My Detainment Story or: How I Learned to Stop Feeling Safe in My Own Country and Hate Border Agents*
[Update: Josh Neufeld has made a really great comic inspired by this piece: Crossing the Line. You can see a panel below, and read the whole thing on The Nib.]
Earlier this month, OTM producer Sarah Abdurrahman, her family, and her friends were detained for hours by US Customs and Border Protection on their way home from Canada. Everyone being held was a US citizen, and no one received an explanation. Sarah tells the story of their detainment, and her difficulty getting any answers from one of the least transparent agencies in the country.
[Hi folks. This piece has been getting a lot of traffic, so we wanted to direct you to more of Sarah's enormously good reporting if you're interested. A nice place to start is her firsthand account of what it was like to coordinate information for anti-Gaddafi rebels, or her profile last month of the newly launched Al-Jazeera America. Or you can just go here for all of her OTM appearances.]
*The original title for this story referred to Border Patrol. While Border Patrol is a unit within the US Customs and Border Protection agency, the story is about CBP. The title was changed to reflect a more accurate description of the accompanying story.
