Foreign scholars nabbed by US border patrols even when they have valid visas
JAN 10, 2011
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.024961
Chronicle of Higher Education : The US Customs and Border Protection agency has boosted the manpower it deploys along and behind the US–Canadian border. The result, as the Chronicle‘s Colin Woodard reports, has been an increase in the number of roving patrols and surprise checkpoints on buses, trains, and highways. If foreign professors, postdocs, and students fail to present valid immigration documents, they risk being fined or detained. But even when scholars do have the right paperwork, border patrol agents, who are not necessarily well-versed in the intricacies of immigration law, have detained scholars anyway. Woodard cites the case of
A scholar at an undisclosed institution in Rochester [who] was arrested at the airport while on his way to visit his wife, a student at an institution out of state. Both had H1B visas, had applied for permanent residence status, and had permission from Citizenship and Immigration Services to live, work, and travel while their applications were adjudicated, according to their attorney, Mr. Novak. But Customs and Border Protection officers “treated him like a criminal and threw him in the clink. The wife didn’t dare come to pay the bond to get him out because they would throw her in jail, too.”
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
