A British tourist was trying to leave America. Then she was detained, shackled and sent to an immigration detention centre

Every one of these awful ICE stories are terrifying, incredibly saddening and important to witness.

I have noticed a tendency for them to be focused on white-passing English-speaking women though. What's even worse than reading these is thinking about the many many people among the "32,809 people to be arrested by Ice during the first 50 days of Donald Trump’s presidency" but who cannot get press coverage so easily.

That said, the additional impact of the author's personal connection here and the realization of the situation through the subject (who is an artist) providing sketches of the conditions and people gives this whole article even more of a gut punch than the previous iterations.

I think of how broad reaching the consequences are of dealing with our boarder this way is, how it will take time to see the impact, but I'm sure it will be quite large. Also it is insane that we're telling tourists who may have had the wrong visa that they're banned from the country for 10 years. If we continue to scale up these types of violent pointless deportations we're going to have a huge impact from that as well.

Then she was told she had violated her tourist visa by working in the US. They took her fingerprints, seized her phone and bags, cut the laces off her trainers, frisked her, and put her in a cell. “I heard the door lock, and I instantly threw up.”

[...]

After Becky had been incarcerated for more than 10 days, Paul decided to go to the media. A quiet, unassuming man, he found himself live on Newsnight, Sky News and Good Morning Britain. Becky made it to every national newspaper in the UK, and had coverage in US press, too. Hours after her story broke, she was visited by an Ice officer who told her she was now “at the top of the pile” to be processed. Four days later, on a Thursday, another Ice officer came to the facility to tell Becky her flight had been booked for the following Monday.

[...]

The deportation paper Becky signed bans her from the US for the next 10 years. Paul tells me they are going to try to appeal it, but Becky says America isn’t the country she thought it was. Her advice to anyone planning to travel to the US is simply not to go. “First, because of the danger of what could happen to you. And, secondly, do you really want to give your money to this country right now?”