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HOW MY REPORTING ON THE COLUMBIA PROTESTS LED TO MY DEPORTATION  
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Alistair Kitchen
June 19, 2025
The New Yorker
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_ As an Australian who wrote about the demonstrations while on
campus, I gave my phone a superficial clean before flying to the U.S.
I underestimated what I was up against. _

Illustration by Anuj Shrestha // The New Yorker,

 

Many people are detained at U.S. airports for reasons they find
arbitrary and mysterious. I got lucky—when I was stopped by Customs
and Border Protection last week, after flying to Los Angeles from
Melbourne, a border agent told me, explicitly and proudly, why I’d
been pulled out of the customs line. “Look, we both know why you are
here,” the agent told me. He identified himself to me as Adam,
though his colleagues referred to him as Officer Martinez. When I said
that I didn’t, he looked surprised. “It’s because of what you
wrote online about the protests at Columbia University,” he said.

They were waiting for me when I got off the plane. Officer Martinez
intercepted me before I entered primary processing and took me
immediately into an interrogation room in the back, where he took my
phone and demanded my passcode. When I refused, I was told I would be
immediately sent back home if I did not comply. I should have taken
that deal and opted for the quick deportation. But in that moment,
dazed from my fourteen-hour flight, I believed C.B.P. would let me
into the U.S. once they realized they were dealing with a middling
writer from regional Australia. So I complied.

Then began the first “interview.” The questions focussed almost
entirely on my reporting about the Columbia student protests. From
2022 to 2024, I attended Columbia for an M.F.A. program, on a student
visa, and when the encampment began in April of last year I began
publishing daily missives to my Substack
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(except, apparently, the U.S. government) seemed to read. To Officer
Martinez, the pieces were highly concerning. He asked me what I
thought about “it all,” meaning the conflict on campus, as well as
the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He asked my opinion of Israel,
of Hamas, of the student protesters. He asked if I was friends with
any Jews. He asked for my views on a one- versus a two-state solution.
He asked who was at fault: Israel or Palestine. He asked what Israel
should do differently. (The Department of Homeland Security, which
governs the C.B.P., claims that any allegations that I’d been
arrested for political beliefs are false.)

Then he asked me to name students involved in the protests. He asked
which WhatsApp groups, of student protesters, I was a member of. He
asked who fed me “the information” about the protests. He asked me
to give up the identities of people I “worked with.”

Unfortunately for Officer Martinez, I didn’t work with anyone. I
participated in the protests as an independent student journalist who
one day stumbled upon tents on the lawn. My writing, all of which is
now publicly available, was certainly sympathetic to the protesters
and their demands, but it comprised an accurate and honest
documentation of the events at Columbia. That, of course, was the
problem.

This past February, I booked a trip from Melbourne to New York, with a
layover in Los Angeles, so that I could visit some friends for a
couple of weeks. In that time, stories of tourists being detained in
and denied entry from the U.S. had begun to regularly appear in
Australian media. I began to think about what precautions I should
take when crossing the U.S. border. I opted against taking a burner
phone—a move that some legal experts had advised, in the
press—believing it would provoke suspicion, and simply decided to
give my phone and social media a superficial clean.

I designed my strategy around the understanding I had developed, after
living in the United States for five years and travelling between the
States and Australia time and time again, that C.B.P. was
fundamentally unsophisticated and ad hoc in its methods, and that I
would have to get extremely unlucky to be searched at all. I
understood that, if I encountered any difficulty, it would be because
the primary-processing officer at the end of that long line at LAX
would notice that I had been a Columbia student, and ask to see my
phone. If he searched through it, he would encounter the messy and
personal digital life of a worryingly single thirty-three-year-old
man. But he would not find photographs from protests, Signal
conversations, or my Substack posts, which I took down in the week
leading up to my flight.

But C.B.P. had prepared for me well before my arrival. They did not
need to identify me at LAX as someone worthy of investigation: they
had evidently decided that weeks before. My _ESTA_ application—the
system by which many tourists become eligible to visit the U.S. under
the visa waiver program—must have triggered something on their end.
Perhaps C.B.P. now has the technological dexterity to check the web
history of every _ESTA_ applicant. Or, perhaps, I was named in a
list
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by the far-right pro-Israel organization Betar US, to representatives
of the Trump Administration—of visa holders whom it hoped to see
deported. In either case, a U.S. government officer must have read my
work and decided that I was not fit to enter the country. Because
Officer Martinez had apparently read all of my material so long ago,
he didn’t even know that I had taken all this
material _down._ What this means is that, by the time a foreigner
cleans his social media in preparation for a trip to the U.S., as much
of our news media has been urging us to do, it may already be too
late.

