> The obvious answer is to fly home, not to enter the country, and not to let an untrained and clueless individual remove it. Why didn’t he do that?

We don't know given the lack of details in OP, but a few possibilities come to mind:

- Time-sensitivity to attend a meeting, deliver knowledge, deliver goods, etc.

- Fleeing country of origin to seek asylum

- Relatively extraordinary expense of plane ticket and lack of means to purchase another

This is a remarkably unempathetic response.

That would at the very least incur costs for new flights. Airlines may charge you for the return, too. It may cause future immigration trouble. Some travel is time sensitive.

After all that, if the trip is more than a couple of days, you have to pay American healthcare rates to get a new one put in so the hole doesn’t close up. That could be $20-30k given it required general anesthesia.

That's what I would have done, but I can understand the reticence. Being denied entry -- especially due to security concerns -- can turn into a Big Deal with lots of downstream effects.

Good luck trying to enter the USA again after being denied entry for something like this.

I think that would have counted as a deportation or similar and he would have had worse problems the next time he visited.

The obvious answer is because he had something extremely urgent to do in the country.