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U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officials reportedly told an Australian writer who was detained and deported upon his arrival in Los Angeles that he was being removed for writing about pro-Palestinian protests on his personal blog, according to The Guardian.
In a thread of posts on X Sunday, Alistair Kitchen said he had just landed back in Australia after 12 hours in detention and a 30-hour round trip. โThey just came out and said it: โWe both know why youโve been detained โฆ itโs because of what you wrote about the protests at Columbia,โโ Kitchen recounted.
Kitchen, who lived in New York for six years before moving back to Australia in 2024, had written about the campus protests at Columbia University opposing Israelโs ongoing military campaign in Gaza for his Substack blog Kitchen Counter. Kitchen was a masterโs student in creative writing at Columbia at the time.
In his thread, Kitchen said that officials were waiting for him when he got off the plane and seemed to already have a file containing information about him, despite a social media sweep heโd conducted ahead of his trip just to be safe. โIf you are deleting social media ~48hrs before your flight to the US, *it is already too late,*โ Kitchen warned in another post.
Kitchen told The Guardian that CBP officers claimed theyโd found evidence of drug use on his phone, despite his responses to an ESTA form. Although he doubted that there was any actual evidence, he admitted to having lied. In his thread, Kitchen said that he regretted giving officers the password to his phone, and allowed himself to be barred from entering the United States.
Earlier this year, Customs and Border Patrol began to increase screenings of immigrantsโ phones, computers, cameras, and other devices. In March, a French scientist was reportedly denied entry to the U.S. due to texts criticizing Donald Trump.
Kitchen wrote a blog in March about Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and lead negotiator for the studentsโ protest encampment who was detained by ICE despite possessing a green card.
โThe goal here is the deportation of dissent,โ Kitchen wrote at the time.
โThis is a mode of speech suppression that seeks to physically remove the undesirable elements it can, and, through fear, ensure silence in everyone else,โ he added, referring to Trumpโs executive order targeting so-called โHamas sympathizersโ with student visas.
Last week, a judge ruled that Secretary of State Marco Rubio could not detain and deport Khalil on the flimsy basis that he threatened U.S. foreign policy interestsโbut the Trump administration is still intent on keeping Khalil behind bars.
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