February 28, 2020
The head of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) says his staff over-reacted and improperly held up about 60 Iranians and Iranian-Americans trying to enter the US in Washington State the first weekend of January.
“In that specific office,” acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan said at a briefing with reporters in Washington February 13, “leadership just got a little overzealous.”
“That was not in line with our direction. And so that was immediately corrected,” Morgan said. “And it was very unique to that one sector.”
He did not explain why it took six weeks for CBP to make a public statement.
The Seattle field office had issued a notice telling its officers to check Iranians closely. That covered dozens of the border crossings with Canada from Lake Superior to the Pacific Ocean. But only the border office at Blaine, Washington, acted radically to hold up people born in Iran.
They acted over a weekend. When what they were doing was reported in the media, the practice was halted.
Meanwhile, in separate actions, nearly 20 Iranian students with visas have been rejected at US airports, including a young woman named Reihana. She was planning to start a new chapter in her life as a student at Harvard Divinity School. But she never made it out of Boston Logan International Airport before she was put on a plane and sent back home.
Reihana has a lawyer now. She’s filed a formal complaint against CBP, and is suing in federal court. She still wants to go to Harvard, and also to hold the officers who rejected her accountable.
CBP insists it does not target people based on nationality.
So how could this happen? Ronald Vitiello, who served as the deputy commissioner of CBP under President Trump, says officers have broad discretion, and a mandate to keep America safe. “They’re looking for threats to the country. They want to make sure that the people are who they say they are,” Vitiello said.
But Vitiello says CBP officers can’t just pull aside travelers based on the color of their skin or their country of origin. They have to have something more to base their suspicion on, much like police when they stop suspects on the street.
“They can’t deny people just because they happen to be affiliated in some way with Iran,” Vitiello said. “There has to be some justification for the decisions that they make.”
These officers should do more than just stamp passports, says Gil Kerlikowske, who served as commissioner of CBP under President Obama.
“They’re not merely automatons that look at someone and stamp the record,” Kerli-kowske said. “We ask them to take additional steps to make sure the people entering into the country — and it’s a million passengers a day — are not going to cause harm.”
The rejection of fewer than 20 Iranian students does not constitute a wholesale exclusion of Iranians. There are currently about 12,000 Iranian students at US universities. But those rejected, like Reihana, were given no explanation for why they qualified for a visa but were rejected when they appeared in the US. Many of the students have lost substantial sums, having left jobs and often sold off property before flying to the US.