Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 30km from Los Angeles International Airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there at around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside.
I told myself it was for only one night. As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist's visa.
security risk
Since Sept. 11, 2001, any traveler to the US is treated as a potential security risk. The Patriot Act, introduced 45 days after the attacks, contains a chapter on Protecting The Border, with a detailed section on Enhanced Immigration Provision, in which the paragraph on Visa Security And Integrity follows those relating to protection against terrorism. In this spirit, the immigration and naturalisation service has been placed, since March last year, under the jurisdiction of the new Department of Homeland Security. One of its innovations was to revive a law that had been dormant since 1952, requiring journalists to apply for a special visa, known as I-visa, when visiting the US for professional reasons. Somewhere along the way, in the process of trying to develop a foolproof system of protecting itself against genuine threats, the US has lost the ability to distinguish between friend and foe. The price this powerful country is paying for living in fear is the price of its civil liberties.
None of this had been on my mind the night before, when I boarded my United Airlines flight from Heathrow. I spent most of the 11-hour flight daydreaming about the city that I had never visited. My America had always been the east coast: as tourist, resident, journalist, novelist; I had never ventured much past the New York-Boston-Washington triangle. But I was glad that this brief assignment was taking me to sunkissed LA, and I was ready to succumb to LA's laid-back charm.
At the airport, the queue for passport control was short. I presented my British passport and the green visa waiver form I had signed on the plane.
interrogation
The immigration official began by asking the usual questions about where I was staying and why I was traveling to the US.
"I'm here to do some interviews," I said.
"With whom?"
He wrote down the names, asked what the article was about and who had commissioned it.
"So you're a journalist," he said, accusingly, and for the first time I sensed that, in his eyes, this was not a good thing to be.
"I have to refer this to my supervisor," he said ominously, and asked me to move to a separate, enclosed area, where I was to wait to be "processed." I was beginning to feel my jetlag and some impatience. I asked how long I'd have to wait, but received no reply.
Finally, an officer said, noncommittally, "It seems that we will probably have to deport you."
I'm not sure, but I think I laughed. Deport? Me?
"Why?" I asked, incredulously.
"You came here as a journalist, and you don't have a journalist's visa."
I had never heard of it. He swiftly produced the visa waiver (I-94W) I had signed on the plane, and pointed to what it said in tiny print: I had inadvertently declared that I was not entering the US as a representative of foreign media.
Finally, after much scurrying around by officers, I was invited into an office. The interview lasted several hours and consisted of a complete appraisal of my life, past and present, personal and professional. He needed information as diverse as my parents' names, the fee I would be paid for the article I was working on, what it was about, exactly, and again, the names of people I was coming to interview.
After about three hours, during which I tried hard to fight jetlag and stay alert, we had produced several pages that were supposed to provide the invisible person in charge with enough material to say yes or no to my request to be allowed entry.
At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their "rules" demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: "How dare you touch my private things?"
"How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?" he shouted back, indignantly. "Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you'd see a big difference."
After my luggage search, the officer took some mugshots of me, then proceeded to fingerprint me.
Three female officers arrived to do a body search. As they slipped on rubber gloves, I blenched: what were they going to do, and could I resist? I was groped, unpleasantly, though not as intimately as I had feared. Then came the next shock: two bulky, uniformed and armed security men handcuffed me, which they explained was the rule when "transporting detainees through the airport." I was then marched between the two giants through an empty terminal to a detention room.
something worse
Then I was taken to the detention cell in downtown LA, where the discomfort became something worse.
I was in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.
Though my experience was far removed from the images of real torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it was also, as one American friend put it, "conceptually related," at distant ends of the same continuum and dictated by a disregard for the humanity of those deemed "in the wrong." American bloggers and journalists would later see my experience as reflecting the current malaise in the country. Dennis Roddy wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Our enemies are now more important to us than our friends ... Much of the obsession with homeland security seems to turn on the idea of the world infecting the US."
As documented by Reporters Without Borders and the American Society of Newspaper Editors in letters to Secretary of State Colin Powell and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, cases such as mine are part of a systemic policy of harassing media representatives from 27 friendly countries whose citizens -- not journalists! -- can travel to the US without a visa, for 90 days.
The press office at the Department of Homeland Security recently issued a memo announcing that, although the I-visa is still required, new guidelines now give "leeway when it comes to allowing journalists to enter the US who are clearly no threat to our security." Well, fine, but doesn't that imply some journalists are a threat?
Maybe we are. During my surreal interlude at the airport, I told the officer taking my fingerprints that I would be writing about it all.
"No doubt," he snorted. "And anything you'll write won't be the truth."
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