I, Visa: Why is U.S. immigration terrorizing British reporters?

[KamaAina]

http://slate.msn.com/id/2100403/

Last week a British reporter was detained by immigration officials and then expelled from the United States for traveling here without knowing that the visa rules had changed. More precisely, she didn't know that a decades-old unenforced rule was suddenly being enforced against friendly tourists long accustomed to entering the country without a visa at all. Elena Lappin, a freelance journalist from the United Kingdom (who has written for Slate), was stopped at Los Angeles International Airport, subjected to a body search, handcuffed, frog-marched through the airport, and then held in a cell at a detention center overnight—all because she dared travel to the United States without a special journalist visa. There has been a rule on the books since 1952 requiring foreign journalists to obtain special "I visas," but foreign journalists say it was invariably ignored by Immigration and Naturalization Service officials who required only that citizens of friendly countries apply for a visa waiver, an exemption allowing most residents of 27 enumerated countries to visit the United States for business or pleasure for up to 90 days without jumping through any INS hoops.

No more. When the INS was folded into the Department of Homeland Security in March 2003, the I-visa rule began to be enforced in earnest, sometimes, resulting in at least 15 journalists from friendly countries being forcibly detained, interrogated, fingerprinted, and held in cells overnight—with most denied access to phones, pens, lawyers, or their consular officials. Their friendly welcome at the detention center included lights that shone all night long and video surveillance of the entire cell, often including toilets. David James Smith of the Times of London described being denied a blanket, coffee, or a pen during his overnight detention last March. When he first learned he was being denied entry on an immigration technicality, he madly assumed he'd be put up in an airport hotel.

These reporters are not enemy combatants. They are not chroniclers of scathing injustices of the Bush administration. One Australian reporter was here to interview Olivia Newton-John. (God knows, someone has to.) She reported being "body searched and groped" by immigration and customs officials. Ten French and British journalists were here to report on last summer's Electronic Entertainment Expo, the video-game industry's annual trade show. Unless Super Mario Brothers are secretly accumulating weapons of mass destruction, this mistreatment of journalists from allied countries serves as yet another example of overzealous, unbridled discretionary excesses by government officials who still can't figure out who we're fighting in the War on Terror.

Let me guess -- they made a tape of the body search and groping of the woman who was here to interview Olivia Newton-John, and set it to "Let's Get Physical":

Let's get physical, physical,
Let's get physical,
Let's get into physical,
Let me hear your body talk, your body talk,
Let me hear your body talk...

Then again, think of the clear and present danger that self-confessed Canadian Lithwick poses to our way of life: She covers Our Great Supreme Court for Slate!!

Maybe these journalists should have told the :dunce: s at Immigration that they were applying to flight school...
</sarcasm>

[pacifictiger]

1. English journalists have the nerve to actually

ask intelligent questions. Might disrupt the cart full of rotten apples.

[struggle4progress]

2. And they don't report to local corporate media masters

[Jack Rabbit]

3. Maybe they should have carried Saudi passports

That's one way to get through airport security.

[XanaDUer]

4. Another article about this disturbing incident...

British journalist without press visa treated like criminal on arrival in Los Angeles

13 journalists were turned back for same reason in 2003

"Subjected to a body search, handcuffed and locked up... this journalist was treated like a criminal," Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard protested in the letter.

Ménard pointed out that 12 other journalists were arrested and treated in the same fashion by immigration officials at Los Angeles airport in 2003, and then expelled, whereas only one such case was reported at any other US airport. "Los Angeles immigration officials should urgently be instructed that such methods must stop," Ménard said.


British journalist without press visa treated like criminal on arrival in Los Angeles
13 journalists were turned back for same reason in 2003

"Subjected to a body search, handcuffed and locked up... this journalist was treated like a criminal," Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard protested in the letter.


http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=10296