Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
On WPRR, my show follows Amy Goodman's Democracy Now on Thursday nights, so I took a particular interest in this story. The night before Thanksgiving, Goodman was detained and interrogated at the Canadian border while heading to Vancouver to speak at a benefit for a couple of community radio stations. And Goodman says the border guards just kept asking her what she was going to talk about, demanded to see her notes for her speech (which she didn't have) and even questioned her about her views on the 2010 Winter Olympics being held in Canada.
This is very bizarre behavior for a democratic nation to be engaging in. Transcript below the fold.
JUAN GONZALEZ: That report from Kathy Tomlinson of CBC. But, Amy--Thanksgiving--tell us more about exactly what happened when you were stopped.AMY GOODMAN: Well, Juan, it was really incredible. It was Wednesday, the evening before Thanksgiving, and we're headed to the Vancouver Public Library, driving up from Seattle. When we got to the border, I thought it was just going to be routine. We handed in our passports. They stopped for a minute, and they flagged us. They told us to pull over, and it's pouring rain outside. We pulled the vehicle over. We had to get out and go into the facility.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And you were there with Dennis--
AMY GOODMAN: With Dennis Moynihan and with Chuck Scurich. We're on our Breaking the Sound Barrier tour. And while folks here were eating turkey, we thought we'd go "talk turkey" in Vancouver and talk about the columns in Breaking the Sound Barrier with Canadian listeners to Democracy Now!. Three community radio stations in Vancouver run Democracy Now!
So, we pulled in, went into the border facility. It's a large hangar-like space. And they start going through our car, but we're now inside. And then the border patrol call me up to the counter. And the guard--
JUAN GONZALEZ: And obviously, to cross into Canada, people don't need visas, they just--
AMY GOODMAN: No, that's right.
JUAN GONZALEZ:--need to show identification.
AMY GOODMAN: You need your passport. And we were very surprised. It was almost empty, this whole hangar, so we were clearly singled out.
And I go up to the counter, and the guard says, "I want your notes."
I said, "My notes?"
He said, "The notes for the talk tonight."
I was completely taken aback. I went out to the car, and I brought in the copy of Breaking the Sound Barrier. And I came in, and I said, "Well, this is my new book, and it's a book of columns. So I actually read from the columns."
He said, "I want the notes."
I said, "Well, these you can think of as my notes."
And he said, "What are you talking about?"
And I said, "Well, I actually start with the last column, which is a column"--as I was saying in this report to Kathy Tomlinson--"about Tommy Douglas."
Now, for people in the United States, he's not as famous a name. But in Canada, he's considered the greatest Canadian. Tommy Douglas is the Premier--was the Premier of Saskatchewan who brought, who pioneered the Canadian national health care system. And, interestingly, he's the grandfather of the actor Kiefer Sutherland, right? Kiefer Sutherland's mother is Shirley Douglas, the actress; his father, Donald Sutherland. But his grandfather was Tommy Douglas.
And, so I said, "I'll be talking about Tommy Douglas." Actually we were at the Douglas border crossing.
And he said, "What else?"
I said, "What else? Well, global warming."
"What else?" he said.
I said, "The global economic meltdown."
"What else?" he said.
I said, "Well, I'll also be talking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
"What else are you talking about?" he said. And--
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, is it your sense that this was some rogue customs agent or that he had basically been alerted--
AMY GOODMAN: There with another--
JUAN GONZALEZ:--and had gotten instructions to do this kind of questioning?
AMY GOODMAN: He was working with a group of customs agents, with the border guard. I mean, they're armed. Another border guard now has the book, and he's reading it. But they're also inputting everything I say. This border guard is handwriting all notes about what I say. And then the other border guard is going to the computer and inputting everything.
Then, they say, "What else?"
And I say, "That's about it."
And he says, "What about the Olympics?"
I said, "The Olympics? You mean when President Obama went to Copenhagen to push for the Olympics to come to Chicago?"
And he said, "And you didn't get them."
I said, "I know we didn't get them."
He said, "No, I'm talking about the Olympics here in 2010, in Canada."
I said, "No, I hadn't planned to talk about the Olympics.
"You're denying that you're talking about the Olympics."--
JUAN GONZALEZ: Did you even know there's an Olympics in 2010 in Canada?
