I do not live in a war-torn country. I have never had planes bomb my city, soldiers burn my house, or even been shot at. I live in Lubbock, Texas, hundreds of miles from either an international border or one of the airports where travelers with all the correct documents to come to the United States were detained Friday and Saturday due to an order given with no warning or apparent pre-planning.
I can't know what it's like for refugees having to leave their homes due to war, violence, and oppression. But one small, humiliating part of the nightmare that this new administration seems determined to visit upon those who don't enjoy the advantages of already being part of the dominant group is familiar to me: being detained at the border. This is a scary, creepy experience where the legal parameters are unclear and your standing is always uncertain, especially when a visa is involved (something that most people in wealthy countries rarely have to deal with these days).
In the summer of 1997, I was working for Let's Go travel guide in Eastern Europe. The countries I had to cover included Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Moldova, and I needed a visa for each; thankfully my editors helped walk me through this process that was totally new to me: filling out the proper documentation weeks or months in advance, sometimes also having to secure an invitation from some kind of local institution (or shady travel agency), mailing away my passport to a consular service and crossing my fingers for its return.
After six weeks in Bulgaria learning for the first time how to travel alone, I arrived in Ukraine, trying to pinch pennies. I stayed in a communal apartment with Vika and Gari and their baby, the cheapest accommodation I could secure among the hawkers at the train station--I slept on a fold-out chair in a corner of one huge room (where Vika, Gari, and the baby slept at the other end. I got bed-bugs; there was no shower. The last day of my stay in Odessa I went to a hotel for one night to have a wonderful (cold) shower before boarding the train to Moldova.
When the train arrived at the border (which had barely even been a border for five years--at the time because of the Transdnistria separatist conflict, it was not even entirely clear where the border was), a guy in a big Soviet-style hat with Ukrainian state insignia walked through the train, and immediately picked me out as "the one of these things that doesn't belong here," looked briefly through my passport, saw my visa (in order), and asked for my Регистрация (Registration). I showed the second copy of my customs declaration from when I had entered the country a week before, but that wasn't what he wanted. He told me to follow him off the train.
We walked through one car, then another, then got off the train, and walked towards a station past a scrubby patch of earth where dozens of people were trundling back and forth to a station-like building with loads of those big plaid-patterned bags woven out of heavy plastic that you'd see all the time in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. I thought, "I'm leaving the country, my visa's not yet expired, and I have no contraband; there will be an office inside where all this will be straightened out." But instead, we got back on the train, disembarked on the opposite side (where there were no people), and took a path through chain-link fencing into the woods.
In a few minutes, we came to a little shed, inside of which were three large Ukrainians of what official status I could not tell, wearing military fatigues and brandishing their Kalashnikovs. I was informed that I needed to show my registration to prove where I had been domiciled while in Ukraine. If Gari & Vika had known that I should be registered, well . . . they had enough on their minds arguing with the other families in their apartment about who got to use the one sink spigot. I had no registration. But I was leaving the country; why should it matter now? The Ukrainians told me they could send me back to the police station in Odessa (it was unclear whether I'd be registered there, or locked up), which would, in fact, result in my overstaying my visa. They had me over a barrel.
I was scared. I was upset. I was 20 years old and this was my first time traveling alone abroad. I had the advantage, though, of having a passport from the most powerful country on the planet, having cash on me equivalent to several months' pay for these officials, and speaking Russian, so I could explain myself and understand what I was being told. I was tired, bed-bug-bitten, and worried I'd miss the train's onward journey, but had the presence of mind to ask how much it would cost to "register" here. I handed over a twenty-dollar bill and my passport was duly stamped (so lightly it could hardly be read).
I had thought all my papers were in order. I was aware I had just paid a bribe--been complicit, in fact, in criminal corruption. Guns had been at the ready the whole time. I felt humiliated, angry at the stupid Ukrainian system that required "registration" in addition to a visa that I didn't understand why it should be. I felt like I had been revealed to myself as something between a law-breaker and an incompetent at the same time--and it was the fault of the Ukrainian government.
And these feelings were after I was on the train and on my way to what I felt would be the comparably orderly paradise of Moldova. While I was being led into the woods and loomed over by people who told me I had fallen afoul of their system, I was terrified; if they sent me back to Odessa and locked me up, I didn't know how to contact a consulate. If I overstayed my visa, would I get in worse trouble? If I refused to leave and be sent back to Odessa, what physical force might they use? Would there be medical treatment if I was injured? How much would that cost? Whose jurisdiction was I under, in the no-man's land between countries--what legal system could I trust if the one I thought I was doing right by all of a sudden threw me in the slammer for additional bureaucracy I hadn't understood beforehand? Was it my fault if I had failed to abide by the rules, and how much of my meager summer pay (needed to pay the thankfully-small portion of tuition I'd owe that coming fall) would it take to fix the situation if I had to stay in Odessa, hire a lawyer, pay fines, pay for a flight directly back to the US? What would happen to my life? Detained at the border is a scary concept.
It happened again three years later. By this point, I'd gotten a lot more experience traveling in that part of the world, and was coming to the end of a year spent living in Russia (with multiple visas, and a crash-course teaching myself how various kinds of visas & registrations worked). As a last hurrah of my year in Moscow, I took the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Mongolia. After a week on the Mongol steppe, I was scheduled to take the train back across the Russian frontier and then fly from Russian Buryatia back to Moscow, from which I'd take my final leave of the country (for that trip). In Mongolia, I'd gotten some kind of illness and fever, and spent the final two days of the trip writhing in my bunk in a youth hostel in Ulan Bator. Weak, sick, and still feverish, I hauled myself to the train station and deposited myself in a bunk there to continue my writhing on the night train, interspersed with drinking water and using the facilities, such as they were.
