this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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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.”

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 6 days ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 100 points 6 days ago (4 children)

They're lucky they were sent home instead of to an El Salvador concentration camp.

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 6 days ago (15 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 128 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 6 days ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Why would anybody travel to that shithole country?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Because people booked last year and can’t get a refund.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

Ah yeah, that's fair.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 days ago

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".

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

Is losing your non-refundable booking a worse outcome than a few nights in a detention cell?

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