For me, this mistake was a disaster. Because I’d designed my
strategy around passing the standard passport line, I was totally
ill-equipped for what happened in the interrogation room. Though I did
not know it then, I was participating in an interview that I was never
going to pass. It didn’t matter that my views on Israel-Palestine
seemed to disappoint Officer Martinez in their lack of
divisiveness—I told him it is a conflict in which everyone has blood
on their hands, but which can and should be brought to an immediate
end by the dominant power. He asked if other Australians feel the
same, and I told him that yes, most do. This seemed only to perturb
him. When he ran out of questions about Israel, he disappeared into
the back room to begin downloading the contents of my phone.

He was gone for a long time. I imagined him, in his office, using some
new software to surface all the grimy details of my life. Though I’d
deleted a lot of material related to the protests from my device,
I’d kept plenty of personal content. Presumably Martinez was
skimming through all of this—the embarrassing, the shameful, the
sexual.

That fear was confirmed. Martinez came out and said that I needed to
unlock the Hidden folder in my photo album. I told him it would be
better for him if I did not. He insisted. I felt I had no choice. I
did have a choice, of course: the choice of noncompliance and
deportation. But by then my bravery had left me. I was afraid of this
man and of the power that he represented. So instead I unlocked the
folder and watched as he scrolled through all of my most personal
content in front of me. We looked at a photo of my penis together.

When he was done, he disappeared again into the other room. I sat
there, trying to understand why, despite my hard-won comfort with
myself, and with sexuality in general, I felt so violated. I am proud
of my life, of who I am. That didn’t seem to help. I realized then I
had no privacy left for them to invade.

This time, Martinez was gone for even longer. After fifteen or twenty
minutes, the person who had been left in the room to guard me, a
lumbersome, goateed man without a name badge, turned to me and said,
“God, dude, what do you have on your phone? This normally takes five
minutes.”

This is when I truly knew I was fucked—not because the guard was
telling the truth but because I sensed he was not. My feeling then was
that he was playing his own part, a part designed to mount pressure,
to intimidate.

When Martinez finally came out, he was bouncing toward me excitedly,
like a kid with a lollipop. He said that they had found evidence of
drug use on my phone. Did I realize that I had failed to acknowledge a
history of drug use on my _ESTA_?

I moved, in seconds, from a desire to be amiable to a desire not to be
found lying. In the gray zone between the arrival gate and passport
control you are beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution. You have
fewer protections than a criminal metres away, inside the border.
People with legal standing are much harder, it turns out, to abuse. In
the C.B.P. interrogation room, I had not quite fallen to the level of
statelessness, but I had fallen below the criminal.

Were I not fatigued from a long flight and from a long interrogation,
and were I not stressed and scared, I would have recalled that my
phone does _not_ have clear evidence of drug use. A better version
of me, the version I like to think I am, would have called bullshit on
this bluff. But at that moment I could not account for every single
one of the four thousand-odd photos on my phone. I imagined
photographs that do not exist, messages that do not exist, proving
that I was some sort of drug kingpin. So I admitted that I had done
drugs in the past—in other countries as well as in the U.S., where I
had bought THC gummies at a dispensary in New York.

Marijuana is legal in New York, but it is not legal federally, and so
it seems that, in the eyes of C.B.P., I had broken federal law for
purchasing legal weed in New York, and then perhaps again by failing
to declare it on my _ESTA_. Martinez, who seemed now to be bubbling
over with excitement, went back to his supervisor to, in his words,
“pitch this.” When he came back, he told me I would be put on the
next flight back to Australia.

Martinez and another officer took me in the back, pushed me against
the wall and patted me down. Martinez made sure that I carried no
weaponry between my penis and my scrotum. They took the shoelaces out
of my shoes and the string out of my elastic pants, presumably so that
I would not be able to hang myself. This struck me as overly cautious,
but as I entered the detention room I changed my mind. We were so deep
in the building, and so clearly underground, that the very notion of a
window started to feel like something from a half-remembered dream.
Three months ago, a Canadian woman was disappeared into the system for
nearly two weeks. I did not know then whether I would be out in one
hour, one day, or one month. When I was brought into the room, I
encountered a young woman, in tears, begging the guard for
information. He told her he had no information to give her and that
none would be forthcoming. “_That_ woman,” he said, pointing to a
bundle of blankets in the corner, “has been here for four days.”

After that I started to spiral. We detainees were banned from talking
to one another. There wasn’t anyone I could communicate with,
anyway—a barrier in the room separated the men from the women, and I
was the only man. There was food—cup noodles mostly—and a vending
machine with M&M’s and Coca-Cola that we could use “if we had
brought cash,” one of the guards told me. The room was so cold that
all of us were wrapped in C.B.P. blankets.

The bulbs buzzed and the air-conditioning hummed throughout the day,
or the night, or whenever it now was. I learned then that the
detention room is a place where time itself is detained, that the
clock behind the guard, who himself sits behind plexiglass, existed
mostly to taunt us. We worked hard not to look at that clock, because,
though the hands would move, we had no concept of what they were
moving toward. The horror of the thing was that no one knew where we
were, and we had no way of telling them. We were isolated from one
another and also from the world.

