Because, you know, they’re probably terrorists. Or, perhaps, bit players in a story by Kafka:
Ms. Ghuman’s descent into the bureaucratic netherworld began on Aug. 8, 2006, when she and Mr. Flight returned to San Francisco from a research trip to Britain. Armed immigration officers met them at the airplane door and escorted Ms. Ghuman away.
In a written account of the next eight hours that she prepared for her lawyer, Ms. Ghuman said that officers tore up her H-1B visa, which was valid through May 2008, defaced her British passport, and seemed suspicious of everything from her music cassettes to the fact that she had listed Welsh as a language she speaks. A redacted government report about the episode obtained by her lawyer under the Freedom of Information Act erroneously described her as “Hispanic.”
Held incommunicado in a room in the airport, she was groped during a body search, she said, and was warned that if she moved, she would be considered to be attacking her armed female searcher. After questioning her for hours, the officers told her that she had been ruled inadmissible, she said, and threatened to transfer her to a detention center in Santa Clara, Calif., unless she left on a flight to London that night.
Outside, Mr. Flight made frantic calls for help. He said the British Consulate tried to get through to the immigration officials in charge, to no avail. And Ms. Ghuman said her demands to speak to the British consul were rebuffed.
“They told me I was nobody, I was nowhere and I had no rights,” she said. “For the first time, I understood what the deprivation of liberty means.”
Who is the International Woman of Mystery? A Welsh-born musicologist who’s been teaching at Mills College in Oakland, and who’d been working in the US for a decade. Oh, and she’s an expert in Elbert (“Pomp & Circumstance”) Elgar, and an Oxford graduate, with a doctorate from UC Berkeley … ah, that must be it … terroristic Berserkeleyite, man …
And after 13+ months trying to find out more, trying to reapply for a visa, getting folks from Parliament and Congress and the American Musicological Society to write in on her behalf … nada. No explanations, no justifications, no accusations that can be addressed or rebutted. No response as to whether her visa reapplication’s been blackballed, etc.
Kelly Klundt, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection in the Department of Homeland Security, said officers at San Francisco International Airport had no choice but to bar Ms. Ghuman because the State Department, at its discretion, had revoked her visa. The State Department would not discuss the case, citing the confidentiality of individual visa records.
How conveniently “confidential.”
I’d note that the picture of her in the NY Times article looks a lot like my mother in younger days … but who knows what might happen to my Mom if I did.
I sent this to my sister who (went to Mills and) knows the music biz in DC. Maybe she or one of her friends can figure it out.
It surpasseth all understanding.