An American citizen says he and his wife were detained for hours by U.S. border agents when they returned to the United States after a short trip to Canada.
Bachir Atallah told CNN he and his wife, Jessica, were driving back into the U.S. Sunday evening after visiting family in Canada for the weekend when U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents stopped them for a secondary inspection at the Highgate Springs checkpoint in Vermont.
Atallah, who is originally from Lebanon, said he was told to park his Range Rover and hand over his keys. When he asked the officer why, the officer placed his hand on his gun and told him to exit his vehicle, Atallah said. He said he was then handcuffed and led into a cell, where his belongings were confiscated. He said his wife was put into a cell across from his.
“Seeing my wife’s mascara running because she was crying, it was heartbreaking,” Atallah said. “It wasn’t humane.”
I think people in here didn’t read the article. Border patrol explained that he was just overreacting. Being cuffed and placed in a cell for hours is part of normal operating procedure. It’s all fine. Everything is fine.
I hope every single one of these cases results in a lawsuit.
I have seen some rhetoric about this, like “a few bad apples,” but here’s the problem with this and a lot of enforcement jobs.
- Polite and decent people, on average, dislike confrontation. Thus, are not particularly attracted to these types of jobs.
- This leads to an uneven amount who are fine with confrontation or even like it. Some of these people are sociopaths and psychopaths.
- People who are psychopaths are actually very attracted to position where they have power over people.
- US Customs are not regulated under the same laws as police or military. They can do what they want, when they want, with little to no discretion.
Are all US customs agents bad? No, of course not. But unchecked power is dangerous for anything. I can’t tell you what percentage is or is not, because you can’t measure a negative. But I see this in military, police, hired guards, and politics.
Many years ago, they cavity searched an underage girl at my local airport (Dulles) as she returned with her family from a vacation in Jamaica. They separated her from her family, did not tell her family, and searched all her holes “for drugs.” They defended their actions by saying, “if we told people we didn’t cavity search babies, they’d hide drugs inside babies.” Essentially admitting, with no shame, they’d cavity search an infant. All in the name of “stopping drugs.” Oh and the girl? US citizen, but dark skinned. The mistake they made was her dad was a powerful attorney and went public.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106hhrg66023/html/CHRG-106hhrg66023.htm
https://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/circle/raceprofiling/stories.racial.profiling.html
I am going to say right now, the actual phrase is “a few bad apples spoil the bunch” and it is to literally say that yes, one or two massive assholes in any collective will eventually fuck shit up for everyone if not dealt with. I don’t know why the second part of that phrase stopped being acknowledged but it isn’t supposed to be just a hand wave to say oh it’s just one guy so let it go.
also go be clear, i am talking about ICE, not the american citizens illegally detained for daring to return to their county while being human.
So basically anyone non-white should never visit, and if youre not white and plan to leave, plan on it just being for good.
Murica
Been saying for awhile now if you plan on leaving the country, plan to move.
Nobody should be coming here right now. It’s too dangerous.
Not with the head of ice saying shit like “we want prime but for people” regarding deportations
I’ve been seriously reconsidering my vacation to Mexico scheduled for the second half of this year. I’m Asian and I have no doubt that I will be “randomly selected” to go through extra screening.
Without reason??? His name is “Bachir Atallah”! Clearly, a sinister sounding name like this must be detained, whereas John Smith will be allowed to enter. Part of Making America Great Again is returning to the xenophobia of the 1950s and earlier. Isn’t this what ~half of the voters wanted?
They probably thought they’d caught Atalla the Hun.
Flying home from international now.
Wish me luck my homies!
Good luck! Let us know how it went!
If you don’t hear from me hello from El Salvador!
Just be white, and you’ll be fine. Kinda like my other advice. Just be rich and you’ll be fine.
<Sigh>
White people may be detained to. I know one elderly white man who was made to repeat ‘I love the US’ three times before being allowed entry.
He did it and managed to get in unscathed so perhaps this is not the best example. But I imagine they would have detained him if he refused.
