Are these just alternative facts and MAGA talking points or do you have any proof from a reputable source for what you stated?

These are not "MAGA talking points." I speak my own opinions. And they come from bringing a modicum of critical thinking to a situation where people (including the MAGAs, I might add, who want to scare people away) are trying to get you to catastrophize. And like I said, the only source of this we will ever have is a very biased one whose story is as untrustworthy as Alex Jones' would be.

Most of these CBP agents are the same people who had the job 6 months ago. And 6 months ago, people who lied (possibly by omission) on visa applications largely got exactly this treatment. The news just didn't report on it.

Let's say I buy that #1, #2, or #3 of your scenarios are what really happened. Let's say I buy it without any reservations or modifications. Let's make the position even stronger by stipulating that she has been charged with something and none of the reporting covered that, because obviously any narrative falls apart if e.g. she assaulted someone and was not charged or arraigned after weeks of incarceration. Let's buy the strongest version of your entire party line, in other words.

It's still a terrible situation that would involve ICE making up procedures to supersede our actual laws. We have laws and procedures that cover all of these things, from disorderly conduct to criminal trespass to assault. None of these laws are new; all are well-tested in courts in front of juries and judges. Equally, none of them include weeks of pre-trial detention without bail. (Also, one would be able to independently find the arrest and court records now.)

Which, maybe ICE is allowed to make up law on the spot. But that further solidifies my initial point that it is very risky for any non-citizen to cross any US border right now due to wildly unpredictable procedures and uncertainty as to whether existing US laws will apply or not.

I'm not sure why you think they need new laws to detain you and deport a non-citizen, especially when your paperwork is no good. If you show up to a US border checkpoint and you are not a US citizen, that is standard procedure. It is also a situation where border control has very, very broad powers and entrants have very few of the protections that you might think they have. These are not wildly unpredictable procedures, and as far as I can tell, they have basically not changed - enforcement of illegal crossings is going up a lot, though. The huge difference between now and 6 months ago is that reporters are now seeking out these stories (see how Obama's CBP was putting kids in cages for years without a peep and it took until Trump's first term to get any reporting on the conditions under which families were detained).

The same goes at most other country borders. If I try to force my way into Germany (for example) with no permission to enter and then refuse to leave, you better believe I am headed to a German prison until they can make arrangements to deport me.

It's messy and gross business, certainly. People getting arrested usually is. It is not something to fearmonger over, though, to the millions of visitors who have clean and valid permission to enter the US.

> why you think they need new laws to detain you and deport a non-citizen

I did not suggest that they did. That's not what they did, though, is it? She is from Canada; there are flights to Canada all the time. There is no indication that she was indigent and unable to pay for her own return flight after being refused admission to the US.

I think most reasonable people would agree that refusing entry to a person not legally allowed to enter is one of the core duties of immigration personnel. If they had put her on the next flight back to Canada, there would have been no story here.

What we did instead was we incarcerated her for weeks across multiple prison facilities. There is no suggestion that anything caused this beyond her paperwork being "no good," as you say.

I'm not getting into the politics of it. I'm just saying that I would not get on a plane to go to a country where a visa snafu could land me in prison for weeks, and I can understand why people would not want to take that risk. That's the part that's not normal among civilized countries.

> Government procedure doesn't just turn on a dime.

People could reasonably disagree with this point, especially where the current administration is concerned.

> I did not suggest that they did. That's not what they did, though, is it? She is from Canada; there are flights to Canada all the time. There is no indication that she was indigent and unable to pay for her own return flight after being refused admission to the US.

> What we did instead was we incarcerated her for weeks across multiple prison facilities. There is no suggestion that anything caused this beyond her paperwork being "no good," as you say.

We don't have all the facts here, and even though return flights happen "all the time," they will usually put you on a relatively cheap flight back because you're going to be sent a bill for that flight and they don't expect you to pay. Last-minute flights are always expensive. This is what happened with the British tourist as well, they essentially held her in prison until a cheap enough flight. In a sane country, the cost of the imprisonment would factor into this, but it appears that US border control does not care about that.

They should have given her an option to pay for her own earlier flight out if she wanted to. It sounds like they may not have, but again, we have a source that has the same credibility level as Alex Jones here. It's entirely possible she spent that two weeks trying have a lawyer in the US to fight to clear her visa issues and she failed.

