Alistair Kitchen, an Australian man, was detained at Los Angeles airport and deported back to Melbourne due to his writings on pro-Palestine protests. After a 12-hour interrogation, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials explicitly stated his detention was linked to his blog posts about Columbia University protests. Kitchen, who had previously lived in New York and documented student movements, asserted that his political opinions influenced his treatment, highlighting concerns over freedom of speech and politically motivated border actions. His writing on the detention of another activist further fueled this scrutiny.
The CBP explicitly said to me, the reason you have been detained is because of your writing on the Columbia student protests.
It was quite an in-depth probing of my views on the war, he said.
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.
This year, Kitchen published a piece on his blog, Kitchen Counter, on the Department of Homeland Security's detention of Mahmoud Khalil.
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