<
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/05/i-was-a-british-tourist-trying-to-leave-america-then-i-was-detained-shackled-and-sent-to-an-immigration-detention-centre>
"Just before the graphic artist Rebecca Burke left Seattle to travel to
Vancouver, Canada, on 26 February, she posted an image of a rough comic to
Instagram. “One part of travelling that I love is seeing glimpses of other
lives,” read the bubble in the first panel, above sketches of cosy homes:
crossword puzzle books, house plants, a lit candle, a steaming kettle on a gas
stove. Burke had seen plenty of glimpses of other lives over the six weeks she
had been backpacking in the US. She had been travelling on her own, staying on
homestays free of charge in exchange for doing household chores, drawing as she
went. For Burke, 28, it was absolute freedom.
Within hours of posting that drawing, Burke got to see a much darker side of
life in America, and far more than a glimpse. When she tried to cross into
Canada, Canadian border officials told her that her living arrangements meant
she should be travelling on a work visa, not a tourist one. They sent her back
to the US, where American officials classed her as an illegal alien. She was
shackled and transported to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice)
detention centre, where she was locked up for 19 days – even though she had
money to pay for a flight home, and was desperate to leave the US.
Burke had arrived in the US during the Biden administration, only to become one
of 32,809 people to be arrested by Ice during the first 50 days of Donald
Trump’s presidency. Since February, several young foreign nationals have been
incarcerated in Ice detention centres for seemingly little reason and held for
weeks, including Germans Lucas Sielaff, Fabian Schmidt and Jessica Brösche.
(Brösche, 26, spent more than a month in detention, including eight days in
solitary confinement.) Unlike these other cases, Burke had been trying to leave
the US, rather than enter it, when she was detained for nearly three weeks."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
