Blogger Detained at JFK
Posted on November 16, 2008, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Immigration, International, Media.
Three Egyptian bloggers spent a week with us at the HuffPost’s OffTheBus. One of them, Ahmad, got detained at JFK airport as he tried to leave New York for his next stop in Austin. He did nothing wrong, other than have an Arabic name. Once the U.S. officials freed him, and he bought a new plane ticket with his own money since he missed his flight, he wrote about the experience:
The place perfectly resembled any Egyptian police station, except for the picture of Mr. George Bush handing on the wall in place of Mubarak’s, and that the officers’ clothes were blue rather than white. The American officers had the same cold, dumb faces of their Egyptian counterparts. I told the officer at the beginning about my flight leaving in two hours, but he told me to sit waiting until they called my name.
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