Shamed, frisked, hand-cuffed and heaped with racist abuse by the US immigration personnel at the New York airport, city boy K.M. Kumar is back home.
Dejected, he now plans to head to a new destination, Canada.
Kumar shared his 22-hour-long ordeal at New York airport with
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After pursuing a course in bio-technology from a local college, he applied for a seat in New England College, Henniker, New Hampshire in the US, to pursue Masters in Computer Information Sciences.
“Everything seemed perfect and I was on cloud nine, dreaming of a bright career,” he recalls.
On December 30, he flew to London and from there to New York the same day. Little did he know that the next few hours would change the course of his career plans. “Even as the immigration officer was about to put the stamp, a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer came and engaged him in a small talk. As he came to know that I was an Indian, the CBP officer exclaimed: “May be he is the last Indian coming through; I’ll just grab him,” and quickly took away my passport and I-20 from the immigration officer.”
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As Kumar walked along, the CBP officer asked him if he was doing some fraud. When the former denied, the officer said if he did not speak the truth he could land in jail. He carefully scrutinised his passport and I-20 and asked him if he had paid the college fee and demanded to see the receipt.
The CBP also asked where did he plan to stay in the US and details about the accommodation. “After a while, I was taken to a room, made to face the wall and frisked.
The terminal was about to close and so the CBP officer handed him over to two other officers who cuffed his hands in the back. “With my hands cuffed, they made me drag my luggage bag from one terminal to the other,” he says.