It was then, some hours after first being detained, that I realized
C.B.P. must be governed by _some_ internal procedure regarding the
distribution of information, and I approached the guard to ask if
there was any way I was allowed to get word of my detainment to the
outside world.

“You can call your consulate,” he said.

I exercised that right immediately. He dialled the number, and I stood
there at his desk, talking loudly so that the others, who I doubted
had been informed about their right, could hear me. The woman at the
other end of the phone told me that in all likelihood I would be on a
plane that evening, about six hours from then, and that, if I knew the
number of any of my contacts by heart, she would notify them for me.
That’s how my mother found out.

About three hours later, after I passed out on a cot in the detention
pen, an officer shouted and woke me up. I was taken to another room
and subjected to a second interview, one I did not know was coming, in
which all the same questions of the first interview were repeated. I
lost my patience with this new guy, Officer Woo. “If you are already
going to deport me,” I asked him, “why should I answer any of your
questions?”

He seemed shocked at that. “We haven’t decided if we are going to
deport you yet,” he said. Then he paused. “But looking at your
file . . . I can see why the other officer told you you were going
home.”

This second interview had a “Groundhog Day” quality to it, except
I was glad for the repetition. We encountered errors in Martinez’s
notes. At one point, when I told Woo that the demonstrations at
Columbia were “pro-peace” protests, he looked at me with real
surprise. “I thought they were pro-Hamas protests?” he asked,
quite genuinely. I was stunned by the innocence he brought to a
question I found violently absurd. He couldn’t seem to bear the look
I gave him then, a look somewhere between horror, exasperation, and
fury, and, in embarrassment, he started to laugh.

Iwas put on a plane, eventually. It was indeed the next Qantas flight
out, QF94 at 9:50 _P.M._ on June 12th, roughly twenty-seven hours
since I’d first left Melbourne and twelve hours since I’d arrived
at LAX. Two heavily armed C.B.P. guards led me out of the detention
room and marched me through the bowels of the airport, and then,
suddenly, into the bright lights of the duty-free shops, and then
finally toward the gate, where, as I stood with guards at the head of
the queue, I watched my compatriots board one by one. This gate at LAX
is famous to the many Australians who have passed through it on their
way home. The armed-guard act from C.B.P. was, I think, supposed to be
a kind of shaming, but I felt such a surge of love and respect for my
own people that I began to smile and joke with passengers as they
passed. The guards did not like this.

When the plane was loaded, I was finally allowed on. The lead guard,
Officer Liu, handed an envelope with my passport and phone to the head
flight attendant, who, seeing at once what was happening, began to
treat me with conspicuous warmth, and the guards, uncomfortable in
their contrast, quietly disappeared.

Qantas itself no longer reflects the warmth of its staff—presumably
at the request of C.B.P., the airline withheld my phone and passport
from me until we landed in Melbourne. In this respect the airline is,
in my view, carrying water for the Trump Administration. (Qantas did
not respond to a request for comment.) Because I did not have my
phone, no one—not me nor the consulate—had informed anyone in
Australia that I was on that plane, and I landed back in my home
country believing that I would have to make my own way to my house in
the bush, nearly two hours from Melbourne.

Every year scores of Australians and thousands of others are denied
entry to the United States. C.B.P. has full discretion, after all.
There is nothing new about the U.S. ferociously, arbitrarily, and
cruelly deploying that discretion in order to keep out people the
government does not like. What _is_ new is the politically motivated
deployment of that power to exclude speech that the government does
not want to hear.

When Mahmoud Khalil
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detained, I wrote on my blog that the U.S. had pivoted to a new
tactic, one I called “_the deportation of dissent_
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Then it happened to me. C.B.P. ostensibly marked me for denial of
entry before I arrived. Its officers told me explicitly why I had been
marked. Then it used the powers at its disposal to make sure I did not
enter the country.

I do not yet know if I will be allowed back, or if I have been banned,
as can happen to travellers accused of misrepresenting their
experience with drugs. But I fear that writing about this, and
speaking to the media, as I have done, will trigger further reprisals
from the U.S. government. I’m afraid that I will be banned for good,
if I haven’t been already, or that the information on my phone,
which I handed over to them, will be used against me. But I was
targeted for writing honestly about what was in front of me—the same
thing I’m doing now. That is worth its price. 

_[ALISTAIR KITCHEN is a writer living in Victoria, Australia.]_

* Deportation
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* police state
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* pro-Palestine protests
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* Student protests
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* Columbia protests
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* Palestine
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* Israel
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* Gaza
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Oct. 7
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* Palestine solidarity
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* Customs and Border Protection
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* CBP
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* Stephen Miller
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* Donald Trump
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* Trump 2.0
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* Civil Liberties
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* McCarthyism
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