Leading
French academic threatened with deportation at Houston airport
Henry
Rousso was due to take part in a symposium at Texas A&M
University
Ten-hour
ordeal highlights ‘total arbitrariness and incompetence’
Tom Dart in Houston
@Tom_Dart
Sunday 26 February
2017 19.54 GMT
A prominent French
historian has said he was detained for more than 10 hours in Houston
and threatened with deportation, in the latest of several examples of
high-profile individuals being questioned extensively at US airports
before being allowed entry.
Henry Rousso flew
from Paris to Houston last Wednesday to take part in a symposium at
Texas A&M University but was wrongly detained and almost sent
back to France after a border guard failed to understand Rousso’s
entitlements under visa rules, university officials said.
Rousso said on
Twitter that he was “detained 10 hours at [Houston’s George Bush
intercontinental airport] about to be deported. The officer who
arrested me was ‘inexperienced’.”
While he was held,
Rousso contacted university officials who attempted to secure his
release. “He was waiting for customs officials to send him back to
Paris as an illegal alien on the first flight out,” Richard Golsan,
a professor at Texas A&M, told the Eagle.
Following scorn
poured on Donald Trump by the French president and the mayor of Paris
after the US president suggested in a speech last week that Paris is
unsafe for American tourists, the incident has sparked fresh outrage
in France. Emmanuel Macron, a presidential candidate, tweeted on
Sunday to declare that “there is no excuse for what happened to
Henry Rousso. Our country is open to scientists and intellectuals.”
Fatma Marouf,
director of the A&M Immigrant Rights Clinic, told the Guardian on
Sunday that she found out about Rousso’s situation at about 10pm on
Wednesday night and worked to get him freed, which happened three or
four hours later. She said that Rousso came to the US on a visitor’s
visa which normally does not allow recipients to work or receive
compensation, but there are exceptions for some academic activities,
such as giving lectures or speeches.
“My best guess is
that it was his honorarium, I don’t think the officer who decided
to detain him really understood the visa requirement and the
technicalities on getting an honorarium which are permitted under his
visa,” Marouf said. A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson
did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Raised in France
after his family were exiled from Egypt, the country of his birth,
the 62-year-old Rousso is an expert on antisemitism and the Vichy
government in France during the second world war and writes and
lectures on the importance of remembering and learning from that
period in modern history. He works at the French National Centre for
Scientific Research. He has also had links with several distinguished
American institutions, including Columbia University, Harvard
University, Yale University and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
After landing in
Houston he was taken to an interview room where an officer suspected
him of travelling on another, expired, visa, he wrote in the
Huffington Post’s French edition.
He credited the
intervention of the university officials with securing his release
and said he did not know why he was singled out for special scrutiny,
but doubted it was by chance. “I’m always wary of making any
hasty conclusions. This incident has caused me a certain discomfort,
it’s impossible to deny. I cannot, however stop myself from
thinking of all those who have to suffer these humiliations and this
legal attack without the protections which I was able to benefit
from,” he wrote.
“It is now
necessary to face up to the total arbitrariness and incompetence on
the other side of the Atlantic,” he wrote. “I don’t know which
is worse. What I do know, loving this country as I always have, is
that the United States is no longer quite the United States.”
Last week it was
reported that border agents in Florida detained the US citizen son of
the boxer Muhammad Ali and asked if he was a Muslim, while the
celebrated Australian children’s author Mem Fox said she “collapsed
and sobbed like a baby” after being held at Los Angeles
international airport for two hours, insulted and questioned about
her visa status.
Rousso did not
immediately return a comment request on Sunday. He is scheduled to
fly back to France on Sunday – accompanied to the airport by a
French consulate official to ensure his check-in process goes
smoothly, Golsan told the Guardian.
Two more French
academics are set to visit Texas A&M for a conference this week,
he said. Golsan added that there was concern in the academic
community that Rousso’s predicament was a sign that the
anti-immigrant “spirit of Trump” has emboldened enforcement
officials to behave overzealously. The professor said that even
though an immigration agent called him to confirm details in Rousso’s
story at about 4.30pm on Wednesday, he was not released for another
eight hours or so and grew anxious that he might be shackled and
handcuffed if forced to fly back to France.
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