AMY GOODMAN: This was not my topic, right? This is not so much news in the United States.
I really didn't know what he was referring to. And he kept pushing. He was clearly incredulous. And at my surprise, he disbelieved me even further. He clearly did not think I was telling the truth. He kept pushing, "You're denying you're talking about the Olympics?" I said, "That wasn't my plan for tonight."
Of course, as the reporter had asked me, "And what if you said yes. What would have happened then?"
Anyway, he finally tells me to sit down. And they go out and they combed through the car. I got very alarmed at what was happening, and I walked outside to where the guards were going through the car. One is on my colleague's computer, as if it was his. You know, he's just--the computer was set up and he was going through it. They were rifling through the papers and everything. They told me to get back inside. I went back inside.
Finally they came in. We're now over an hour and a half late to the talk. And they say for me to follow them into a back room. I go with them into a back room--the border guards--and they take my picture. They make four copies of the picture. They take Dennis and Chuck's pictures. Individually, one by one, they take us in the back, one by one.
And then they attached them to what they called a control document. I said, "I wasn't aware we needed a visa." And they said, "These are control documents." And they stapled them into each of our passports. And I opened it, and it said--the control document--that we had to leave by Friday. We were coming in on Wednesday--that we had to leave by Friday.
Then we were allowed to leave. We saw they had been through both of my colleagues computers, both Dennis and Chuck's computers. I don't know if they had gone into mine. And they had gone through the car. And we eventually arrived an hour and a half late to the talk.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Amazing.
AMY GOODMAN: To say the least, it was--
JUAN GONZALEZ: This is from our friendly Canadian neighbors.
AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, this was, to say the least, extremely jarring. I felt completely violated, I mean, personally and professionally. You know, and for journalism overall. Because this is not only a violation of freedom of the press, you know, the idea that, you know, the state is going into your papers, your documents, your sources, everything--but also a violation of the public's right to know. Because if journalists feel there are things they can't report on, that they'll be detained, that they'll be arrested, or they'll be questioned, they'll be interrogated; this is a threat to the free flow of information. And that's the public's loss, that's democracy's loss.
Weird. And frightening.
Politics
Comments
Sounds very odd, but I'm sorry that it happened in my country. We have freedom of expression, and I can't imagine why they'd have been asking what the topic of a speech was. Only if the topic were the promotion of hatred toward a group would they be interested in stopping it - I recall that when Fred Phelps wanted to demonstrate here there was a decision not to allow him entry.
Hopefully it was an isolated incident, a few knucklehead border guards acting out their own agenda, emboldened by the authority they are given.
Posted by: Epinephrine | December 4, 2009 9:30 AM
I hope that Epinephrine is right, that this is an isolated incident carried out by a few knucklehead border guards.
If it happens again however, then it is obviously a tactic of 'detain and inconvenience' those of discomfiting political views.
Posted by: Rodney | December 4, 2009 9:58 AM
This is very bizarre behavior for a democratic nation to be engaging in.
Oh, come now. This is about as bizarre an overstatement as I've come across this year. This was an overzealous and badly misguided civil servant.
Get a grip.
Posted by: Scott Belyea | December 4, 2009 10:01 AM
Its Amy Goodman - I don't exactly consider her an unbiased sort for what she claimed happened so I take her story with a grain of salt. Saying that - border guards can prevent someone from coming into their country for any reason. If her story is true (and I doubt it) it wouldn't be the worse experience I've seen or heard about. Depending on where and when you enter Canada - their border guards can be complete asses or the nicest people on the planet. Its incredibly inconsistent. Its part of the reason I stopped working for a Canadian company. Canada is not unique in this regard and I am repeatably surprised when someone announces their outrage over an bad experience at a border crossing. It happens every day.
Posted by: yoshi | December 4, 2009 10:03 AM
This story deserves follow-up with Canadian officials in hopes of getting some sort of rationale´ for these claims.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 4, 2009 10:12 AM
Yoshi-
If you want to call her a liar, then come right out with it. She is reporting direct factual claims of what happened to her and bias is therefore irrelevant; she's either lying or she's not.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | December 4, 2009 10:14 AM
Yoshi wrote:
Oh! I see! I thought it was something relatively rare, which is why I thought it was wrong. Now that, thanks to you, I know it happens everyday I can clearly apppreciate the inarguably high ethical standards that these actions do in fact meet.
