Many people are detained at U.S. airports for reasons they find arbitrary and mysterious. I got lucky—when I was stopped by Customs and Border Protection last week, after flying to Los Angeles from Melbourne, a border agent told me, explicitly and proudly, why I’d been pulled out of the customs line. “Look, we both know why you are here,” the agent told me. He identified himself to me as Adam, though his colleagues referred to him as Officer Martinez. When I said that I didn’t, he looked surprised. “It’s because of what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University,” he said.

They were waiting for me when I got off the plane. Officer Martinez intercepted me before I entered primary processing and took me immediately into an interrogation room in the back, where he took my phone and demanded my passcode. When I refused, I was told I would be immediately sent back home if I did not comply. I should have taken that deal and opted for the quick deportation. But in that moment, dazed from my fourteen-hour flight, I believed C.B.P. would let me into the U.S. once they realized they were dealing with a middling writer from regional Australia. So I complied.

Then began the first “interview.” The questions focussed almost entirely on my reporting about the Columbia student protests. From 2022 to 2024, I attended Columbia for an M.F.A. program, on a student visa, and when the encampment began in April of last year I began publishing daily missives to my Substack, a blog that virtually no one (except, apparently, the U.S. government) seemed to read. To Officer Martinez, the pieces were highly concerning. He asked me what I thought about “it all,” meaning the conflict on campus, as well as the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He asked my opinion of Israel, of Hamas, of the student protesters. He asked if I was friends with any Jews. He asked for my views on a one- versus a two-state solution. He asked who was at fault: Israel or Palestine. He asked what Israel should do differently. (The Department of Homeland Security, which governs the C.B.P., claims that any allegations that I’d been arrested for political beliefs are false.)

Then he asked me to name students involved in the protests. He asked which WhatsApp groups, of student protesters, I was a member of. He asked who fed me “the information” about the protests. He asked me to give up the identities of people I “worked with.”

Unfortunately for Officer Martinez, I didn’t work with anyone. I participated in the protests as an independent student journalist who one day stumbled upon tents on the lawn. My writing, all of which is now publicly available, was certainly sympathetic to the protesters and their demands, but it comprised an accurate and honest documentation of the events at Columbia. That, of course, was the problem.

This past February, I booked a trip from Melbourne to New York, with a layover in Los Angeles, so that I could visit some friends for a couple of weeks. In that time, stories of tourists being detained in and denied entry from the U.S. had begun to regularly appear in Australian media. I began to think about what precautions I should take when crossing the U.S. border. I opted against taking a burner phone—a move that some legal experts had advised, in the press—believing it would provoke suspicion, and simply decided to give my phone and social media a superficial clean.

I designed my strategy around the understanding I had developed, after living in the United States for five years and travelling between the States and Australia time and time again, that C.B.P. was fundamentally unsophisticated and ad hoc in its methods, and that I would have to get extremely unlucky to be searched at all. I understood that, if I encountered any difficulty, it would be because the primary-processing officer at the end of that long line at LAX would notice that I had been a Columbia student, and ask to see my phone. If he searched through it, he would encounter the messy and personal digital life of a worryingly single thirty-three-year-old man. But he would not find photographs from protests, Signal conversations, or my Substack posts, which I took down in the week leading up to my flight.

But C.B.P. had prepared for me well before my arrival. They did not need to identify me at LAX as someone worthy of investigation: they had evidently decided that weeks before. My ESTA application—the system by which many tourists become eligible to visit the U.S. under the visa waiver program—must have triggered something on their end. Perhaps C.B.P. now has the technological dexterity to check the web history of every ESTA applicant. Or, perhaps, I was named in a list—provided by the far-right pro-Israel organization Betar US, to representatives of the Trump Administration—of visa holders whom it hoped to see deported. In either case, a U.S. government officer must have read my work and decided that I was not fit to enter the country. Because Officer Martinez had apparently read all of my material so long ago, he didn’t even know that I had taken all this material down. What this means is that, by the time a foreigner cleans his social media in preparation for a trip to the U.S., as much of our news media has been urging us to do, it may already be too late.

For me, this mistake was a disaster. Because I’d designed my strategy around passing the standard passport line, I was totally ill-equipped for what happened in the interrogation room. Though I did not know it then, I was participating in an interview that I was never going to pass. It didn’t matter that my views on Israel-Palestine seemed to disappoint Officer Martinez in their lack of divisiveness—I told him it is a conflict in which everyone has blood on their hands, but which can and should be brought to an immediate end by the dominant power. He asked if other Australians feel the same, and I told him that yes, most do. This seemed only to perturb him. When he ran out of questions about Israel, he disappeared into the back room to begin downloading the contents of my phone.