The carriage had several westerners in it, including a couple of women from New Zealand, a rangy, older Swiss guy, and a couple of others, along with a lot of Mongolians, all of whom were very friendly.
When we got to the border, the train had to stop for the strange ceremony of lifting up every car and setting it on a new chassis that had the right gauge of wheels for Russian railways--a process that took six hours (during which time, the bathrooms were closed, since were no longer moving--the toilets just emptied onto the tracks in those days). My water consumption, fever, and the accompanying physical exigencies made this really unpleasant for me. Finally, when the wheels were changed, we rolled forward a few hundred yards, stopped again, and a Russian border guard took all our passports and disappeared for an hour (bathrooms were still locked).
When he came back everybody was given their passports, let out of the train to use facilities in the border station, and allowed to stretch their legs--except for me. I was "detained". I followed the border guard into an office at the station, looking bedraggled: clothes rumpled, hair matted, smelling of fever and sweat, and still desperate for various forms of release. I waited half an hour and the captain came in, with my passport in his hand. He spent time silently examining all the pages and stamps, then asked me why I had come to Russia, how long I'd been there, who had arranged my visa invitation, what school I had attended and what my current employment was. He asked where my family lived, and what were their national origins, if I was Jewish, Christian, or something else. He asked if I had a camera, and to see what books or notebooks I had with me. There was no question of improper documentation--I was being detained for entirely other, obscure reasons. And this guy was not some underpaid underling of the border service.
I don't think this "detention" could have lasted more than an hour and a half (although it made up at least the 8th hour without restroom facilities, which made it seem much longer), and this time, there was no question of me being sent back to Mongolia. I was in the hands of the Russian State now, to do with as it would.
It turned out, in the end, that there had been reports of somebody from our carriage (the Swiss guy, I later discovered) taking pictures out the window when we crossed the border itself (where an anomalous and spirited volleyball game was in progress right by the tracks--a noteworthy spectacle among all that grim security, admittedly). Whether such border photography was actually prohibited or simply suspicious was never made clear to me, but it did become apparent that they decided to detain me because I was the only one they could interrogate (none of the other westerners spoke Russian, and none of the border guards spoke English or German--or I guess Mongolian). The situation was resolved when I sort of lost my cool and tried to give my camera and all my film to the captain of the station, telling him he could keep it all, if I could just go to the bathroom. He told me I could go.
I was released (in time for the train), availed myself of the releases I needed, and by the time I got back to Moscow (well, really by the time I rolled into my friend's apartment in Berlin about five days later, having driven overnight across Poland from Kaliningrad), it all seemed rather more comical than otherwise.
But of course, in the end, everything had worked out according to my plans: I was not arrested or held at gunpoint; I did not languish in a cell in need of legal assistance or have to figure out how to contact the US consulate in Vladivostok or have money wired to me to hire a lawyer or something. I did not have to make expensive alternate travel plans, and was not deported back to Mongolia. The friends and family waiting for me did not have to spend days or even hours expecting me to show up when I didn't, wondering why everybody else got off the plane and I didn't. I did not have a war-torn country waiting for me if my detention had proved to thwart rather than merely delay my border-crossing. I had no bombs, no mercenary armies, no homelessness, violence, or death as the alternative to getting into Russia (or out of Ukraine).
But that's not true for the people in airports around this country and the world who've been detained at the border due to Friday's executive order (which they hadn't been apprised of when following all the proper protocols, certainly at great personal expense in monetary terms, as well as time, effort, and bureaucratic hassle). These are people who followed all the rules, and then have had to spend who knows how long in border detention, and at best a lot of money to change their plans.
The fear in being detained at the border, in my experience, is about arbitrariness, not knowing what will happen to you, whose hands you'll fall into, what might be extracted from you on purpose or by accident as a result of the detention interrupting your travel plans; thinking you've followed all the rules, but afraid you didn't understand them correctly. Or, perhaps even more scary for rule-followers like myself, learning that the rules don't matter, or don't apply to you. There is no jurisdiction or framework of law on which you can hang your hopes. The rule of law you'd been promised is a mirage, and the truth is just the arbitrary power of who's got the guns, the physical bulk, the handcuffs, and the willing to aggress the most to get their way, or the way they've been ordered to get.
I can't know the terror of the prospect of being sent back to the kind of strife happening in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan, or Somalia that could take your life in a moment. But I had two tiny glimpses in my life of the free-fall of being detained at the border, the limbo into which a thoughtless, haphazard, and chaotic administration tossed some of the most vulnerable people in the world on Friday night, people who were looking to America for hope, freedom, and safety from war & violence. Instead they found a legal chaos, a bureaucracy not defined by the rule of law, but by arbitrariness of individuals in positions of power, with overtones of extraordinary rendition and tight-lipped armed men informing you that "your papers are not in order."
If this is happening to certified refugees, green-card holders, and travelers with all the proper visas at this point, just a week into the Trump administration, the scariest prospect for those of us who are not refugees, who are not from those targeted countries, who currently hold American citizenship (by birthright or naturalization) is this: who's next?