Thank you, Yoshi, thank you!
Posted by: Valhar2000 | December 4, 2009 10:14 AM
I can't help but think of this as a kind of iterative Prisoner's Dilemma of border crossing, where the best strategy is to treat incoming people the same way their nation of origin has treated it's incoming travelers. This sort of story isn't at all uncommon for Canadian's entering the U.S. In fact more and more countries seem to be adopting the U.S. model of unreasonable paranoia, as was recently comically captured in this three-part PHD Comic.
Posted by: Abby Normal | December 4, 2009 10:19 AM
I can tell you why it happened, though obviously I don't agree with it. There's been a lot of serious protests going on, particularly by anti-poverty activists, against the games in Vancouver. There's a lot of discussion about how much money is being spent on preparing for the Olympics versus what being spent on helping homeless or addicted folks, particularly in Vancouver.
I assume she was detained and questioned because her topics and politics had the guards assuming she was there to stir things up about the Olympics.
Stupid, but there you go.
Posted by: Sivi | December 4, 2009 10:22 AM
I agree with Michael, Canadian officials really should reply to these accusations. Was this the act of bizarrely overzealous border patrol (civil servants) or was this some weird effort to stifle free speech, or was it something else? It's all pretty weird and hard to dismiss with waving of hands and wishful thinking.
I don't know if what she describes is accurate, but I have absolutely no reason to believe otherwise, so the question that follows has to be, what's up Canada?
Posted by: dogmeatib | December 4, 2009 10:24 AM
Sivi at 9 - interesting speculation. However, if we follow it to its logical conclusion, what would these border officials have done? Suppose Ms. Goodman was going to advocate against the Olympics and for more welfare. Are you insinuating she would be denied allowed entry? If so, it doesn't seem like they'd be able to manufacture a red herring excuse given their overt question; so what would be their rationale?
I think your point would be a good follow-up question to Canadian officials, i.e., "If Ms. Goodman was coming to Canada to advocate against holding the Olympics; would she have been prevented the country and on what grounds?".
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 4, 2009 10:44 AM
This is scary, but it usually happens on this side of the border.
I've been where Amy was--pre-9/11, no less. I used to get stopped and searched at Border Patrol checkpoints every time I tried to leave the Rio Grande Valley.I had my car searched, dogs and all. Four times, four searches. They're humiliating and damned inconvenient. One time, I was trying to get to San Antonio to meet with some friends, then catch a flight. I ended up missing out on the friends, and the flight. Fortunately, it wasn't a business trip.
After the missed flight incident, I had a lawyer ask the USBP why they were harassing me, a USAF veteran. I also called my congressman, Kika de la Garza, and asked the same thing.
Funny, I never got stopped again.
Posted by: Aquaria | December 4, 2009 10:58 AM
The fact that border guards will hassle someone for "Suspicion of Talking About The Olympics" is a pretty good argument in itself for just stopping holding these overblown boondoggles (at least in anything like their current form). To that, you can add the idiotic laws about signage they were trying to pass in Vancouver recently.
Whatever benefit in international chumminess is supposed to accrue from these spectacles is more than overshadowed by the restrictions on free speech and movement the PTB seem to think are necessary to make sure that they go off without a hitch, and ne'er will be heard a discouraging word.
(Disclaimer: I'm a sports-a-phobe, so feel free to apply appropriate grumpiness discount to the above)
Posted by: Eamon Knight | December 4, 2009 11:08 AM
> And I go up to the counter, and the guard says, "I want your
> notes."
What happens at this point if you just say "no"?
Posted by: David Durant | December 4, 2009 11:34 AM
I'm not surprised to hear about something like this happening in the evening. I used to make regular border crossings into Canada, and my job required clearing a truckload of equipment through customs. Daytime crossings were always easy, but the border guards and customs agents on the night shift were far more likely to make things difficult.
I never did find out why the day and night shifts were so different, but this incident fits a pattern I'm all too familiar with.
Rt
Posted by: Roadtripper | December 4, 2009 11:38 AM
@6, Ed:
Not quite. It's entirely possible to be mistaken but not lying when it comes to reporting personal experiences. Misinterpreting tone of voice, inflection, implications; misremembering wording, sequence of events; time between event and recounting; all these can distort memory just as easily as personal bias.
