Given the recent changes to American policy I know people with American passports who are worried they can't even go back into the United States.
I was harassed and detained every single time I went back. Always something different, never anything to actually do with who I actually am or anything I actually did or didn't do.
I was routinely detained at passport control because there was a bad guy with my same name. It took some amount of time and being very polite to get me out of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List#False_positives
> Numerous children (including many under the age of five, and some under the age of one) have generated false positives.
And at least on one occasion, a sitting US Senator: https://www.theregister.com/2004/08/19/senator_on_terror_wat...
https://halifax.citynews.ca/2025/08/06/immigration-lawyers-s...
I have seriously never had a positive interaction with the US border force. Wether it's the TSA or another associated organisation (since I've been pestered by people who are not TSA).
I've been detained, questioned, randomly selected, given contradictory rules by different people, had things randomly confiscated and even been insulted.
I'm not confrontational, and I don't believe I stand out.
I have had exactly ONE positive interaction (in 2011) whereby I had accidentally travelled with a pocket knife in my checked luggage and due to the fact I was not allowed to check my luggage on the return journey (due to the train being delayed going into Newark; seriously, I understand why Americans distrust public transport) - I told the TSA agent about it and he was kind regarding it, offering condolences, but obviously destroying the knife.
I'm not sure if I'm on some kind of easing program to disincentivise me in particular from visiting the US, but I could easily see that if I was anything other than what I am in terms of race/religion/looks/citizenship: that I would presume that this was the reason.
And, for context, I've been to the US on average twice per year in the last 15 years, so this is my experience from around 30 trips, and 60-ish interactions with the international air apparatus.
It's a pretty decent country once I'm in though, though I wouldn't want to live there.
EDIT: I'm not sure why the parent is being downvoted, his anecdote is the same as mine.
Unless they're taking liberties with your wife and children or something.
Every other interaction, I can't imagine being worse. Rude, tense, confusing, authoritarian with arbitrary detainment - with no acknowledgement of time or empathy for your own obligations (to board the plane for example); and heaven help you if you express your frustration.
https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/i...
"Yet in these suits, innocent women — including minor girls — who were not found with any contraband say CBP officers subjected them to harsh interrogation that led to indignities that included unreasonable strip searches while menstruating to prohibited genital probing. Some women were also handcuffed and transported to hospitals where, against their will, they underwent pelvic exams, X-rays and in one case, drugging via IV, according to suits. Invasive medical procedures require a detainee’s consent or a warrant. In two cases, women were billed for procedures."
Oh, I can help you with that!
> Arar was detained during a layover at John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunis.[1] He was held without charges in solitary confinement in the United States for nearly two weeks, questioned, and denied meaningful access to a lawyer.[1][2] The US government suspected him of being a member of Al Qaeda and deported him, not to Canada, his current home and the passport on which he was travelling, but to Syria.[3][4] He was detained in Syria for almost a year, during which time he was tortured by Syrian authorities, according to the findings of a commission of inquiry ordered by the Canadian government, until his release to Canada. The Syrian government later stated that Arar was "completely innocent."[5][6] A Canadian commission publicly cleared Arar of any links to terrorism, and the government of Canada later settled out of court with Arar. He received C$10.5 million and Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized to Arar for Canada's role in his "terrible ordeal."[7][8] Arar's story is frequently referred to as "extraordinary rendition" but the US government insisted it was a case of deportation.[14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar
Hopefully, given that little intuition pump, you can also imagine that he could have died from the torture instead of ever returning home.
The trick is to pay to not interact. Global Entry, TSA PreCheck with Digital ID, et cetera.
And for the record, I'm dark-eyed and brown skinned. There are absolutely racists in the Trump administration. But they don't seem to have co-opted this element yet. Instead, it just presents the classic American preference for wealth.
(Note: I'm not endorsing the system. TSA PreCheck makes sense; the fee for it does not. Same for Global Entry.)
Global entry is a real difference, but you need to travel internationally quite a bit to make the application/renewal process worth it (conditional approval backlog is 12-24 months now, although it seems you skip to the front just in time to do interview-on-arrival on your next trip).
Yes. I'm not endorsing the system. Just stating why folks on HN might be having wildly different experiences.
Broadly speaking, if you have to interact with border control or airport security, you're going to have a bad time. The stupid, lazy and mean are overrepresented in their ranks. You may have a slightly-worse time with particularly physical affects. But I've absolutely watched my British-accented white friend from Atlanta get singled out every time for fuckery by their TSA.
If, on the other hand, you get the unequal wealth treatment, you won't see a disparity. Because there isn't one. You're rarely interacting with a human being.
One easy trick to world domination prison planet…
I'm not sure what I'm giving up by ceding fingerprints and a picture to a government agency that almost certainly already has both.
