CBP officers are not googling authors' names at primary inspection, determining whether they are liberal or conservative thinkers, and then retaliating against them if liberal by referring them to secondary inspection.

Agreed. And it may be that there's no crack down on people working on tourist visas, and that this sort of thing would have happened exactly the same way a year ago, but it just wouldn't have made the news back then because it couldn't be blamed on President Trump's new, hostile, xenophobic America.

It's been done before, denials here not withstanding what has in fact taken place before.

Please provide a cite/link to where this has happened before. I would be interested in reading about it.

You know full well that not everything observed by you or by others has a "cite/link" on the internet, but you are welcome to try to deny or confirm what happened without even being present when I and others have seen such things take place. That may include you trying to use Google, as CBP sometimes indeed does in the way I mentioned.

And by the way, a lot more of this took place under the prior Admin than the current one (so far).

OK. Are you a former CBP officer or law enforcement agent who worked with CBP officers in some way and personally witnessed them googling author's names at primary inspection and retaliating against liberal thinkers by referring them to secondary?

I mean, I could write, "CBP officers at Honolulu airport sometimes torture kittens on their lunch breaks but it just hasn't been reported," and then add "you are welcome to try to deny or confirm this." But if I never worked at Honolulu airport and provided no basis for why I would have such information, you'd probably assume I was a kook who was just spreading false information.

You seem to be more interested in whether or not this is about Trump vs "liberal thinkers" than realizing it's mostly about CBP employees and their personal/group prejudices/ignorance resulting in hassles for people "wrongfully detained" at US ports of entry and how that has sometimes involved the use of Google at the ports of entry.

I think you know enough about what kind of material I provide on FT in this area to know that I'm far from clueless about our policies and practices at US ports of entry and need not rely upon just experiences of myself and my travel party members as passengers at US ports of entry. I've worked with CBP, but not in a role as a CBP employee or law enforcement officer. And that's all you are going to get from me on that.

As you'd expect - 8 years versus not even a couple of months.

Yes, but I haven't yet seen numbers indicating that secondary got filled up way more than has taken place in some prior periods during earlier years in this decade.

Perhaps the proportion of passengers sent to secondary or even the average time in secondary (for people sent to secondary) has increased this year, but I haven't yet seen numbers make the round about this for US ports of entry.

It's also possible they are just asking them about their writing and going from there. No need for phones/computers.

Fox, 70 years of age, was made to stand for much of the time she was detained. She was entering you country on the correct visa and received an apology from your government after this stuff up.

She won't be going back to the US in future and other notables will be giving pause before bothering to go there.

You need to be careful about who you let wear uniforms in
your county. From FAs to doormen you seem to grant them too much power.

The current US Administration wants to be less careful about who wears CBP uniforms:

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2017/im...7/cbp-memo.pdf

To grow the number of DHS employees the new President wants, they want to make it easier to get less qualified Americans to work for CBP than is currently allowed. That "flexibility" in hiring/retention standards means more -- not fewer -- CBP bad apples and foolish/ignorant shenanigans from CBP at US ports of entry. This Australian author experienced this under the current ("high") standards of CBP employment practices; it will be even more of a gamble at US ports of entry when the CBP hiring standards are "relaxed".

If somehow I found myself in the US I'd be very cautious of even dealing with someone working in a burger joint. A uniform is a uniform, and it doesn't really seem to matter who issued it.

No she wasn't. She was detained for an hour and forty minutes. Most of the time she was sitting. She only stood while she was questioned - for fifteen minutes.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...entire-country

I don't disagree that CBP officers can be rude and intimidating. However, I see nothing wrongful about them briefly detaining foreigners visiting for career-related reasons to determine if they have the correct visa or authorization for their visit.

About the only authority a person flipping burgers has is to order you out of his establishment and not want you as a customer. They cannot detain you, arrest you just for looking at the burger menu (unless you committed a crime such as beating or robbing them), or force you to go into a back room and be searched outside of public view. If you're scared of someone flipping hamburgers, are you just as scared of 7-11 clerks wearing a company outfit, or someone collecting tickets at an athletic event/concert that may be in uniform?

CBP has police powers, whether they wear a uniform or not, and the question is whether they're abusing those powers. I'm concerned about some recent reports and the impact it's going to have on the tourism industry in the U.S. I just can't see how that has anything to do with hamburgers.