An Australian man who was detained upon arrival at Los Angeles airport and deported back to Melbourne says United States border officials told him it was due to his writing on pro-Palestine protests by university students.
Alistair Kitchen said he left Melbourne on Thursday bound for New York and was detained for 12 hours and interrogated by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials during the stopover in Los Angeles.
The 33-year-old said he was “clearly targeted for politically motivated reasons” and said officials spent more than 30 minutes questioning him about his views on Israel and Palestine including his “thoughts on Hamas”.
Kitchen said officials asked him for his “thoughts about the conflict in a very broad sense”, including about student protesters, what Israel “should have done differently” and “how I would resolve the conflict”.
“It was quite an in-depth probing of my views on the war,” he said.
Kitchen said he was deported and landed back in Melbourne on Saturday morning.
“The CBP blockly said to me, the reason you have been detained is because of your writing on the Columbia student protests,” he told Guardian Australia on Sunday. The US Department of Homeland Security has been contacted for comment.
Kitchen said he lived in New York for six years and wrote about the protests staged in support of Gaza at Columbia University while he was a master’s student at the college, before he moved back to Australia in 2024.
“Because I was a creative writing student, I took the opportunity to witness the protests and wrote about them in depth on my personal blog,” he said.
This year, Kitchen published a piece on his blog, Kitchen Counter, on the Department of Homeland Security’s detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the lead negotiator of the Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
In the article, Kitchen said Khalil had been arrested “on utterly specious grounds by a neo-fascist state” with the goal of “the deportation of dissent”.
He referred to the Trump administration’s executive order of 30 January in which the government promised to go on the “offense to enforce law and order” and “cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses”.
Kitchen, who was planning to return to New York for two weeks to visit friends, said he deleted “sensitive political posts” from his blog as well as “some social media” because he was aware of the increased risk of crossing the US border.
However, he believed US border officials had used technology to link his posts to his application for a Electronic System for Travel Authorization (Esta), which allows eligible visitors to make a short trip to the US without a visa.
He said he was called for over the intercom shortly after exiting the plane at Los Angeles international airpot and “taken into a back room” for secondary processing
“Clearly, they had technology in their system which linked those posts to my Esta … a long time before I took them down,” he said. “Because they knew all about the posts, and then interrogated me about the posts once I was there.”
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Kitchen said he wanted other Australians to be aware that “cleaning” their phones wouldn’t necessarily mean they would be able to get their Esta approved upon arrival in the US.
“They had already prepared a file on me and already knew everything about me,” he said.
Kitchen said he agreed to give officials the pblockcode for his phone, which he now regretted.
“I had at that time, the wrong and false hope that once they realised I was, you know, just a Australian writer and not a threat to the US that they would let me in,” he said. “But then they took my phone away and began downloading it and searching it.”
Kitchen said he was “terrified of retribution and reprisal from the US government” for speaking out about his experience but he wanted people to know what had happened.
He urged other Australians who were detained upon arrival into the US to accept “immediate deportation” instead of handing their phones over the border officials.
He said he had put the “offending posts” back online on his blog.
Kitchen said his phone and pblockport were handed to a Qantas flight attendant at the start of his deportation flight and he was unable to get them back until they landed in Melbourne.
Qantas confirmed that its staff received a sealed envelope from US customs officials containing the pblockenger’s personal items which was returned upon arrival in Australia.
The airline declined to comment further.
