Truly amazing. A Palestinian Freshman student who had been living in Lebanon, was interrogated and his phone and computer exhaustively searched for multiple hours, until an agent declared that because a friend of his had declared some political opinions, he would not be able to enter the US to attend Harvard.
I myself have been close to civilian employee and fellow sailor evaluations, though I’ve never actually written an evaluation, I do know that evaluating an employee is a pretty long-term process and not one that a Customs agent can adequately do as a person of interest passes through. The fact that Harvard had admitted Ismail B. Ajjawi as a student means that they had performed all of the evaluations and security clearances needed. So why Customs felt they had a better understanding of Ajjawi than Harvard did is difficult to understand.
U. S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Michael S. McCarthy sent an emailed statement to the paper. “Applicants must demonstrate they are admissible into the U.S. by overcoming ALL grounds of inadmissibility including health-related grounds, criminality, security reasons, public charge, labor certification, illegal entrants and immigration violations, documentation requirements, and miscellaneous grounds.”
This set of possible reasons is of interest because pretty much all of these grounds for inadmissibility could have been cleared up long before Ajjawi got on the plane in Lebanon. The reason he was given sounds suspiciously like a made-up excuse to justify a higher-up order.