You seem to represent a rather is phenomenon in society though. For a lack of a better term at the moment; the shift or maybe even deliberate psychological manipulation of society, civilization, culture towards not only a passive, depressive state, but also a kind of self-harming, self-destructive, nihilistic state of “what does it even matter anymore” and “I probably deserve the abuse of my abusers” type of mentality. A variation of that is “I’m not sure what I’m giving up by ceding…” an odd fatalism.
I look stereotypical MENA and haven't faced any extra screening, and I travel a lot for work both domestically and abroad, and I'm too lazy to get Global Entry or TSA Pre so I'm dealing with general TSA.
Did your friend maybe travel to an Arab country at some point in time that either faced significant instability, a country that borders Syria+Iraq, or to the West Bank via Jordan?
SFO, SeaTac, JFK, OHare, and ATX, with a decent showing for Logan, DCA, and RTP.
I crossed the US-Canada land border with a non-US friend to go to a birthday party a while back; they sent us to secondary so my friend could get their passport stamped (their previous visa had run out). CBP took the opportunity to search our car and tried to convince us they found weed before letting us go (neither of us use it).
Another time my wife and I (both citizens) were crossing and the border agent gave us a hard time for having different last names.
I can't imagine what it's like for people with less privilege than I, but I'm already to the point where I stress about crossing the border. I bring a spare phone, wiped of anything interesting, I let my partners know when I'm at the crossing in case something happens; Paranoid? Possibly. But the potentiality of something going horribly wrong is through the roof, and there's increasingly little recourse. Yes, citizens especially should be insulated from this, but we're seeing egregious violations on so many fronts I don't want to trust that to hold.
And, yet, the CBP can cause you any number of headaches and subject you to intimidation and humiliation prior to your actually being waved through -- especially if they deem you "difficult".
Similar to lots of the other comments in this thread, I'm subjected to additional screenings every time I come back into the country. I'm a completely average middle-aged white guy and I have no idea why this happens. Is it because I'm anxious? I have a somewhat common name; perhaps they've confused me with someone else? Was it because I was at Schipol the same time as The Underwear Bomber or because I went to Turkey on vacation? I will (probably) never know why but it's so unpleasant that I've stopped leaving the country for fun (something I used to love) and has had a real, negative effect on my relationship with my spouse.
Some may be confused by reading that or even scoff at it, but it’s really not any different than any other kind of fraud by deception where, e.g., you think you have a certain amount of assets with Bernie Madoff that make you rich, but in reality it’s all just fake and does not actually exist at all.
It’s just that Americans haven’t realized that their country has being defrauded out from under them, much like how the EU just snuck in and went from standardizing trade to co-opting democratic self-determination and just swiping national sovereignty out from under the people of Europe because the ruling class said “no take backs” and that’s just how it’s going to be now.
Where did that happen?
People are not going to like hearing this, but everyone else who were merely made American citizens by process, has a bit of an increasingly minor risk of being denied entry if they or their first generation relative are deemed to have received their citizenship illicitly and or shown or even just accused of foreign ties, let alone any involvement of espionage or terrorism.
More likely is that even in cases of espionage and terrorism, the government would simply prefer permitting entry and then simply prosecuting people.
They can just say you aren't one, throw your passport in the bin and deport you to that prison in central America.
If you're lucky you'll have a family/lawyer that will notice you didn't get home and have the resources to get you back.
What counts as natural born is constantly subject to fuckery. (The Citizenshop Clause is all the Constitution has to say on citizenship, and it doesn’t directly address either naturalization or revocation.)It took Congress in 1924 to admit American Indians are born in America [1]. Meanwhile, we've created de facto exemptions on the positive side for e.g. John McCain [2] and Ted Cruz [3].
A future Congress (or potentially just the President, under Trump's precedents) could absolutely vote to strip citizenship from e.g. dual nationals or people who have travelled to this or that country.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act
[2] https://hls.harvard.edu/bibliography/why-john-mccain-was-a-c...
[3] https://hls.harvard.edu/bibliography/why-john-mccain-was-a-c...
But to at least offer you some salvation from the memes you hold, as much as I didn’t like him, McCain was clearly a natural citizen as a function of his jus sanguinis birth to a legitimate American father. That is not an exception.
Additionally, it was not “admitted that Indians are born in America” as much as Congress did a little bit of magic to sidestep the fact that “Indians” had what up until recently still were effectively sovereign nations, and in some ways they still are, but kind of more like legal black holes and loopholes that supersede American law that everyone else is suppressed to follow, i.e., super-Americans. They weren’t in fact born in America, because the various types of “Indian” territories were effectively not America, regardless of the stunted and dull, rudimentary grasp on history, politics, governance, and reality the average person has.
Ironically, objectively speaking, the recent full recognition of Indian theories as American land with full rights while giving up sooner of their freedom and independence is arguably the last act of actual “colonialism” in human history as a function of its connection to the past. But that kind of thing is totally lost to the general public that has the ignorance of a bull in a China shop, and the maladjusted confidence of a redditor.