How to prepare for a US trip from somebody who was rejected at the border

Alistair Kitchen flew from Melbourne to New York to visit friends two weeks ago. During a stopover in Los Angeles, the 33-year-old writer was pulled from the customs line, detained for around 12 hours by border agents, and questioned about his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Kitchen was a student at Columbia University in New York last year, where he covered pro-Palestinian rallies on his personal blog.

He realised something was wrong when he first got off the plane, he told RNZ’s Afternoons.

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“I stepped into that hall at LAX where they process your passport. And before I could even get in the queue, my name was called over the loudspeaker.

“And that by itself is pretty strange when you're in a crowd of a thousand people. And I was pulled into the backroom and my phone was demanded and my passcode was demanded.

“And I realised at that moment that this wasn't random or ad hoc, but they had been waiting for me.”

Border agents told him, he says, the reason he was being questioned was because of posts he wrote about the protests at Columbia University which he says would be considered mainstream views in Australia or New Zealand.

He had taken those posts down days before he boarded the plane, he says.

Even though he felt he had prepared sufficiently prior to the flight, in hindsight, he says, he was never going to be let in the country.

“I prepared for a situation which I think most travellers in Australia and New Zealand are right to prepare for, which is you go through the passport control, and you do make sure that your social media has been cleaned up, that your phone is missing messages that might have been critical of Donald Trump, for example.

“I think that's prudent and wise. In my case, it was not sufficient, exactly because they had already done this background search on me. Because they had already done that work, in my view, I was never going to get through.”

When he was taken into detention, he says he was told that if he did not hand over his passcode and phone, he would be immediately deported.

“Obviously, I hesitated and declined to give them my passcode when they first asked for it.

“They then said, that's fine, we'll deport you right now. And I made the mistake at that moment of complying. And I did that because I still had hope.

“I still had the sense that, hey, I write a blog that no one reads. Surely these are reasonable people. Surely, they'll see that I don't pose a threat to anyone.”

The Department of Homeland Security has denied Kitchen was deported over his political views.

“The individual in question was denied entry because he gave false information on his ESTA application regarding drug use", it said in a statement.

Kitchen says they downloaded the contents of his phone and after “grilling” him on his views on Israel-Palestine they said they’d found evidence on his phone he’d misrepresented himself to them about drug use on his ETSA form and would have to send him home.

“What happened in that moment is that I, 15 hours off a flight from Melbourne, started imagining all manner of evidence on my phone that I now know does not exist.”

He admitted he had done drugs before.

“Among other things, I bought weed in New York, which is legal in the state, but illegal federally. Having admitted to it, they had even more grounds to deport me.

“That's not something I'm disputing. What is clear is that I was only selected at the beginning because of my political speech. And I know that because they told me.”

He advises people travelling to the US take a basic burner phone.

“Buy a second phone, text your mum on it, take a bunch of pictures, but have only content on it that you can absolutely account for.”

He did a “cursory and superficial” cleanup of his phone which “turned out to be totally insufficient".