I was turned back at the US border after a 12-hour interrogation
Last Thursday, I departed Melbourne on QF93 for a two-week holiday in New York. I never made it.
After landing at LAX, I disembarked with everyone else and made my way towards the famously long passport queue. I was eager to get through, collect my bags, and board the second leg of my journey. But as soon as I stepped into the snaking line, a voice came over the loudspeaker, calling me out by name. They had been waiting for me. 'Alistair Kitchen, please report to the officer at the back of the arrival hall.'
I turned back and was met by a Customers and Border Protection Officer I found disquietingly polite. He asked me to follow him, and we walked together past that long line, down a special queue where my passport was quickly scanned, and then into a room some passengers will know as 'secondary processing'.
The officer, who I later learned was Officer Adam Martinez, asked for my phone. He asked if I wanted to use the water fountain, as Americans call it, and if I wanted to use the bathroom. Over the course of the two interrogations that were to come, and in my 12 hours of detention, I was asked many times if I wanted to use the bathroom, as if the customs officers had been taught that availability of a toilet would make up what they were about to do. Then he asked for my phone, and told me I would be immediately deported if I did not give him my passcode. I made the mistake of complying.
I may have been visiting only for a short holiday on this occasion, but I know the US well – I lived there for six years, studying and working. Last year I moved back home, to Castlemaine, in regional Victoria, but for the years 2022 to 2024 I was studying a master of fine arts in nonfiction writing at Columbia University. In April 2024, months into the Israeli war on Gaza, students at Columbia began to protest the university's investment in Israel. Columbia is famously the 'activist Ivy', and proudly advertises its history of student protest, such as the 1968 occupation of university buildings to protest the war in Vietnam, and the fight against apartheid in South Africa.
One day, I stepped onto campus to discover that students had erected tents on the lawn. At that moment, they began a protest movement that rapidly swept around the world, including to the lawns of universities here in Australia. I began to write down what I saw.
Over the days and weeks that followed I posted reports to my Substack, Kitchen Counter. I wrote plainly about what I observed: from Jewish and Muslim students holding hands, singing together for peace, to faculty mounting their own protests opposing university administration. In the end, it was how militarised police used siege vehicles to storm the campus. All of this I watched with my own eyes, and reported as a witness, and a journalist.
I wrote, too, about my best guesses for why the university, and the NYPD, were making choices disproportionate in their fierce violence to the peaceful behaviour of the students. I wrote against the swirl of misinformation that rose rapidly, driven from powers a long way from campus. Because the university went into lockdown, professional media were not on the ground. I realised then that my first-person accounts were as important for describing what I saw as they were for describing what I did not see. And what I did not see, in my time observing the protests, were instances of antisemitism from Columbia student protesters.
That was why I was detained at LAX. I didn't need to guess the reason – Officer Martinez had told me. As he sat down for the first interrogation, he said, 'We both know why you're here.' I was there because of what I 'wrote online about the protests at Columbia'.
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