I don't mean to imply that Ms. Goodman is guilty of any of this - how should I know? I merely mean to point out that recalling personal experiences is often not as clear-cut as people might like to think, especially in regards to stressful situations.
Posted by: Dan | December 4, 2009 11:42 AM
Amy Goodman: highly suspect, not credible.
Some guy who calls himself yoshi: completely vetted, likely to be the next GOP vice presidential candidate.
Is that about right?
Posted by: xebecs | December 4, 2009 11:53 AM
Second what Rt said @16. I used to cross into Canada a lot on business travel, and my Canadian friends told me that the only people they let be Canadian border agents are the ones that flunk the personality test to be New York City cabdrivers.
Of course, most border agents I encountered were courteous and professional. But every once in a while...
Posted by: wubz | December 4, 2009 12:38 PM
My comment pertained to Rt@15, not @16. Sorry.
Posted by: wubz | December 4, 2009 12:41 PM
It seems like it might be better to just say, "I'm here to see the sights." With a lone exception where the border guards actually had a legitimate reason to be suspicious, every time I've crossed into or out of Canada for tourist-y reasons, they just wave me through as soon as I say, "We're headed to the Falls" or whatever. One time, I was coming up to present a paper at a conference, and when I told them as much, the guy all of a sudden was interested: "Oh? What conference?" Since it was an IEEE conference on computing, he quickly lost interest, but it got me thinking... What if I'd just said, "Going to see the Falls for a night" or "Visiting some relatives" or something? Sheesh...
Posted by: James Sweet | December 4, 2009 12:52 PM
Of course, if you happen to be Canadian and extremely right wing, and you know that someone like Amy is coming up to Canada, you could always alert the border guards to a "potential troublemaker" trying to come into Canada. What you're saying may not be true but that's not so important.
Being a Canadian (and a Vancouverite), I would very much like to know why my border guards are hassling someone invited up to Canada to speak, even if she were planning on speaking against the Olympics. What it seems to amount to is "if you are planning on speaking freely, we don't want you up here". To me, that is disgusting.
Posted by: pough | December 4, 2009 1:35 PM
When headed back from Canada, I had a similar experience with an America boarder guard. I am a US citizen born and raised with no criminal past. I had both my driver's lincense and SS card, which in early 2002, was all I needed, but it still took me two hours to get back into the country. During which time I was told: "I have no constitutional rights while in the boarder area." "Your driver's license only proved you can drive in the country. And your social security card only provide you can work in the country." You can not win an argument here," when he claimed that my girlfriend was under twenty-one when she had turned 22 three months prior. "Please talk louder," quickly followed by "Do not yell!" That is when he first put his hand on his holstered gun. I was repeated told that "We were at war." It got to the point where the guard undid the leather strap in his gun holster. But to top it off, when he did get to looking into the truck, we had a giant blue cooler. It could have been filled with anything -- Drugs, tomatoes, dead babies.... The board patrol agent never even bothered to look in the cooler. He just jerked us around for 2 hours. Then we got lost in Detroit at 1 in the morning.
Posted by: Holytape | December 4, 2009 1:55 PM
Could be some sort of political bias, fear of her touching on delicate subjects, or a border guard that got a wild hair up his ass and decided to do 'the full treatment' on people he decided he didn't like.
Or it may be that they give 'the full treatment' to every tenth car or such. I know that at some security checkpoints the military runs they select a random number every shift and, in addition to pulling in anyone suspicious, they go whole hog on these random vehicles and their occupants. Some organization have been known to roll dice.
This is supposed to throw off any people trying to get away with anything and is a partial answer to complaints of profiling. It also keeps the security folks on their toes and well practiced in the procedure. They also sometimes use a detail search and questioning to train people or test guards to make sure they know and follow the proscribed techniques.
People have to know that delays are possible any time you go through a checkpoint.
Posted by: Art | December 4, 2009 3:02 PM
How weird. No one ever bothered me as I traveled to Canada - the US agents never fail to annoy the hell out of me on the return trip though. I'm surprised to learn that the Canadians are hassling people headed north. For those who have read Ewan McGregor's "Long Way Around", I usually get the sort of treatment that was described as he and Charlie Boorman crossed from Canada into the USA. (Except that the guards never see a horde of TV cameras and suddenly go ga-ga over me.)
