1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

I’m extremely disturbed by the actions of agents at our ports of entry. People with valid visas to enter the US are being barred from entering and either turned around (best case scenario) or detained and held in uncomfortable conditions for indefinite periods of time. Students arriving back from holidays hoping to continue their studies, a Canadian woman who runs a business in the US, another Canadian woman planning to join her boyfriend on a backpacking trip are all accounts I have recently read that have been reported. To my personal knowledge, a Colombian woman was detained when returning from a visit to her mother in Columbia. Her fiancé lives here in the US. She has been detained for more than 2 weeks despite having signed papers agreeing to return to Colombia. Her jailers say they can’t find her paperwork. This sounds like an excuse for the private prison where these detainees are often held to get more money from the government by holding people as long as possible. Aside from the fact that this is unwarranted abuse of visitors and aspiring Americans, this has a deterrent effect on tourism. Europe and Canada have warned their citizens against travel to the US because of the risk of abuse at the hands of border agents. It is also a risk to our long term standing as a place for the best and brightest of the whole world to come to pursue higher education. This has enriched our nation in so many ways but already these students are turning away. This policy of bullying cruelty must be stopped. There should be guidelines in place to ensure that agents at our airports and ports of entry are scrupulously following the law and behaving in a courteous manner. People shouldn’t be thrown in detention for minor infractions or for nothing at all. We also shouldn’t be farming out our prisons and detention centers to private, for-profit companies. This enables corruption and abuse. Let’s actually make America great again like it was a few months ago.