Funnily enough, I was just listening to the original novella for the first time as an audiobook. I was surprised how many details of the movie (including the blood-wire test) came from the original.
Madoline, very sorry for your predicament and hope you have recovered. As an immigrant, I’ve never been detained but you know one always wonder if something is not good enough in their paperwork. Good to see your love for cats. Personally, I do not like cats, but thats another topic.
IMNAL (I am not a lawyer) but follow the immigration forums because I am an immigrant.
I have read about women being detained at USCIS being asked this question to make sure that they get extra support. Here is an article from ACLU on this :
I am not going to say you didn’t need a visa - but it does seem odd that you would need a US visa to go to Antarctica where as far as I know the US hasn’t claimed any territory, and I though a Canadian citizen transiting through the US didn’t need a visa* so I can’t blame the immigration/custom agent at this tiny airport for being confused.
* I may have misunderstood - but the way I understood your post you flew from Canada to Bellingham where you were going to pick up another flight to a non-US destination because if you were flying from Bellingham to another US airport you wouldn’t be “transiting”
I was working for a US university, funded by a US government agency on a US science base (McMurdo base). Thus the need for a US work visa.
I worked for a law-enforcement agency and someone around 2015 there were policy changes requiring that pregnant detainees and those who had experienced a “pregnancy outcome” within the last eight weeks had to be treated differently than other detainees. Which of course meant that most biologically female detainees had to be asked because while it might be obvious that someone is eight months pregnant , it’s not so obvious that someone is eight weeks pregnant or that there was a “pregnancy outcome” within the last eight weeks.
Not always! A friend of mine asked someone when they were due, just making conversation. The woman was not pregnant.
I’ve heard enough stories like that to know never to ask a woman when she is due, unless she’s giving birth that moment, or she breeches the topic herself.
And not even then.
Emphasis added. I see what you did there.
I once flew to England via MSP-YTO-LGW and went through US Customs at Toronto instead of Minneapolis. I thought it a bit odd, but all my flights to and from Canada alone have always been through Customs on the Canadian end of the trip.
Thanks for the kind words, am77494.
It seems like what’s mentioned in the ACLU article is specific to hieleras. I had to Google what ‘hielera’ is/means, but I don’t think it’s quite the same as the holding facility I was in at the airport. We had access to bathrooms, and food, water and toiletries. It wasn’t overcrowded, but my time in there still sucked.
Madolline
Just wanted to say welcome to the SDMB, deported-cat-sitter. It’s pretty neat to have the subject of a thread show up and join the conversation. Plus, you’ll never really have to explain your Dopername.
Hi, @Dag_Otto 
That is why we women wanted to know more about this question. There are legit questions and there is harassment. I wanted to verify that it was asked in a legit way.
US Border Patrol is absolute garbage. They can & do ask foreign travelers literally any question that strikes their fancy and bar them entry with almost no recourse.
Border Patrol is your front-row seat to the cutting edge of the American police state. It’s a test lab for law enforcement to experiment with new abuses of power. Of course they’ll ask women about abortion for absolutely no reason.
Ahem! UK Immigration are quite as bad.
They are trained to sniff out visa breakers by asking key questions intended to reveal whether you intend to do any sort of work and thereby break the terms of tourist visitors visa. Any sort of payment in kind for a service counts as work. That includes accommodation. This catches a lot of volunteers. Especially idealistic types who tend to talk too much and share their hopes and dreams who plan to stay for several months.
Sometimes immigration are told to look out for single women traveling alone. Especially those going to stay with someone they met on the Internet. This was a response to concerns about people trafficking.
Since Brexit, and the ending of the free mobility of labour rules with the 27 countries of the EU, immigration have taken to deporting youngsters arriving from Europe looking for work. Younger workers from the EU are the backbone of the hospitality business London and now all those businesses are hard pressed to find staff.
The Brexit mantra is ‘strong secure borders’ and a highly controlled immigration policy that welcomes only the brightest and best to ‘global Britain’. Only elite professionals, no low grade workers serving tables or other poorly paid jobs. These political policies inform the procedures followed by immigration and the Border Force.
I’ve met cat sitters in London. It is quite popular with Russians and South Americans. I guess they omit to mention this arrangement to immigration and walk and talk like short stay tourists.
Getting through immigration smoothly is matter of ensuring you fit into one of their expected categories and have evidence to back it up should it be required.
The thing about the US immigration and pregnant women is interesting. I have a friend who emigrated to the US and flew his wife back to the UK to give birth cared for by the NHS for free rather than face the excessive costs in the US.
Well, that makes a lot of sense. It’s also a big part of the breakup of the ex and I; he was British with health problems and I am a Yankee with no job in the U.K., and not much chance of getting one in my field because all E.U. folks were eligible before I was.
Your memory is just fine. I did the same thing, when I visited Australia a few times back in the 1990s.
The idea, as I learned, was that flights from Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, and other North American cities, would converge on Honolulu at the same time. Meanwhile, flights from Sydney and Auckland would arrive at about the same time. Everybody would change planes (not immediately, it took about three or four hours for everybody to arrive and for baggage to be transferred), but they’d continue on to their destination. I’d fly Toronto to Honolulu on Canadian Airlines, and continue from there on Qantas to Sydney. The reverse happened on the return.
Thing is, US Customs was never really involved. We did not go through US Customs leaving Toronto, nor did we go through it in Honolulu. We were in a closed terminal of the airport, for passengers in transit between North America and Australia/New Zealand only, so US Customs didn’t need to be involved. Oh, they were there, but in the form of one officer at the aircraft door as you exited, asking, “Destination?” I always answered “Sydney” (which was true), and was waved through, with no other questions or examination of my passport. Those whose destination was Honolulu were, naturally, directed to the US Customs desks at the airport. But those of us just transiting, on the way to Australia or New Zealand, were not.
Those days are over, I guess, but it leads to a question for @deported-cat-sitter : nowadays, there are direct nonstop flights between Canada and Australia. Why did you not take one of those? Why would you connect in the United States when you did not need to? Please do not misunderstand, but on another message board, I’ve encountered many Europeans who believe that the only way to get from Europe to Toronto or Montreal (say) is by connecting in New York. Did you not know that you can go directly from Australia to Canada without connecting in the United States?
This may explain the pregnancy questions, but it fails to answer why these people thought it was their business whether this woman had an abortion or not. It’s just damn creepy.
There were no direct flights between Brisbane and Vancouver (or anywhere in Canada) until 3 July. I left on 30 June.
I could get a flight from Brisbane to Sydney or Melbourne that’d go straight to Vancouver, but connections in Australia are messy. Especially in Sydney where you’ve got to make your own way between terminals (shuttle comes every 30 mins, or you can pay for a taxi or train).
I was just thinking about this and perhaps if she entered pregnant/obviously showing and leaving non-showing and w/o a child they were looking to see what happened to the baby and perhaps checking for human trafficking / selling babies.