~flupps

In April this year I had a run-in with the US Customs and got turned around. I got permanently stripped of my rights as a EU citizen to enter the US under the VISA Waiver program. Here’s the short story about what happened. (Everything is fixed now, though, but took a lot of paperwork and months to fix)

After getting off my flight I walk down to the customs and immigration part of the Detroir airport, it’s been a really long day by now, I arrived at the airport hotel in Copenhagen around midnight, got some sleep and had to get up at 4:30AM to check in to my first flight of the day.
I had a layover in Amsterdam as well, which was quite a few hours, but I needed it to prepare for work the following week - needless to say, after standing in lines at the airport for about an hour, 90 minutes flight to Amsterdam, then another couple of lines and lining up for the US safety checks in Amsterdam and a long layover where I force myself to stay awake not to miss my flight; I’m quite tired.

I get to the front of my line. I should have switched lines when I noticed that my line took longer to process, that’s never a good sign, cause it means that you have one of those pedantic agents that try to look for reasons to get you in trouble.

I reach the front of the line and states that I’m here to teach a training class where one of our new hires will sit in so he can teach it in the future and I won’t have to go to the US to do it.

She asks a bit about what kind of training, what kind of software, etc. Just like normal. She then starts to look through the stamps in my passport and makes a small comment on that there are quite a few US stamps in there. I say that we hold meetings, conferences and training in the US, so as a business man it’s not really that much, since I almost never stay more than a couple of days up to a week.

She says she still wants to check this out more and takes me to another room behind the whole area. There’s about three people sitting in here already, the room is made up out of a big long desk with around 6 working spots with computers. There are chairs in behind each computer, the wall behind the working desk have windows and there’s an office in there with printers and another desk. The middle of the room has a block of attached plastic chairs, approximately 40 of them, all the chairs are solidly fused together onto a big piece of metal that is fixed to the floor.

All the colors are in this sterile grey and dark blue (anyone ever visit US immigration/customs will know the colors).

On the sides of the room there are little “Interview” rooms which have a small chair for the person being “interviewed” (I’m using quotes here cause it’s more a process of interrogation than just interviewing) in wood and a big comfy high desk chair for the officer interviewing, a small flatscreen based computer and a desk. There’s not even any watches in there, so you can’t see how long they’re keeping you waiting for if you like in my case only have a clock on your cellphone (which you’re obviously not allowed to use).

They put me down on one of the chairs in the middle of the room. There’s 3 other people here when I arrive, one looks to be from the middle east somewhere, and two business men from Japan.

After a few minutes a few more people come in. One of the officers take one of those people and lead him in the arm to one of the “Interview” rooms, he lets go in a way that half pushes this man into the room and slams the door in his face, then yells through the glass of the interview room “Just wait here then, and don’t come out, we’ll get to you when we feel like it, since you don’t want to answer our questions properly”.

“Ah, so that’s how it works, huh” I think quietly, makes me smile a bit thinking about where the “Good cop” archetype is hiding out.

About 3 hours pass, there’s been a heavy circulation of people in the room by now, I’d estimate the number to be around 30 people that have come in and left. The Japanese business men are long gone, the Saudi man they hassled a bit with information, I’m guessing to make sure that his passport wasn’t fake. They asked him about his father’s and mother’s lives and where he was born, if he had any best friends growing up - after each question the officer took a 10 minute break to cross reference answers with some database. They took ink fingerprints of the person and then let him go.

He kept asking for a phone call while he was there, cause he had friends waiting to pick him up. After about 20 minutes the officer did call his friend for him to say that he was delayed, but would be out in just a bit.

An indonasian lady got sent off on a plane back. I’ve not been here for about 4 hours and noone has yet spoken to me, lots of people have been through and out, and only one got departed back so far. The man they put into the room that they would talk to “when they felt like it” is long gone as well.

So, an officer finally calls my name up to the desk. He asks some questions, basically the same as usual, what are you doing here, what’s your job, etc. I answer same as always, that I’m here to perform business for my Swedish company doing software training. He kept asking me questions about the setup of the companies financially, the flow of money and similar things, and I said I couldn’t answer that, cause I’m a technichal worker, not with Finance or Administration. So, he asked some about MySQL AB, MySQL INC. relationships, so I said that they’re subsidiaries and I’m employed by MySQL AB. He left for about two hours.

The most annoying part here is that they have a lot of people waiting for them. Most are missing flights and have people waiting for them. And all they do is standing in a bunch of 7-8 officers and talk about sports or have coffee and talk about mortgages or whatever is on their mind for the moment. It just seems so arrogant.

After about another hour, he comes over and talks to me again, asking the same questions, I give the same answers, he doesn’t seem to happy, so he waves in another guy, that asks the same questions again. The first guy takes notes on a computer (writing about about 5 wpm).

All the way through this, they are watching an Internet-broadcasted stream of the last game of the season for the Detroit Basketball team, so every now and then while we’re talking they were making comments about the game and the score to eachother, and when someone was walking by, they made comments about the game to them and pointed to the bottom of their screen.

They keep asking the same questions over and over again, trying to angle them differently, like they’re just waiting for me to give an answer that they’re looking for.

After a while they leave again.

Now I’m alone here with another person, and there’s the two of us and about 10 officers. Their shifts seems to be ending soon, maybe of them are getting ready to leave. After a while the guy that’s been talking to me most of the time comes up and puts a paper in my hand and asks me to sign. It’s 4 sheets, he quickly opens up the last page of the stapled bunch and shows me where to sign. I ask to read what this paper is that I’m signing, because maybe I can’t agree to what it says I’ve said since I’ve been under oath if it’s been misinterpreted. He scoffs and lets me read.

