff. We’re not hearing about great new sales at bed bath and beyond or whatever, we’re only hearing about the heavy handed deportations and human rights violations. Which is obviously bad but its easy to confuse “probably not as bad as it sounds” with “probably not actually that bad”.
I don’t think I’m communicating the point i was trying to make very well but whatever
I think you’re saying that we/I in the USA still see/have the trappings of normalcy: ads for BB&B, our Amazon packages are still delivered, we still have our treats.
Y’all outside of the USA don’t care about our treats. Y’all’s news is showing all the human rights erosions and ignoring that I got new prescription glasses by mail just 2 business days after ordering them (what a successful and stable country this must be/s!).
(sidenote, maybe prescription glasses aren’t treats, but I’m very excited because my prescription has changed and maybe I will stop with these eye strain headaches)
I assure you, most don’t. Message boards don’t contain mist people
I wouldn’t go to USA even if you pay me. To be “mistakenly” deported to El Salvador and then they fucking “don’t know” how to get you out. Fuck no.
I used to say this about 3rd world countries to avoid them, now USA is on that list. Imagine USA being that bad. Well, it is that bad now. When it was under Biden, I wouldn’t even think about it. With this orange baboon, no fucking chance you see me go to USA.
Even before, having to be treated like cattle in their border checks for hours? No thank you.
Read the article - they clearly don’t read the news, and had no idea that other Germans had already been detained.
like didn’t Germany issue a travel warning?
It was explicitly not a travel warning (“don’t go there”) but a note to be aware that an ESTA does not guarantee entry to the US. Because our authorities are lame and still want to avoid looking like they’re somehow opposed to anything the US does.
That’s actually both lame and stupid considering that getting detained by ICE is almost a guarantee
Yeeees but the US is, of course, a VALUED and RELIABLE partner and has been for decades and we, the new German government, look forward to an increasedly productive collaboration with the new Trump government regarding global matters etc. pp. bl. er. gh. 🤮
Almost all Germans entering the US are detained by ICE? They must have a lot of agents on standby for every Lufthansa flight.
They might have booked the trip before it was clear it was going to be so bad, and I doubt you can get your money back on a ticket for something like that. They probably rolled the dice and hoped for the best. It’s always been a roulette of whether you’d get a ‘good’ border patrol agent or some guy with a chip on his shoulder. It’s just that the latter feels more empowered now and there’s nobody keeping them in check.
People travel to China because there is nice stuff to see and great food to try. While US doesn’t have the great food they have the nice stuff to see and are still way better than China.
I’d visit China before I visited the US right now.
Ngl right now id rather travel to China. If I dont do anything particularly dumb it looks good for them right now to have normal tourism working, particularly when the US is being this shit.
While US doesn’t have the great food
That’s just ignorant. There’s plenty of absolutely fantastic food in the U.S.
I have no idea why anyone would visit us now, but if you manage to get past the fascist scum, there are plenty of amazing places to eat.
They were also going to Hawaii specifically. Now I’m German and have never set foot in any US state but I’d imagine Hawaii as a tropical island group would have its own local cuisine that can’t be half-bad (if you ignore the lack of beer), right?
Pork and pineapple
Exaaactly, Toast Hawaii is a staple of any good German Hausfrau. We love that shit.
This masterpiece will confirm to anyone outside of Germany that they’re not joking: Alexander Marcus - Hawaii Toast Song
As a resident of Hawaii, I have no idea what Toast Hawaii is.
Whaaaat you’re telling me toast with a slice of ham, a slice of pineapple and a slice of melted cheese on top ISN’T a centuries old traditional Hawaiian meal? The GIs have misled us!
It even has an English language entry in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_Hawaii
(I am being very unserious :))
You forgot the Spam.
Loosely covered under “pork?”
When they denying whiter than white German kids, shit done got real.
They need to come up with enough people to deport to justify their lies about the border.
Yes, this is border agents filling their quota.
Interestingly.as far as I’m aware
GermansItalians were one of the last “ethnicities” to be considered white, alongside the Irish.Edit: Originally said Germans, left the comment because it’s more about how whiteness is more about in group acceptance than actual skin tone.
You’re thinking of Italians. While some ‘german’ ethnicities were indeed swarthy whites along side Nordic countries in the 1700s, nearly all were included in the white umbrella by the start of the 1800s. Italians, Irish, and Mediterranean whites took well into the 20th century to be white.
Ah, my bad, I’ll update.
If the Germans aren’t white, what the fuck is white?!
White is whatever the rich white guys say it is. It was never about skin color for them. It is about maintaining power, wealth, control, etc. Othering is like a hack to get people to do whatever they want.
Generally it’s the people who you want to be. It’s not about “color”.
I’ve seen it described as “proximity to power”. Which is why the definition can change.