Posted by: MadScientist | December 4, 2009 3:09 PM
Yeah i have had an encounter With teh Candian customs and it was pretty Scary , to the point i wont ever go back to Canada (mind you i love the country, its beautiful and the people are wonderful) I was driving Cab , i had picked up a Fare going to Sarnia Canada customs (no big deal). we get to the Booth on the Canadian side of the Blue water bridge , and the booth Guard ask our citizenships I give her mine and My i.d. My passenger announces he is from Somolia , so we are flagged to Customs (no big deal as a Cab driver this is common) so they take him into the building , then the guard comes out and orders me into teh building , and tells me they might charge me with smuggling Illegals. i was detained for four hours and hounded with questions . it was a crazy experience .
Posted by: Vic Vanity | December 4, 2009 3:13 PM
Apparently, only a couple of you grasped the significance of this. It was not a random event. She was stopped because she is a journalist and because she might be there to discuss the upcoming Olympics in Vancouver, BC.
The authorities in Vancouver are very concerned about the spread of criticism concerning the Olympics. And there are MANY reasons to criticize the Olympics. The funny thing is (as Keith Olbermann pointed out) they ended up giving her a topic to report on.
Keith Olbermann: “Dateline: British Colombia. Best paranoid freedom of speech suppression. Border Guards at the Peace Arch at the U.S.-Canada line last week they stopped Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. She had weapons-carrying agents search her car, held her passport for a time. They were afraid she was going to say something dangerous in Canada… seriously. In theory you could stop somebody who was going to advocate violence or the like but their fear, as Ms. Goodman recounted it, was that she was going to speak out against the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Seriously. When she said, no, that wasn’t what she was going to talk about in Canada, they asked her again six times. You guys might want to rethink your priorities and if you are that desperate to prevent criticism of some Olympic Games, you shouldn’t detain a noted commentator and write her scripts for her.”
For Amy's follow-on story, see:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/30/amy_goodman_detained_at_canadian_border
Scroll down the page to where she interviews Christopher Shaw (a leading spokesperson for the No Games 2010 Coalition and 2010 Watch) and David Eby (the executive director of British Columbia Civil Liberties Association). When you read the transcript, you'll understand why the authorities were so concerned about her visit.
Posted by: DavidK | December 4, 2009 5:01 PM
Goodman is not lying, but she's certainly putting her own characteristic spin on it. This is not her only reporting the facts as they occurred, this is Amy Goodman, notorious opinionated person, describing an "incredible" event and being "singled out" at the border to her listening audience.
I've had inconvenient crossings at borders into and out of the US, Canada and Mexico as well as some free democracies in Europe. The reasons? Who knows? It could be that set of guards didn't like the way I looked, or they had just gotten chewed out by their supervisor and were taking it out on random travelers, or they could have been directed to act as they did. I just act respectful and let them play out their actions and go on to what I need to do.
If I had my own radio show, however, perhaps I'd vent my petulance to my listeners and invoke the holy mantra of "freedom of the press" and all that.
And, like Amy, I'd be sure to plug my new book and tell folks they can listen to my show on 3! radio stations in Vancouver.
Posted by: 10,000li | December 4, 2009 5:23 PM
That is exactly what you expect from a provincial government that put itself into a shithole of debt by financing the olympics for the thugs from the IOC.
Our healthcare is now underfinanced, we stop paying for assistance to youth programs, cuts to schoolboards and those arseholes we call MLA's in Victoria shit their pants because a substantial part of the population - anybody not making money off the olympics, which is about 95% of BC - has severe doubts about the money flow and who really benefits.
No wonder they try to stop anybody who might question what really is happening in BC.
Posted by: peter | December 4, 2009 8:03 PM
So, peter, you're saying that the Canadian government, in the end works to help keep the rich richer - like just about every other government.
Posted by: 10,000li | December 4, 2009 9:25 PM
In my experience, Canadian and UK immigration staff tend to be about the same, and generally more friendly than their U.S. counterparts. (I used to work in a job where i was on the road all the time; I'm retired now, but I still cross the border once every couple of weeks.) Having said that, of course there are some guards who go overboard for whatever reason. The government has yet to explain this incident, and I think they need to.