He was gone for a long time. I imagined him, in his office, using some new software to surface all the grimy details of my life. Though I’d deleted a lot of material related to the protests from my device, I’d kept plenty of personal content. Presumably Martinez was skimming through all of this—the embarrassing, the shameful, the sexual.

That fear was confirmed. Martinez came out and said that I needed to unlock the Hidden folder in my photo album. I told him it would be better for him if I did not. He insisted. I felt I had no choice. I did have a choice, of course: the choice of noncompliance and deportation. But by then my bravery had left me. I was afraid of this man and of the power that he represented. So instead I unlocked the folder and watched as he scrolled through all of my most personal content in front of me. We looked at a photo of my penis together.

When he was done, he disappeared again into the other room. I sat there, trying to understand why, despite my hard-won comfort with myself, and with sexuality in general, I felt so violated. I am proud of my life, of who I am. That didn’t seem to help. I realized then I had no privacy left for them to invade.

This time, Martinez was gone for even longer. After fifteen or twenty minutes, the person who had been left in the room to guard me, a lumbersome, goateed man without a name badge, turned to me and said, “God, dude, what do you have on your phone? This normally takes five minutes.”

This is when I truly knew I was fucked—not because the guard was telling the truth but because I sensed he was not. My feeling then was that he was playing his own part, a part designed to mount pressure, to intimidate.

When Martinez finally came out, he was bouncing toward me excitedly, like a kid with a lollipop. He said that they had found evidence of drug use on my phone. Did I realize that I had failed to acknowledge a history of drug use on my ESTA?

I moved, in seconds, from a desire to be amiable to a desire not to be found lying. In the gray zone between the arrival gate and passport control you are beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution. You have fewer protections than a criminal metres away, inside the border. People with legal standing are much harder, it turns out, to abuse. In the C.B.P. interrogation room, I had not quite fallen to the level of statelessness, but I had fallen below the criminal.

Were I not fatigued from a long flight and from a long interrogation, and were I not stressed and scared, I would have recalled that my phone does not have clear evidence of drug use. A better version of me, the version I like to think I am, would have called bullshit on this bluff. But at that moment I could not account for every single one of the four thousand-odd photos on my phone. I imagined photographs that do not exist, messages that do not exist, proving that I was some sort of drug kingpin. So I admitted that I had done drugs in the past—in other countries as well as in the U.S., where I had bought THC gummies at a dispensary in New York.

Marijuana is legal in New York, but it is not legal federally, and so it seems that, in the eyes of C.B.P., I had broken federal law for purchasing legal weed in New York, and then perhaps again by failing to declare it on my ESTA. Martinez, who seemed now to be bubbling over with excitement, went back to his supervisor to, in his words, “pitch this.” When he came back, he told me I would be put on the next flight back to Australia.

Martinez and another officer took me in the back, pushed me against the wall and patted me down. Martinez made sure that I carried no weaponry between my penis and my scrotum. They took the shoelaces out of my shoes and the string out of my elastic pants, presumably so that I would not be able to hang myself. This struck me as overly cautious, but as I entered the detention room I changed my mind. We were so deep in the building, and so clearly underground, that the very notion of a window started to feel like something from a half-remembered dream. Three months ago, a Canadian woman was disappeared into the system for nearly two weeks. I did not know then whether I would be out in one hour, one day, or one month. When I was brought into the room, I encountered a young woman, in tears, begging the guard for information. He told her he had no information to give her and that none would be forthcoming. “That woman,” he said, pointing to a bundle of blankets in the corner, “has been here for four days.”

After that I started to spiral. We detainees were banned from talking to one another. There wasn’t anyone I could communicate with, anyway—a barrier in the room separated the men from the women, and I was the only man. There was food—cup noodles mostly—and a vending machine with M&M’s and Coca-Cola that we could use “if we had brought cash,” one of the guards told me. The room was so cold that all of us were wrapped in C.B.P. blankets.

The bulbs buzzed and the air-conditioning hummed throughout the day, or the night, or whenever it now was. I learned then that the detention room is a place where time itself is detained, that the clock behind the guard, who himself sits behind plexiglass, existed mostly to taunt us. We worked hard not to look at that clock, because, though the hands would move, we had no concept of what they were moving toward. The horror of the thing was that no one knew where we were, and we had no way of telling them. We were isolated from one another and also from the world.

It was then, some hours after first being detained, that I realized C.B.P. must be governed by some internal procedure regarding the distribution of information, and I approached the guard to ask if there was any way I was allowed to get word of my detainment to the outside world.

“You can call your consulate,” he said.

I exercised that right immediately. He dialled the number, and I stood there at his desk, talking loudly so that the others, who I doubted had been informed about their right, could hear me. The woman at the other end of the phone told me that in all likelihood I would be on a plane that evening, about six hours from then, and that, if I knew the number of any of my contacts by heart, she would notify them for me. That’s how my mother found out.