An incoming Palestinian Harvard freshman was refused entry to the US and deported after immigration officers searched his cellphone and located Fb posts – from his mates – containing allegedly anti-US political statements.
Ismail Ajjawi was deemed “inadmissible” by US Customs and Border Safety and despatched again to Lebanon on Friday night time, after CBP officers at Boston’s Logan Worldwide Airport confronted him with Fb posts from his mates checklist containing “political factors of view that oppose the US.”
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An immigration official questioned the 17-year-old scholarship recipient for hours about his mates’ social media exercise, after ordering him to unlock his cellphone and laptop and spending 5 hours looking the units. Ajjawi’s protestations – “I’ve no single publish on my timeline discussing politics,” he informed the Harvard Crimson on Tuesday – reportedly fell on deaf ears because the agent “screamed” at him.
“She mentioned that she discovered individuals posting political factors of view that oppose the US on my good friend checklist,” Ajjawi mentioned. “I responded that I’ve no enterprise with [political] posts and that I didn’t like, share or touch upon them and informed her that I shouldn’t be held liable for what others publish.”
Nonetheless, the officer cancelled his visa and informed him he could be deported. He had been detained for eight hours – first questioned with a bunch of worldwide college students, then held for additional questioning about his spiritual practices whereas the others have been allowed to go away, and finally kicked in a foreign country over his mates’ Fb posts.
A CBP spokesperson (satirically named McCarthy) defined “candidates should reveal they’re admissible into the US by overcoming ALL grounds of inadmissibility together with health-related grounds, criminality, safety causes, public cost, labor certification, unlawful entrants and immigration violations, documentation necessities, and miscellaneous grounds” and claimed “data found in the course of the CBP inspection” had rendered Ajjawi “inadmissible” to the US.
“Thoughtcrime by mates on social media” would presumably fall below “miscellaneous.”
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This isn’t an remoted incident involving Harvard, which employs a workforce of immigration attorneys to resolve visa-related points. 4 Iranian graduate college students in 2017 spent weeks or months tied up in pink tape after President Donald Trump’s journey ban – an government order barring journey from seven international locations, together with a number of majority-Muslim ones – prevented them from attending faculty.
Ajjawi can also be receiving authorized help from AMIDEAST, the group which awarded him the scholarship to attend Harvard within the first place. He nonetheless hopes to attend Harvard, and college spokesperson Jonathan Swain mentioned the varsity is “working intently with the scholar’s household and acceptable authorities to resolve this matter in order that he can be part of his classmates within the coming days.”
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