Italian’s Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face
Somehow I just do not feel all that much safer after reading this story, highlighted today by Atrios.
But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.
Ah, that's quite a public face we are showing to the rest of the world. Now Ms. Cooper, as the Times so properly puts it, is looking to move to Italy after what happened to her boyfriend.
These are just the stories we know. One wonders what we may find out under a new administration or a Congress that fully embraces its vital and Constitutionally necessary oversight role.