Huffington Post reports on a fascinating use of your tax dollars: holding a woman from Australia in immigration detention who was trying to get her visa fixed so she could leave the country.
Instead of simply fixing her visa, they threw her in immigration detention instead, so ICE can deport her at your expense. (She was going to leave at her expense.)
Additionally, her family was planning a trip to the USA this summer, to travel across the country (and spend money here), to gather information to reverse some of the negative perceptions abroad about our country.
I suppose that isn't going to happen now. By deporting her, she will not be allowed back into the USA for ten years.
The start of the article (the rest appears at Huffington Post here):
Sarah Jane McCrohan, a 24-year-old Australian, says she stayed in the U.S. for about 11 hours longer than she was supposed to, and it's landed her in detention for three weeks.
She was traveling from New York to Ottawa on March 26 to go to the Australian embassy when a Canadian border officer noted that she had been in the U.S. longer than the 90 days allotted by the Visa Waiver Program, according to McCrohan and her boyfriend, Chauncey Carter, who was with her at the time. The officer suggested they go back to the American side to sort it out, they said, and they wanted to do the right thing. The point of going to the Australian embassy was for McCrohan to speak to someone there about legal avenues for her to return -- she said she hadn't even realized she had overstayed and had intended to leave the U.S. on time.
So they turned around and went back to the American side of the border crossing. Once they got there, officers detained McCrohan, and she is now set to be deported to Australia.
McCrohan, her lawyer and her supporters aren't disputing her removal, or that she stayed longer than she was supposed to, albeit unintentionally. But they say it's absurd that she has been detained for so long based on a mistake.