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.”

  • kowcop@aussie.zone
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    2 days ago

    I assure you, everyone outside of the US knows how bad the US is… the US is the laughing stock of the world right now. We get daily reminders how shit it is, how shit the economy is, how many mass shootings there were today. The world is fascinated by it, sometimes bored.

    In this case with the young travellers, they have probably had the holiday booked for ages. Some people just think it wouldn’t happen to them. These sorts of checks would seem random anyway. These sorts of things appear on near every episode of Border Patrol (in Australia) where someone is being sent home because of lack of funds to sustain their length of stay etc…

    • Ricky Rigatoni@lemm.ee
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      9 hours ago

      Ok… so why do they still travel to the us? Do they know how bad things are but are just stupid?

      • Chip_Rat@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Well yeah, there are two types of people in the world: Americans and Not-Americans. So these Not-American teenagers would certainly be fully aware of the current political climate in America.

      • kowcop@aussie.zone
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        1 day ago

        Which bit are you objecting to? If you don’t believe that the US is being portrayed by every news agency (worldwide) as a dumpster fire, you are deluded

    • Yermaw@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      I would guess we as outsiders think it’s worse than it is, hearing only the bad stuff. We’re not hearing about great new sales at bed bath and beyond or whatever, we’re only hearing about the heavy handed deportations and human rights violations. Which is obviously bad but its easy to confuse “probably not as bad as it sounds” with “probably not actually that bad”.

      I don’t think I’m communicating the point i was trying to make very well but whatever