Ya, I’m sure, but I’d bet your odds of being harassed are greatly reduced. That is a special kind of CBP agent that required them to recite that to continue… What a world we’re in…
It’s not like they have thrown white Tourists from Germany or Canada in the prison the last few weeks instead of refusing them at the border
Magats will jerk off to this, this is what they wanted with their vote
Multiple orgasms for the first time…
You’ve conjured images in my mind. I wish you hadn’t.
The victims in this case are magats.
“My brother voted for President Trump. What he and his wife regret is the trauma they endured on U.S. soil—both handcuffed without cause, separated, humiliated, and treated like threats instead of citizens.”
They’ll jerk off to it until it’s their turn.
yeah - the dogwhistle language was pretty much “jail the brown people”.
i’m sure my mother is estatic. she told me she is scared all the time because one of her neighbors is chinese (she doesnt know them or talk to them; i have never met them… and neither has she, officially). that is the only basis for her fear - she makes up stories about them and everything. the last story she made up was how they were running an international crime ring to get more chinese people to live near her…
fucking white people :(
Fucking hell, doesn’t sound far off from my mom other than the situation. I finally had to just block her number cos she wouldn’t respect my wishes of not talking about religion or politics cos she’s just a hate filled little shit bag
Dr Fu Manchu is your neighbor!
Ah, another case of the ol’ caucasian deficiency.
It’s happening to white people as well.
Not enough to make any material impact … yet, if ever.
Wait until a celebrity is handcuffed at the border whilst live streaming the experience.
Even then, the brainwashed will still claim that it was justified.
Not until it happens to them will anything like this resonate.
I think things like DHL no longer accepting personal shipments into the USA valued at over $800 will have a bigger impact than this all too familiar story.
That already happened, a Canadian actress was detained for like 2 weeks months ago
Yet here we still are
And she was a US resident renewing her visa at the border, she was living here legally
You said it yourself, “Canadian actress” … I think right there is their excuse to ignore this.
I mean yeah but things have progressed since then. They’re snatching anyone.
If it’s brown, flush it down.
To be honest, secondary inspections are fairly commonplace at the US-CAN border. A (white) Canadian friend of ours was deported back to BC and barred from entry for 5yr because she overstayed her tourist visa. This article said he was detained Sunday evening and released by 11pm, which is like 6 hours tops- I’ve heard of people staying 8+ hours.
CLEARLY the fact that his name is Atallah and he and his wife are Lebanese had everything to do with this, but at some point it’s like, read the room. Don’t do int’l travel and expect it to go well in Trump’s Amerika
he and his wife are Lebanese
The article only says that Bachir Atallah was originally from Lebanon, his wife, only referred to as Jessica, might not be.
Not that I disagree with the fundamental notion, I just noticed that it was never said where she was from.
Bachir Atallah
Yeah, I think I know why they detained him.
Fuck this country.
But not even the OK half of that chart is set in stone unless you have an obviously American surname like Smith or Jones. You could be a white fifth generation American with a surname that sounds remotely middle Eastern, east European, etc. and you could be in for a rude awakening…
They detained a white German tourist trying to enter with a German passport and valid visa for several weeks, while he begged them to just let him book the next flight back to Germany.
You could be a white fifth generation American with a surname that sounds remotely middle Eastern, east European, etc. and you could be in for a rude awakening…
Or if they think you may have said something vaguely critical of dear leader online.
We all knew Trump was a dictator, he said so himself. I did not expect this level of buy in from the rest of the country though.
It has never been this explicit.
Well since the 90s anyway.
deleted by creator
it’s never been this explicit
Meanwhile every non-white group can tell you how they’ve been oppressed in the US for decades.
First they came for…
Move up the list.
They came for…
They are coming for us all. Act accordingly.
He also voted for trump
If he did, then I guess he’s having the day he voted for. But I still detest that I live in the kind of country that would do this shit.
Absolutely, I would hate it where I am if it happened here
And this will keep on happening until people react
Funny how so many of these detained US citizens share certain, ahem, characteristics about their names
