Another German, 25-year-old Lucas Sielaff, was detained at the San Ysidro border crossing on February 14. He had obtained an ESTA and had a been visiting his American fiancée, Lennon Tyler, who lives in Las Vegas. She told reporters that they had traveled to Tijuana to obtain veterinary treatment for her dog. When they attempted to reenter the U.S., Tyler alleges that CBP officers became “very aggressive and hostile almost immediately.” Sielaff has told reporters that owing to the language barrier, he incorrectly answered a question about where he lived and officers accused him of living in Las Vegas rather than visiting. His ESTA was ultimately canceled, and he was handcuffed and arrested. “There was no proof that I overstayed anything,” he later told ABC-10 News.
Tyler told the New York Times that at the border crossing, after she tried to get answers about what was happening to her fiancée, she was subjected to a body search by ICE officers and was briefly chained to a bench.
Sielaff said he was held by CBP at the border for two days before being transferred by ICE to the for-profit Otay Mesa Detention Center, where he shared a cell with eight other people. He was held for a total of 16 days before returning to Germany on March 6. Per the Times, Tyler says he was only able to get out because “we made ourselves a nuisance”:
Dr. Tyler called the immigration authorities daily, she hired lawyers who also called them, she gave news media interviews and she reached out repeatedly to a German Consulate. [Eventually] Mr. Sielaff was allowed voluntary deportation, on a flight that cost him $2,744.
A 35-year-old Canadian entrepreneur attempted to enter to renew her work permit at the Mexican border and ended up detained for 12 days at two grim ICE facilities.
The details of her case are unusual. Jasmine Mooney, who once starred in a direct-to-video American Pie spinoff and more recently co-founded the American-based Holy Water! brand, said that while she was living in Vancouver, she discovered that her U.S. work permit had expired after three years. She decided to travel to Mexico to attempt to obtain a new permit at a San Ysidro border crossing, at which point her troubles began. The New York Times has a rundown of the complex logistics involved:
Ms. Mooney was applying for a TN visa, which allows professionals from Canada and Mexico to stay temporarily in the United States. She initially applied for one last year for her other marketing job, but she said that it had been rejected because the company’s letterhead was missing from her documents.
She said she had successfully reapplied about a month later at the San Ysidro border crossing, but when she tried to return to the United States at the end of November, a U.S. immigration official at the airport in Vancouver revoked her visa. He explained that her application had not been processed properly, she said, and raised concerns over one company that was employing her that sold hemp-based products.
Ms. Mooney said it was not uncommon for people like her who work in Southern California to apply for visas at the San Ysidro border station, so earlier this month, she figured she would try again.
Mooney says that rather than simply denying her entry, ICE agents detained her for unclear reasons, then moved her to an ICE prison in Southern California before transferring her to one in Arizona a few days later. She described bleak conditions at both facilities, describing her conditions to People as “inhumane” and feeling like a “deeply disturbing psychological experiment.” She describes being shackled for up to 24 hours in a row, sleeping on a mat with no blanket, having “aluminum foil wrapped over my body like a dead body for two and a half days,” among other indignities.
Mooney says she was freed without explanation, and is still unsure why she was detained in the first place. She described her ordeal more thoroughly in a first-person article published in The Guardian on Wednesday.