However, if you refuse to pay for your own ticket, what are they supposed to do other than detain you?

To be clear, I generally have very few sympathies for the idea of someone having a casual "visa snafu." It is not hard to read the procedures for any country you enter and get the appropriate documents lined up far in advance.

Clearly our sympathies are calibrated differently around international travel. :-)

I am wondering how you think about stories like this. This is not to attack you, I legitimately am curious as to the thought process.

You say she has no credibility. Great, why do you then go along with her assertion that she was ever detained, or even in fact ever traveled to the US? None of us have verified any of this beyond seeing the article in The Guardian...

If you believe her when she says that she came to the US and was detained for two weeks, why do you not also believe her when she says she offered to pay for her return trip (as she says in the article)?

How do you decide which parts of her story are worthless, and which parts have some fidelity to the truth? Again, I am really more interested now in the thought process than the politics or whatever of this story.

First of all, I believe that everything she says is true (otherwise there's an easy denial), but I believe that every single gap in the story should be held against her given the friendliness and motivations of her and the forum in which she is telling the story. This is the same standard I hold Ted Cruz to when he talks to Fox News, for example. For a near-perfect comparison, gun nut Republicans do this with visits from the ATF (they like to own things like pistol braces and use these accessories in questionably legal ways).

The "Alex Jones" standard is a bit worse, I guess, since I would assume him to be lying about facts.

In general, I also believe that people doing work internationally (especially ones with a lawyer) almost certainly do know the rules and it's okay to hold them to those rules. I have personally done a lot of international travel, including to places that are rather unsavory, and it's not that hard to follow the rules. It is very hard to get them to bend the rules, which is what I assume she wanted to happen here.

Here's what I think of her story:

1. Denied a visa 3 times to try to work at a company that sells federally illegal products, and didn't go through the right channels to rectify that. Why not? Why go back to the same place that denied you multiple times and not to a consulate? Also, the "approved by the computer then denied at entry" has basically two possible causes: (a) some other past immigration problem like a visa overstay or (b) she didn't mention the denial when she applied. I am guessing (b) given that she probably got advice from her lawyer that going back to the border station 3 times was an acceptable course of action, when it is well known that it is nearly impossible to get a visa on entry after a previous visa denial (this happens for any country, and often for any denial).

2. I assume she was detained because her welcome in Mexico had run out or she otherwise refused to leave (no law breaking necessary). She cuts straight from "your visa is denied" straight to "you're not a bad person," and I'm sure there's a relevant detail missing there because there's a lot of specificity otherwise. I would also bet that given her use of exact quotes in this encounter, she remembers exactly what that statement was but decided to omit it.

3. For the whole time when they were trying to figure out what to do with her, she was "in shock" and doesn't remember anything they asked her. Unlike the above, I believe that she doesn't remember (she might be terrible at handling stress). However, that is exactly when you would expect them to ask her if she wants to set up her own flight out. What I think is likely is that she was still trying to position herself to enter the US, and she may have refused to get her flight back to Canada at this time.

4. They called her friend, and two days later she called her friend, and her friend did something? It was something big since lawyers and politicians were involved, but presumably it did not extend to calling border control and getting her on a plane because if someone had tried to do this it would 100% have been in the article.

5. Later, the normal deportation process starts and she's on the assembly line until the next convenient flight to Canada. She finally remembers tons of details about what people said at this point, now that none of those people are asking her if she wants to arrange her own travel back to Canada.

It's hard to imagine that the details that were omitted weren't at least a little inconvenient for her given the level of detail we have on the convenient facts. She remembers lots of things around that time period, but not the interviews or the deportation papers that she signed. We also haven't heard anything about the plan that her friends and lawyers enacted, which I assume was "find a way to get me into the US" not "find a way to get me out of ICE detention." Again, if the plan was the former, it would be an attempt to skirt the rules (unsympathetic) while the latter would be a very sympathetic cause and thus a detail that is conspicuously absent. An additional sign that this is what she wants to do is that she's emailing her future manager throughout the process about something unspecified.

Doing this at the Mexican border when you are not Mexican is also a good way to get the bad outcome. If she had done this from Canada, they would never have detained her.

Anyway, it's hard to take stories like this truly at face value when they have so many convenient details and so many other convenient holes. My best guess is that her 2-week prison stay was largely self-inflicted due to a series of poor strategic choices (ie trying to get the visa rather than trying to self-deport).