It does go in the other direction, too. In 1972, I was travelling by bus to Seattle. Bus passengers had to line up in the customs building for their interview, and I always ended up right behind an elderly Chinese lady who spoke no English and was returning to the U.S. with large collections of traditional Chinese medicines (i.e., plant substances labelled only in Chinese). The immigration guy took particular interest in the book I was reading, and asked me a lot of questions about politics. The penny didn't drop until I got back on the bus. Hint: do NOT try to cross an international border reading a copy of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Posted by: Vincent Manis | December 4, 2009 10:02 PM
I travel for work a lot, and in a branch of journalism. Maybe it's because I'm Canadian, but our border personnel have never given me any trouble. That said, I used to do some human relations training for the RCMP and did the same for a few groups of immigration guys, and they can be a little nuts. Of course, these were not border guards, these were the guys who track down illegals.
I have had some difficult and humourless agents on the way into the US, though. Harder to deal with than Chinese customs, depending on port of entry. (Nice guys in Minneapolis, bitchy as all get out if stationed in Montreal) One agent was Very Concerned that I was going to work illegally in the US when I was on a personal trip to visit my brother in law because of my occupation - even though I was carrying a baby and heading to Albequerque, not LA.
Posted by: 24fps | December 4, 2009 11:26 PM
yeah, there's definitely something wrong with the border crossings between BC and WA. The first time I crossed north, the Canadians got upset because I only had driving directions to my friend's place, not his exact address. so they actually called him :-p
the second time they asked me really weird questions about whether I was employed.
and ironically, I never had any problems crossing south into WA, which is pretty much the ONLY time crossing into the US wasn't a thoroughly embarrassing and uncomfortable procedure!
Posted by: jadehawk | December 5, 2009 4:11 AM
Actually if you are coming to work in Canada from the US you do need a work visa. I just had to go through some stuff with an instrument repair guy. You can either go to an embassy with 6 photos and documentation proving you have a job to do and documenting what it entails so you have your temporary work visa (with exit date) in hand at the border. Or you can get it done at the border where you take your chances on getting a jerk.
Posted by: cass_m | December 5, 2009 7:44 PM
"So, peter, you're saying that the Canadian government, in the end works to help keep the rich richer - like just about every other government."
That and also that they abandoned those they were elected to support - the sick through the health care programs, schoolchildren by keeping schools open and welfare to those who cannot find jobs in the present situation after the EI runs out.
And why? because we needed billions for an olympic village that the province/city of van. is now liable for, an upgraded four lane high way to whistler that only gets used effectively four months of the year, facilities that get torn down again shortly after the olympics.
I am sorry, if I come across as thinking the olympics to be a colossal waste of tax payers - my - money.
But that is exactly what I think.
Posted by: peter | December 5, 2009 8:10 PM
Yeah, they should've put the money into something cool, like fast ferries!
Posted by: Modusoperandi | December 5, 2009 8:36 PM
MO - I think the system Rico has in mind could be summarised:
'If you're rich you get medical care; if you're poor, pray."
Kinda the same system that was prevalent in Medieval Europe. - DJ
Posted by: DingoJack | December 5, 2009 10:40 PM
Social Darwinism is only bad if you call it Social Darwinism. I believe the term now is "Dickensian".
Posted by: Modusoperandi | December 5, 2009 11:13 PM
I'm sorry to say that wasn't an isolated incident. I sit hear shaking because my daughter just went through a similiar incident at the Border crossing at Niagara Falls from U.S. into Canada. She was on her way to see friends in Toronto and was stopped at the border for a second screening. They preceded to man handled, interigate her into confessing to having marijuana, that she obviously did not have. They let her go only after she told them her mother was on her way with a Consulate. They trashed her car, man handled her body, went up her shirt in front of male patrol officers. Tried to not let her call me. This went on for 2 hours. They obviously didn't find anything, because there was nothing to find, and finally let her go. I feel if she didn't keep telling them that I was on the way, they would have pushed this further. She had to hit the call button and scream to me that they were arresting her, because they wouldn't let her call me. They hung up on me. She is devastated, she is on the side of the road crying. I am looking online for what to do about this. I read this blog and had to write that this is happening at other borders too. When I called a friend as to what to do, they said don't worry this it's Canada they wouldn't hurt an American. Well... I'm afraid they just did. She said she feels like she was raped.
Posted by: Lynda | March 8, 2010 4:47 PM