Lennon Tyler and her German fiancé often took road trips to Mexico when he vacationed in the U.S., as it was only a day’s drive from her home in Las Vegas, a perk of their long-distance relationship, the Associated Press reports. Things went terribly wrong when they drove back from Tijuana last month. U.S. border agents handcuffed Tyler, a U.S. citizen, and chained her to a bench, while her fiancé, Lucas Sielaff, was accused of violating his 90-day U.S. tourist permit, the couple said. Authorities handcuffed and shackled Sielaff and sent him to a crowded U.S. immigration detention center. He spent 16 days locked up before being allowed to fly home to Germany. Since President Trump took office, there have been other incidents of tourists like Sielaff stopped at U.S. border crossings and held for weeks at U.S. immigration detention facilities before being allowed to fly home at their own expense. They include another German tourist stopped at the Tijuana crossing on Jan. 25. Jessica Brösche spent six weeks locked up, including over a week in solitary confinement,.
On the Canadian border, a backpacker from Wales spent nearly three weeks at a detention center before flying home. A Canadian woman on a work visa detained at the Tijuana border spent 12 days in detention before returning home. Sielaff, 25, and the others say it was never made clear why they were taken into custody even after they offered to go home voluntarily. Pedro Rios of the American Friends Service Committee’s US-Mexico border program, a nonprofit that aids migrants, said in the 22 years he has worked on the border he’s never seen travelers from Western Europe and Canada, longtime U.S. allies, locked up. “It’s definitely unusual with these cases so close together, and the rationale for detaining these people doesn’t make sense,” he said. “It doesn’t justify the abhorrent treatment and conditions” they endured. “The only reason I see is there is a much more fervent anti-immigrant atmosphere,” Rios said. Of course, tourists from countries where the U.S. requires visas — many of them non-Western nations — have long encountered difficulties entering the U.S.
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