this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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The teens claimed CBP targeted them because they hadn’t booked hotels for their entire stay in Hawaii.

“They found it suspicious that we hadn’t fully booked our accommodations for the entire five weeks in Hawaii,” Pohl said. “We wanted to travel spontaneously. Just like we had done in Thailand and New Zealand.”

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[–] DicJacobus@lemmy.world 19 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I know every country has its problems and that there are desperate people everywhere.

but its very much american exceptionalism, that americans would assume people coming from a country that has infinitely more worker rights, would move to their failing state just to work.

[–] Doorbook@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

If the US stop bombing and middling in South America, and countries in the middle east, most of these people will voluntary go back or never try to get into the states in the first place.

[–] DicJacobus@lemmy.world 0 points 8 hours ago

not the only ones spreading death and displacement,

Russia, Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia to name a few of the worst offenders

[–] WorldsDumbestMan 8 points 12 hours ago

Oh the horror! Not hard working people working for USA!

[–] rothaine@lemm.ee 6 points 12 hours ago

Holy shit the comments on that article. I know NY Post leans right, but some of them got their noses so far up Trump's ass they're snorting small intestine

[–] Etterra@discuss.online 10 points 14 hours ago

NGL, traveling to America right now is just too risky. Don't do it, for your own safety.

[–] thorhop@sopuli.xyz 39 points 22 hours ago

Look at those evil immigrants. No doubt they'll... they'll... hold on, can we use some AI to replace the stock photo with brown people? Thank you.

[–] obvs@lemmy.world 62 points 1 day ago (1 children)

When the world thinks "illegal immigration" we all think "Germans sneaking into Hawaii".

[–] Kinperor@lemmy.ca 16 points 21 hours ago

They finally found the culprit for the shit state of the United State: It's all those pesky german young adults backpacking through the world and visiting Hawaii for like a few weeks or something!

[–] rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 13 hours ago

I travelled a lot and never pre booked more than the first night

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 59 points 1 day ago

Every time I've been to Cuba I show up in the airport and basically have a car rented, maybe first night in a hotel. Then we drive wherever we feel like and usually pick up a hitchhiker or two that will have a "sister" that has a room for rent.

It has almost always been clean, friendly, cheap, and a good breakfast. Rinse, repeat. I love travelling like this and have generally done this everywhere I've gone in the third world. Apparently the US doesn't even measure up to third world.

[–] samus12345@lemm.ee 101 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They're lucky they were sent home instead of to an El Salvador concentration camp.

[–] pleasegoaway@lemm.ee 49 points 1 day ago (2 children)

They were the right color of skin.

[–] jimmux@programming.dev 6 points 15 hours ago

I've been seeing a lot of reports lately of white people getting screwed over like this. They all had one thing in common: women traveling without male company.

[–] samus12345@lemm.ee 37 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It likely saved them, but being white still doesn't guarantee your safety from the US gulags.

[–] pyre@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago

are you implying that fascists might not be reliable?

[–] Absaroka@lemmy.world 128 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Both say they were handcuffed and sent to a detention center, which they claimed was more like a prison.

“We were searched with metal detectors, our entire bodies were scanned, and we had to stand naked in front of the police officers and were looked through,” Pohl said. “Then we were given green prison clothes and put in a prison cell with serious criminals.”

Among them was someone who had spent 18 years behind bars for murder, the women said, and they were left sleeping in a double cell with tiny barred windows and metal bunks with moldy mattresses.

I really want to know what changed that made the above happen much more often.

In December, if Customs had concerns about two teenagers trying to sneak into the US to work on a travel visa, where did they go? How was it handled? Because it feels like overkill and probably much more expensive than what we used to do.

Why are we sending backpacking teenagers with visa concerns to the same place as a murderer?

Why are they being strip searched like they were drug smugglers?

But the women — who were planning to continue on to Los Angeles and then Costa Rica after Hawaii — insisted they were interrogated by CBP for hours, and that transcripts show their words were “twisted” and outright falsified.

“They contained sentences we didn’t actually say,” Pohl said of interrogation transcripts they were sent home with.

“They twisted it to make it seem as if we admitted that we wanted to work illegally in the US,” she told the German outlet Ostee Zeitung.

And then this feels like the after-the-fact coverup. Whatever they held them on was super flimsy, so they tried to make it sound worse when they realized this was going to hit the news.

[–] JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

This is pretty standard treatment. There are only a limited number of holding cells in an airport, moslty for men.

If there is no returning flight that day they are sent to a local jail (known as a remand centre outside of the US) and stripping and searching is standard at those places.

The women said that they were going to do work in the US.

[–] Bassman1805@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago

Per that last bit, I'm guessing they never had a lawyer present. Would make any of those fabricated statements null and void, if the constitution meant anything.

[–] Jamablaya 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The news decided to pay attention, that's what changed, not the reality.

[–] fuck_u_spez_in_particular@lemmy.world 12 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I mean yeah for non-white people maybe. But teenage German girls, that's a novum

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