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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. “They just came out and said it: ‘We both know why you’ve been detained … it’s because of what you wrote about the protests at Columbia,’” 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 Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza for his Substack blog Kitchen Counter. Kitchen was a master’s 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 he’d conducted ahead of his trip just to be safe. “If you are deleting social media ~48hrs before your flight to the US, *it is already too late,*” Kitchen warned in another post.
Kitchen told The Guardian that CBP officers claimed they’d 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 immigrants’ 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 students’ protest encampment who was detained by ICE despite possessing a green card.
“The goal here is the deportation of dissent,” Kitchen wrote at the time.
“This is a mode of speech suppression that seeks to physically remove the undesirable elements it can, and, through fear, ensure silence in everyone else,” he added, referring to Trump‘s executive order targeting so-called “Hamas sympathizers” 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 interests—but the Trump administration is still intent on keeping Khalil behind bars.
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