Wrangell fisherman and business owner Syliva Ettefagh said she, her husband and friends were returning from a vacation in Costa Rica this weekend when she got held up at Los Angeles International Airport. Ettefagh has been an American citizen since birth. She was born in Iran, to an American mom and an Iranian dad, before that country’s Islamic Revolution.
Ettefagh didn’t know about Trump’s order when she got to LAX, so when she was stopped at passport control, she didn’t think too much of it, until an agent led her to a door.
“And I asked him what was going on and he said, ‘well, you can thank Trump for this,’” Ettefagh said.
Ettefagh said she was held in a crowded room with at least 50 others, most of them foreign. One person she spoke to had been there for five hours. She saw a security guard treat an elderly woman roughly for trying to use her phone. She said she noisily protested that she was a U.S. citizen and that holding her was unconstitutional. She says she was held for an hour. She did not miss her connecting flight, but Ettefagh said the whole exercise seems pointless and wasteful.
“You know to hold the country secure, I’m all for it,” Ettefagh said. “But it’s how you do it. If you need security, why name 7 countries? Why not have security?”
Ettefagh said she thinks Customs and Border Protection agents made a mistake in holding her because they were blindsided.
“And in looking up the chain, to have an idea of what they were supposed to do, there was nothing for them,” Ettefagh said.
Ettefagh said she’s certain if she hadn’t been as outspoken about her rights, she might have languished in the holding room for much longer.
Liz Ruskin is the Washington, D.C., correspondent at Alaska Public Media. Reach her at lruskin@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Liz here.
