25 Hours in JFK: My Detention Story
[part one of two]
“This news finally got to me. My composure cracked a little as I dropped my coat onto the chair and sat with a visible expression of mild frustration. The officer responded firmly that if I showed any more acts of “aggressions” like that, I would be restrained — not like that wasn’t going to happen anyway.”
This article is adapted from a statement I wrote to document my experience attempting to travel to New York 2 years ago as a 20 year old visible Muslim.
Part 1 — The Interrogation
I often think about the high before this experience. My friend Arefin and I, had just experienced the most exhilarating Icelandic adventure; blue lagoons, pure air and scenic views fit for Instagram. And we still had long to go. Part 2 of our adventure involved a tour of New York as well as a much-awaited reunion with my cousins and uncle, who lived across the pond.
Arefin and I were on an Iceland Air flight to New York, thousands of miles away from home. We were excited at the prospect of having complementary on-air Wi-Fi. I even started cracking jokes from my Twitter account, sharing the window view from my plane; such was the enjoyment of our travels until then.
As the flight descended unto JFK, like the plane, I was grounded back into reality. Naturally, I anticipated something would happen — this was America after all. And I’m a visibly Muslim brown bearded man. However, I did not expect the situation to be anything like what had followed. My brother was stopped recently, so the probability of it happening to me was high. I knew this. Despite that, I very naively went along with my journey. A naivety I realise now, a lot of us have — the feeling of blissful unawareness. Sure Islamophobia exists on a macro level, but being brought up in a culturally diverse area meant that the closest experiences in my vicinity were the odd Islamophobic abuse hurled by drunk people late at night.
So there I was, in the immigration line still in high spirits and somewhat prepared for what I assumed would be a ‘little bit’ of routinely interrogation as warned by my brother. My turn in line arrived, and I was met with a white chubby officer. He took my passport and started flicking through it abruptly. He asked me how long I was staying; I stumbled for a few seconds, forgetting whether it was Sunday or Monday. The immigration officer snapped back rudely,
“This is supposed to be the easy bit”
My Islamophobia radar was tingling. I answered some more preliminary questions about my trip and the officer got up from his station and demanded that I come along with him. As I followed him, I saw that Arefin had passed immigration. A brief glance in each other’s direction, and I was somewhat relieved that at least he knew where I was.
I was taken into a dull room littered with plastic bolt-down chairs, surrounded by smaller interrogation cubicles with the appearance of a dental practice, but more sinister and foreboding. The rows of chairs pointed towards an elevated platform, on which there is the officer’s desk, looming over the suspect in question. In this sense, the stage was quite literally set for my impending interrogation. I figured the whole thing was purposely designed so that when you are called to the front for questioning, you are forced to look up. “Could be some psychological way to exert power over you during questioning”, I thought.
Meanwhile, the immigration officer that escorted me put my passport in a brown envelope and pushed it through to the queue for inspection. After approximately 30 minutes, I was called to the front and asked the same questions as the previous officer had done, with a few more related to the purpose of my visit. I was planning to stay most days with Arefin’s family in New York, so I gave them that address. Consequently, I was asked more about them. Because I knew nothing about them, Arefin was called in for further probing. He made it through passport control and was waiting for me outside but one of the officers was dispatched to collect him. I was glad we were together again. We both sat back down after answering the first line of questions.
After having experienced quarantine for the past few months, I am sure many of you will be able to empathise the blurriness that comes when you’re cooped up in a room for prolonged amounts of time.
This is why I can’t quite tell you exactly how much time passed between each event during the rounds interrogations. Yet, at least 5 hours went by before the next set of events unfolded. They made us wait for another undefined period of time, until the officers made me open my luggage and inspected everything thoroughly. They ripped open the presents I had gotten my family and left them in tatters.
“Where do you work?”, The officer asks while tearing up the wrapping paper of my nieces’ presents.
I tell him the name, it’s a renowned American bank. He recognises it.
“That must’ve been hard to get into, no?” He says as he inspects the dresses my mum got my nieces.
I told him the usual stuff; the application process, what I do, and responded to his inquisition as if he were a prying aunty at a family wedding.
