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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

Why would a foreigner visit the US when you may be detained and treated like an animal at any time for the most trivial of reasons? Furthermore, why would you visit a country that's actively undermining others around the world? Why would you provide your financial support to that? It's the same reason Tesla sales have fallen off a cliff. You can only mistreat people so much before they push back.

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This at least reflects my feelings about visiting anytime soon.

I mean if I was just put on a flight back (for a tweet they found on my phone or such), that'd be kind of bearable. At least one visitor from the UK got locked up in a facility for a week.

> At least one visitor from the UK got locked up in a facility for a week.

If you're talking about Rebecca Burke, it was almost three weeks. All for something that was at worst a naive understanding of the visa she needed.

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/rebecca...

"Aussie MMA Coach’s Trip to America Goes Horribly Wrong as He Ends Up in Jail & Deported After Arriving in U.S." - https://www.essentiallysports.com/ufc-mma-news-aussie-mma-co...

His story is a bit suspicious to me, I believe that he was detained but I can't help wondering if the rest is fiction based on watching US prison dramas. He would not have been sent to a federal prison for one thing, and his depictions of violence are what I would expect from long-term convicted felons, not people being held for having the wrong visa.

The rest doesn’t matter.

No one wants to be detained.

People who are spending thousands and tens of thousands of dollars to travel are fine if they need to spend a few hundreds additional ro fly back and cancel their vacation. Or sucks but it’s in the realm of the risks you take with international travel.

However, being detained, even for 1 day, and treated like a criminal is something none of these folks want.

Willing to concede that. But he has thousands of followers and is well known in the MMA comunity. Would he throw all that away for a good story? Also there is an update: "Update on U.S. federal prison detention of MMA coach Renato Subotic who recently trained Merab Dvalishvili"

https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-update-u-s-federal-pris...

"UPDATE: I just spoke with coach Renato Subotic for a few minutes. He says he was detained at FDC Honolulu, which is a federal prison facility. He says he has no criminal record and it was a simple visa application issue. Interview later this week."

Interesting, I could be wrong then! The inclusion in his story of some very specific irrelevant details (like his cell/block number) while omitting anything that could be verified (like which border crossing and detention facility) was one of the things that raised my suspicion, but if he's sharing specifics now it raises my odds that he's telling the truth.

Yes, I have family in the USA, usually visiting them two or three times a year.

Not gonna happen this year, probably the next 3 years or more.

> Why would a foreigner visit the US when you may be detained and treated like an animal at any time for the most trivial of reasons? Furthermore, why would you visit a country that's actively undermining others around the world? Why would you provide your financial support to that?

Because it worked so well in the last years. /s

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