Spread the love
Post Views: 7

In two extraordinary and separate cases involving airlines and prisons, an Australian has been deported from the US for breaching a little-known rule and man is suing a major US airline after being jailed for a crime he didn’t commit.
An article in Guardian Australia details how an Australian traveller was denied entry to the US, strip-searched, sent to prison and subsequently deported, due to a little-known entry rule.
The Aussie traveller had applied for a visa waiver for his trip to the US in May and planned to travel on to Mexico. He knew he had to prove he needed to exit the US but was unaware of a rule stating that those entering on the waiver must have booked either a return flight or onward travel to a country that does not border the US.
The traveller never got further than Honolulu before the discrepancy was noted. He was detained in a US federal prison until he could be put on a return flight to Australia.
Several Australians have been caught out by the rule and sent back at the border, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) told the Guardian. The full story can be read on the Guardian site here.
The second case, unrelated apart from the fact it happened to a traveller in the US and involved air travel followed by prison, is even more hair-raising. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram relates how a man’s life was changed after he spent 17 days in a US prison because American Airlines wrongfully accused and identified him to police as a shoplifter at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport.
According to a newly filed lawsuit, Michael Lowe boarded a flight at DFW Airport in May 2020. More than a year passed, and he was enjoying a holiday, when he was suddenly “arrested on warrants he had never heard of for a crime he did not commit”.
For more than two weeks, Lowe was held in a county jail in New Mexico at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in “grossly unsanitary conditions,” according to the lawsuit. Lowe said he didn’t even learn what he was charged with until after his release.
The case is convoluted and alarming; it’s reminiscent of Franz Kafka. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s account is accessible via Yahoo here.
Written by Peter Needham