Subsequently, I was patted down for the first time. I put my hands against the wall, whilst the officer tapped me down with his gloved hands. The sickening smell of human faeces burned my nostrils when the gloves cast over me. I tried not to react. And even when his hands tapped over my crotch, I remained silent, just like I was told to “not react”.
After being made to sit for an undefined period of time, I was told to hand in my phone so that a “media check” could be carried out. They asked for my passcode; I had complied because I believed I had no other choice. I also felt like I had nothing to hide, I’m not a criminal so why should I not comply? However, as my unlocked phone was taken by the officer out of sight and they scoured through my private life, I felt very conscious of my privacy being violated.
It felt like a digital strip search.
Arefin and I sat together in those sinister dental chairs; we were called up to the front of the stage every once in a while. I tried not to let myself think about what was actually happening, instead striking up casual conversations with Arefin. We’re not criminals, right? There’s nothing to hide. It was with this fact I held on to remain sane in the face of what was actually happening. I know if I did take it seriously, I would let my anger from all these consecutive violations get to me, and I absolutely could not afford to let that happen.
“Friends travel together and go out, but we’re getting interrogated together; that’s a different bond,” I joked.
There was a picture of Trump in the room, which I used to stare at from time to time. This was his America, and even as visitors from the UK, I foolishly thought that my red passport granted me a form of immunity from these situation. Yet it did not do so. Before being British, before being a traveller just looking to enjoy my holiday, they saw me as a threat. A suspect. A “Muslim”.
I was asked very stupid questions further along the line; I understand Americans don’t understand the nuance of our conversations, but man they were obtuse. For example, they found Twitter DM conversations I had with some users. Side note — a few people have reached out to me in the past when they have struggled with mental health issues, so it was mostly conversations of me advising them as a means of help. I was asked why they come to me specifically
“Are you some sort of mental health advocate?”
I laughed and explained to them that I use my Twitter platform openly so that people know that if they need help, I am there to assist them. They found a conversation I had had with a person that was depressed. He had messaged me about feeling low and picked out a specific message that said: “Akhi, I’m losing the plot.” They tried to infer that in this country, plot means planning. “So what is he planning?” I had to explain it was a common expression which meant that they’re going crazy.
I was asked about mosques and which mosques I go to, which I found to be an odd question, as if my choice of mosque was a cult, a terror group, an insidious ideological preference. He tried drilling into specific names, so I gave him names of local mosques that were near to me, which he noted down.
At around 11pm the chief officer dealing with me finally apologised for the wait and claimed that, after some “further checks”, we could leave. He then took me to an interrogation room for a final interview. It was about Egypt, the country I holidayed in last year. Why did I go? Who did I go with? I explained that it was a family holiday. They then asked me regarding a specific “Egyptian contact” on my phone. A name I didn’t even recognise. My iPhone routinely imported a bunch of contacts from my old phones. The first iPhone I had inherited from my dad; naturally there were a few numbers in there that belonged to him, had been backed up to the phone and passed along the years. They showed me the country code, it was an 0207 number. I explained that this could not be Egyptian, but it was as if I was clutching at straws again.
In the middle of the interrogation, the officer stepped out to receive a phone call. I could see from the glass, that the officer seemed frustrated. He let me out of the interrogation room back into the dentist’s office. The room was deserted now. It was at that point that I was told I would be sent back to the UK, as my ESTA has been rejected. I would need to go to the US Embassy in the UK for a Visa. The anger and frustration was at boiling point but I remained composed and asked them why this was the case.
“It’s above my pay grade,” the officer replied.
I didn’t let it go. I remained firm and continuously asked him why this was happening, what was the reason and what was the call. He claimed he did not know and could not answer. After tiring out other questions, I asked him to guess and he said sometimes the refusal of entry depends on factors like the picture, face, name or even “mood” of the individual. Yes, you heard that correctly, someone has the power to deport you straight back to the country you came from based on arbitrary discriminatory factors like these. I couldn’t believe what he had just said; we usually speculate these things, but never had I heard it so clearly from the horse’s mouth like this before.
This news finally got to me. My composure cracked a little as I dropped my coat onto the chair and sat with a visible expression of mild frustration. The officer responded firmly that if I showed any more acts of “aggressions” like that, I would be restrained — not like that wasn’t going to happen anyway.
