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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Did you read the text of the article? He vehemently denies that he was going to work at his relative's gas station.

One line of questioning focused on an officer’s accusation that Dakhil was planning to work at a gas station owned by his cousin — which Dakhil denied.

“They totally changed this scenario,” he said, rebutting several remarks and descriptions reported by the officers. “They only disclosed what they wanted to disclose,” he said. “They want to justify their decision, so they mentioned working in a gas station by themselves,” he claimed.

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Read the report of the officers, Techcrunch intentionally put it at the end of the article to bury it, but there are two sides to this story and the report is quite plausible:

"[] stated that he was not sure how much he would get paid or how many hours per day he will work. [] stated that by working at one of the gas stations, this would free [] of the responsibility and allow [] to work at a different gas station."

There's a lot of detail in that statement that lends credibility over what Dakhil says.

Your priors are wrong. You should assume CBP is lying until definitively proven otherwise.

It just lacks plausibility. Ismail Ajjawi doesn't come across as illiterate, and certainly would have been aware of seeking work on a student visa being grounds for denial of entry. Besides being general knowledge, it would have come up several times during his visa application process.

Here[1] a NZ journalist, who tried to come for work on ESTA visa waiver shares the horrors of CBP nazis not understanding that it's hard to get J-1 visa and denying entry. This proves that being literate is not enough to understand requirements of various visas.

[1] https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...

Yes because without any corroboration we should trust people just because they passed a job entrance test. There is nothing that makes CBP any less likely to have all the human flaws of everyone else. Why isn't there video that could be shown to show actual evidence that they claim? They control every part of the entrance process but somehow never seem to have any evidence of anything. I can tell you that this isn't all that much detail to fabricate nor is it something that probably isn't boilerplate for them for certain violations that they want to claim. Police reports are wildly similar based on the type of violation that's claimed because they know the specific words that need to be said for legal reasons whether or not those events happened. It's why you get cases where the only crime is resisting arrest. In what world is not wanting to be arrested for no reason a crime?

Right, and that's contradicted by the document, which says he told CBP a detailed story about how and why he was going to work there. Maybe CBP is lying, but I don't think it's fair to just assume they are.

It is more than fair as CBP makes inaccurate statements about what people say all the time even in easily verifiable cases (i.e. they have claimed that a three year old admitted entering the US to look for work). See:

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/11/border-patrol-asylum-cla...

Why not? The presumption for US citizens is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. There's literally no evidence presented to support the CBP. There's no rules defined publicly, so it's literally secret police type rules that they can make up on the spot from public perception.

Edit: I'm aware of the fact that this isn't a US citizen, however there's no standards to define what the rules are and absolutely zero ability for accountability to the people that they are supposed to be protecting.

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