German teens who ‘intended to work’ were denied entry to US for traveling ‘under false pretenses’: Customs
nypost.com
Maria Lepere and Charlotte Pohl, 18 and 19, arrived in Hawaii on March 18 with short-term travel permits ahead of weeks-long US trip.

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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    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.