January 10, 2020
Dozens of Iranian-born people were stopped by US immigration at one border post with Canada and delayed for as long as 10 hours Saturday and Sunday.
The large-scale delays and questioning were reported exclusively at the Blaine, Washington, border crossing. Many Iranian-born people delayed Sunday were returning from a concert in Vancouver, British Columbia, given Saturday night by Masih & Arash Ap, a duo on a tour of Canada.
News reports spoke of one other Iranian-born man being stopped and questioned the same day on his return to the US at JFK Airport in New York City.
It wasn’t known if there were any other such stops at other US ports of entry—and there are 328 such locales at which people and goods may enter the United States.
The Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the major Muslim civil liberties group in the US and Canada, said January 6 that more than 60 people of Iranian descent, including American citizens, were held for hours of questioning over the weekend at the Peace Arch checkpoint in Blaine, which is the major US-Canada border crossing point on the Western side of the continent
Blaine is one of the busiest US border posts. It is where I-5, the major US West Coast highway, enters Canada just south of Vancouver. It is infamous for long delays.
CAIR said in its statement that a source at US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had reported that the agency received a national directive from the Department of Homeland Security to “‘report’ and detain anyone with Iranian heritage entering the country who is deemed potentially suspicious or ‘adversarial,’ regardless of citizenship status.”
A CBP spokesperson denied that DHS or the agency had issued any such directive. “Social media posts that CBP is detaining Iranian-Americans and refusing their entry into the US because of their country of origin are false,” the spokesperson said.
This may have been a semantic argument. When CBP “detains” someone, it is effectively jailing them. No Iranian interviewed by the media reported being “detained;” what they reported was being pulled aside and required to wait until they could be interviewed at the Blaine post, which officials said was understaffed because of officers on vacation.
The absence of similar actions at other border posts suggested to some that the chief of the Blaine border post had acted on his own and was not actually carrying out a national policy.
Sam Sadr, who lives in North Vancouver, said he spent nearly nine hours at the Blaine border post Saturday after his birthplace printed on his Canadian passport caught the attention of a US customs officer.
Sadr, who was born in Tehran, told Politico he was on his way to Seattle for the day with his family. The officer, he said, asked him to pull over and go into the border office to provide more information.
Sadr recalled arriving at the border at 11:07 a.m. Pacific time. He and his family were finally allowed to enter the US around 7:45 p.m.
In between those times, the officers took their passports and asked lots of questions, he said. After a couple of hours, the officers asked the same questions again. They wanted to know where they were coming from, where they went to school, whether they had military backgrounds and whether they had firearms licenses, Sadr said.
“Why me? Why my parents? Why my sisters, brothers? I don’t know,” said Sadr, a professional photographer who received his Canadian citizenship two years ago.
While he was waiting, he said, he saw many other people of Iranian descent also held up at the border crossing. Sadr, who left Iran more than 12 years ago, said he and his family stayed in the US for only about an hour since it was so late and the stores had closed.
Attorneys monitoring the situation at the border in Washington state said they had not seen any evidence that American citizens with Iranian ties were denied entry to the US; they were just delayed entry for questioning.
Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project’s Seattle office, told Politico Sunday that those being held for questioning were being processed more quickly by then, within 30 to 60 minutes.
There were only two other reports of delays elsewhere. Lee Saunders, an immigration lawyer in Blaine, said two of his Iranian clients encountered “hours” of questioning at two different ports of entry in Washington State Saturday. Politico did not name them.
The only other report of a delay—albeit for less than 15 minutes—came from John Ghazvinian, an Iranian-American historian and US citizen, who said he was subject to additional questioning Sunday when he flew into New York on Air France from a trip to Egypt.
In a tweet that went viral in the Iranian-American community, he said, “Well, just landed at JFK and — no surprise — got taken to the special side room and got asked (among other things) how I feel about the situation with Iran. I wanted to be like: my book comes out in September, preorder now on amazon.”
In an interview with Politico, he said the first CBP officer he saw flipped through his passport and asked him, “When was the last time you were in Libya?” to which he replied, “I’ve never been to Libya.” The officer quickly corrected himself to say “Iran,” to which Ghazvinian told him that he had last been there in 2009. Another CBP officer then asked more questions in a private secondary screening, he said, the first time he’s ever been held up when returning to the US.
Ghazvinian, the interim director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said the officers told him they had flagged him for extra scrutiny because it looked as though he had bought a one-way ticket to the US, when in fact he hadn’t. The female CBP officer, whom he described as “very friendly,” also asked him in the secondary screening whether he had family members in Iran and what they thought of what is going on. He told them he hadn’t talked to them about the situation.
Then she asked him what he thought of the tensions between the US and Iran, to which he responded by saying he didn’t think the question was relevant. “She said, ‘We are just curious about what people think about these things,’ and I said, ‘It feels a little political,’ and then she dropped it,” he said.
The events, which he called “inherently a stressful experience” and “nerve-wracking,” involved a five-to-10-minute wait and around three minutes of questioning, he said.
Soon after he cleared immigration and customs, he sent out the tweet and said he was “surprised by the attention it got…. It was not my intention to paint myself as some type of victim here. I don’t feel that way. To be honest, I thought it was just funny and so I just sent out what I thought was a lighthearted tweet.”
However, Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said the accounts made public thus far were “very disturbing” and were stoking fear among a population already sensitive to border issues, given the Trump Adminis-tration’s visa limits on Iranian nationals.
“The government has a legitimate interest in verifying identity, citizenship or legal status at the border, but it has no business infringing on the constitutional rights of citizens and legal permanent residents by detaining and invasively questioning them about their associations, religious or political beliefs or practices,” Shamsi said.
Mona Zabihian, a US citizen born in Iran, told BuzzFeed News her group waited for more than five hours at Blaine before they were allowed to enter the US.
She was held in a room without enough seats for everyone and with only one bathroom, Zabihian said. If they wanted to get food from a vending machine they had to be go to another room and be accompanied by a CBP officer.
“Amongst us anxiously waiting were children and pregnant women,” Zabihian said. “There were children and parents rolled up on the floors trying to get some physical rest while anxiously waiting to be released back into their country—the United States of America.”
Another US citizen, a mother born in Iran and traveling back to the US with her children, told BuzzFeed News she was in secondary inspection for six hours Saturday at the Blaine port of entry. She declined to give her full name out of fear of retaliation.
She was questioned about her work, citizenship and whether she had been in the military. CBP officers also asked her to provide the names and birthdays of her family members.
She said there were about 20 other people, most, if not all, of Iranian descent, waiting with her. The mother said that the CBP officers were polite and even provided the children with coloring books and juice while they waited.
Still, her children, ages 5 and 7, kept asking her why they were having to wait for so long. “I burst into tears, I was so frustrated,” she told BuzzFeed News. “What do I tell a 5-year-old? I don’t want them to know we were there because their parents were born in Iran. I don’t want them to feel different.”