America? Okay, we can forget the “Land of the Free” part; but I think you need to be pretty brave or desperate to make a home there.
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The only thing to understand here is that the U.S. border is a civil rights grey zone where the border guards can deny you entry or detain you on a whim for whatever legal-sounding reason they can come up with. The claim doesn’t make sense but (and because) it doesn’t have to.
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The Guardian article called it a “stopover,” not a connecting flight. Also, it says she also had a stop in Philadelphia before Montreal. I don’t know LAX but my guess is she’d have to go through U.S. customs before getting on a domestic flight to Philly.
It seems like the refusal to entry was entirely about suspicion of her violating the terms of entry visa. CBP is full of bastards but her claims about questions regarding pregnancy or abortion seem unrelated to her being denied entry. If she was asked these questions, I doubt it was for “anchor baby” reasons. I wonder if they ever ask something like this before doing an invasive search, if they suspect smuggling.
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I’ve never had any social media account or apps. I post only comments here and that’s it. While I don’t consider it a “social media” account, I’ll be deleting my bookmark before traveling outside the U.S. When I look at a Twitter thread that someone posts here, I use a browser. My husband has both a Twitter and a Facebook account, but they are work-related. We are so very boring.
They can have fun looking at ALL my outdoor photos and my paycheck stubs that I keep on my Drive. 
Surely, I can’t be the only person in world who doesn’t have a Facebook or Twitter account?
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I don’t. Take that CBP!
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No, no you are not. I am proudly luddite when it comes to social media. (Present company excluded, of course.)
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You may not have a Facebook account, but Facebook may have an account for you.
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If I were tagged in photos or ordered from a business who uses FB. FB may have analytics on my gmail account, but my gmail account is purposefully muddled (DOB, gender, etc.)
I have tried Googling myself and it’s sad, but in a good way.
CBP officers at our POE is looking for your social media comments and contacts for anything subversive. They are not looking for FB marketing analytics.
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Me neither. We should form a club (and never speak of it again).
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There is no concept of transit in US airports. The US has no outbound immigration control which means international departure gates are not isolated–you can perfectly well walk from an international departure gate to the outside without encountering any barrier whatsoever. (I have done so once when the bird broke and I wanted food from elsewhere. And to get back to the gate I simply cleared normal domestic security.) Since they can’t confine a transit passenger the concept doesn’t exist at all, you have to be admissible to the US to transit.
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Same, exact same.
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I could qualify for that club too, I suspect many of us here could. And more likely would if they didn’t need it for work.
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If she’s not a U.S. citizen, then the burden is generally on her to argue there is some special reason to let her cross the border
She doesn’t have to answer questions, and they don’t have to let her in
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This is blowing my mind
This is why all major Canadian airports have Departure Preclearance Zones for the United States. If you fly, say, from Calgary to Houston, you clear US Customs and border security in Calgary and sit in a little “piece of Murica” hiding in the back of the airport until your flight. This allows secure international connections through Canada without the US transit problem. The flight itself is technically a domestic one from that point, and lands at a domestic terminal in the US. It’s very strange for folks not used to it. It’s basically a bodge to get around the weird US system.
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+1
Misplaced “authority” is a hell of a drug!
It’s worth noting that the response from CBP when asked by The Guardian for a comment about the incident was not a denial. Instead they issued a generic PR expression of regret if something inappropriate occurred and a promise to investigate.
The reason for that equivocal response is clear to anyone who’s been subject to questioning or secondary screening in the civil rights grey zone of the border, especially if that person isn’t a white male age 35+ carrying a U.S. passport. CBP agents ask inappropriate and weirdly random questions all the time because there’s nothing illegal about it and because the institutional culture encourages (and to some degree trains for) it.
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(Bringing this post back):
Anecdotally, when I first traveled overseas, an official at the airport, I can’t recall who he represented or if it was even clear at the time, was concerned that I might be going abroad to work illegally. (I had a student visa and a one-way ticket.) This, of course, should have been the concern of my host country, not the US, but he took the opportunity to ask some intrusive questions about how I was going to fund my stay and where my money was coming from.
I think they often take the opportunity to fish for as much info as they can, if they feel like it. I wouldn’t be surprised that the issue of the day, abortion, plays a big part in their questioning nowadays.
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The US doesn’t do “sterile transit” like the rest of the world does. Always have to clear customs, get bags, then check in again for next flight out of the place. It’s like that at all US airports, not just LAX.
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Allowing CBP to be CBP jerks on Canadian soil does raise some concerns.
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