This is basically the transcript:

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(legal jada jada about the visa waiver, etc)

Q. Do you understand what I have said to you? A: Yes

Q. Any statement you make must be given freely and voluntarily. Are you willing answer my questions at this time? A. Yes

Q. Do you swear or affirm that all the statements you are about to make are true and complete? A. Yes

(Name, date of birth, country here)

Q. Do you make any claim to being a citizen or permanent resident of the US? A. No

Q. Have you ever been arrested anywhere in the world? A. No

Q. Do you have any applications or petitions pending with the US Citizenship and Immigration Service? A. No

Q. Do you have any relatives who are citizens or permanent residens of the US? A. No

Q. What is the purpose of your trip to the U.S? A. I will training a US co-worker how to teach software training [sic]

Q. Who do you work for? A. MySQL AB. US company is MySQL Inc.

Q. Where is the company based out of A. Sweden

Q. What relationship do these two companies have A. They are the same

(At this point when I’m reading here I’m asking him what exactly this means, It doesn’t really look right - he just waves his hand in a way as to tell me that it doesn’t matter)

Q. What type of company is this? A. Database software

(Some questions about what I do for the company, how long I’ve been there, etc)

Q. Who is paying for your expertise in this venture? A. MySQL Inc.

(This one I missed while reading through, and later on this is why I think that they didn’t like me, but it’s contradictory to the next question:)

Q. How much will you be paid A. It’s included in my monthly salary

(So, if I’m employed for the Swedish company, and it’s in my salary, it means that I can’t possibly be paid by the US company… Now, I definitely should have caught this at the time of reading, but at this point I had been awake for over 24 hours and the last 13 hours I hadn’t eaten or been drinking anything, so I was extremely light headed and just wanted to get out at this point. I was also refused a phonecall, so once I started getting into trouble I could not call my boss and get backup plans started up.)

Q. Where was this software developed that you will be teaching A. It was developed worldwide, including the US

(The US part is apparently important, cause when he asked me this question during the talk, I kept saying worldwide, but he kept asking specifically about the US and I said “Worldwide” again, and he kept asking until I said “If a developer for our company is working out of the US, sure”. He asked at that point if someone currently was employed in the US as a developer, I said yes)

Q. Are there american workers who are capable of giving the same instrution you are? [sic] A. No one yet, after this week yes

(Because of the situation we had at that point I was the only one that had done this course, and I had other instructors supposed to sit in this time)

Q. How many times have you entered the US doing this type of work? A. Ten or Fifteen times.

(Derived from my answer “I have no idea, ten to fifteen maybe, maybe more if you let me get my passport I can count” - since they took my passport on arrival and I hadn’t seen it since)

Q. Has your company applied or intend to apply for a visa on behalf of you? A. No

Q. How much money are you bringing to the U.S Today? A. About forty dollars, I have a credit card.

Q. How is it possible that you are training people on this new product (which a part of it was made in the United States) and there are no American workers capable of giving this training? A. Not yet, I am training people to train other people, the software developers just develope [sic] they don’t train people on the product.

===========================================================
That was the contents that I signed, seems pretty inefficient for hours and hours of qustions and running back and forth, doesn’t it?

Once I signed he rushed off with his jacket, it was obvious his shift ended a while earlier, which explains his excitement to get me to sign this fast, cause nothing else they did the whole day seemed to be in a rush to get done except those last couple of minutes of work.

Anyways, the rejection comment is what really makes me upset, because it’s just beyond me how I can tell him something probably 15 times and he still gets it wrong every time.

BASED ON THE FACT THAT YOU HAVE STATED THAT YOU ARE COMING TO THE US TO PROVIDE TRAINING TO AMERICAN WORKERS AND WILL BE PAID BY AN [sic] US COMPANY, IT HAS BEEN DEEMED THE [sic] YOU ARE INADMISSIBLE TO THE UNITED STATES UNDER THE VISA WAIVER PROGRAM. IT APPEARS THAT YOU NEED A VISA TO DO THE TRAINING THAT YOU ARE COMING HERE TO DO. YOU ARE NO LONGER ABLE TO USE THE VISA WAIVER PROGRAM. YOU MUST OBTAIN A VISA TO ENTER THE US IN THE FUTURE.

Another guy comes up with a paper with the above comment, I told him the comment about me being paid by an American company was wrong and that I could easily prove it. He just said “I cannot make any changes to your case, since I’m not the officer that has been working on it with you.”. So, naturally I asked for that officer, but of course he was off shift and would not be back until the next morning. The officer nicely informed me that I could wait if I wanted to, but he would have to call the police and have me wait in a cell until the morning, and also have a criminal record opened in my name if I chose that - which would guarantee me never be able to return to the US ever again. Now, I didn’t believe him with what he said here, but I also realized that there’s no chance that I could be where I was supposed to be in the morning for work. So, I just had to get out quickly so I could call my boss and we could make other arrangements.

After that it was just a matter of waiting for the next flight, someone else took over and went and got me tickets for the next flight home and also checked my luggage. I was not allowed to get my jacket from it or put items I bought in Amsterdam into it. I was not allowed to go anywhere to get food, so during this whole time I only had access to a small water fountain (which I couldn’t use, since I get sick from US tap water). There was one bath room to share for all the people in this room, which didn’t have any lock on it, and it had an obvious one-side mirror taking up one whole end of the wall.