American Border Guards Strip Searched Me Because I Had a Guitar

If you’ve ever travelled to the USA, there's a good chance that you've come to loathe American border officers. But while your hatred may stem from their suspicion of anyone with a foreign-sounding surname or accent, you've got nothing on me. I had endure a full body search and hours with America's finest, all for the crime of wanting to turn up to some bars and play a few unpaid gigs with my guitar.

I was planning on travelling in the footsteps of my musical idols – Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, John Lee Hooker; well-travelled men with guitars and drug addictions – taking the Greyhound through the South and up to the West Coast for several weeks, before visiting my aunt in Alabama and holing up in some motel somewhere in the Mississippi Delta to record some music of my own. I'd also emailed a number of bars in the hope of playing some open mic nights along the way, which I assumed would be OK because, on the visa waiver programme, it says it's fine for amateurs to take part in "musical, sports, or similar events or contests, if not being paid for participating”.

Before my visit to the South, my girlfriend and I wanted to travel through California. Since I live in London and she in Constance, Germany, we flew to the US independently, planning to meet at LAX.

My journey went smoothly enough, until I got to Minneapolis, where I was supposed to catch my connecting flight. That was my first point of entry to the Land of the Free, so I had to go through a border check. The officer checked my passport, looked at my guitar and asked, "Are you a musician?" to which I replied that I'm a hobby musician and was hoping to play some small shows and maybe some open-mics.

Then he asked me when I'd last been in the US. I told him that I had come from Germany to study in Seattle in 2011. "What did you do that for?" he yelled. I studied philosophy while I was in Seattle, so I found it interesting that this strangely aggressive man wanted to navel gaze about the purpose of education right here in passport control. But before I could offer a response, he looked at me sternly and said, "My colleagues have some more questions for you."

I was brought into a room with some more highly suspicious individuals. For example, a boy from India in his early twenties who'd been kept there for almost a day on just water and crisps because something had supposedly been wrong with his student visa. Then there was a family with a small child who wouldn't stop crying and an elderly British lady visiting her daughter who'd been pulled off my flight and looked absolutely terrified. "Why are you visiting your daughter?" an officer barked at her, before she explained that's what families do when they live far away from each other.

I sat in silence, worrying about keeping my girlfriend waiting at LAX, until I was called to the counter by a guard named Officer James B. Officer James began repeating a bunch of questions that I'd already been asked – what was I doing in his country, essentially – and I gave exactly the same answers I'd given before. I got the impression that he thought I was a professional musician, which would have been kind of flattering from any other stranger but the man detaining me against my will in an airport holding room.

At one point, Officer James told me quickly and off-the-record that they could throw me in jail straight away, without seeing a judge or with any due legal process. I know America's reputation for rationality isn't great, but I still found that pretty shocking, given the fact I wasn't presenting any conceivable threat whatsoever and had been nothing but compliant.

My ticket.

After that brief threat that my rights would waived because I had a guitar in my possession, I was ordered to go back to the waiting room and take a seat. Another border officer then asked me to bring them my travel bag so that they could have a thorough rummage.

After they'd finished going over my bag, emptying my aftershave and, weirdly, piercing all of my condoms, Officer James pulled out some papers. One of them had the dates and locations of the shows I'd arranged to play under my stage name, John Vouloir, which I hadn't told them yet because nobody had asked and I didn't think it was important. I wanted to know where and how they had obtained that information. "America knows everything," I was told.

Next came the body search. I was asked into a room that looked a lot like a prison cell – toilet, sink and table all made of steel, with no window or natural light. I still hadn't been told what grounds I was being held under. For the next ten minutes or so, an overweight officer breathed all over me while he searched for contraband. He didn't find anything.

I got dressed and endured another round of questioning. By this point I'd been detained for about three hours and was anxious that my girlfriend, who would have touched down in LA by then, would be going mad with worry. I asked if I could make a phone call and was told that I could only call an American number, so I asked if I could call my aunt in Alabama. The border officers immediately accused me of lying about her. I was confused as to how they could find out my stage name but fail to uncover the fact I have a relative who's been living in the States for years.

I was then interrogated

with similar questions. This time it felt more official and Officer James jotted down some notes. After about ten minutes in the interrogation, one of his colleagues came into the room and urged him to hurry up. She told him that he only had a few minutes left to complete the interrogation. When he'd finished questioning me, he gave me a document that I had to sign, but that I wasn’t allowed to actually read due to time concerns.
An email from the author to the press office of the Munich Consulate. The subject reads: "Entry into the USA denied / Treated beneath contempt".

It turns out that I was denied entry because I was on an illegal business trip, or something along those lines. After three hours of disturbing uncertainty and wondering if I would end up in a cell for the night, I was told I would be sent back to Europe – or to Amsterdam, more specifically. When I arrived, I was given an envelope containing my passport a plane ticket to London, which was nice. But the poor Indian guy I'd been interrogated and flown back with wasn't afforded the same luxury and had no idea how he was going to get home.

A non-response from the Munich consulate.

The question is, why did the US target me? Why have I been put on the SSSS (Secondary Security Screening Selection) list – something that was described as "unconstitutional" by the civil liberties union of Washington State? In 2012, British tourists Leigh Van Bryan and his girlfriend were thrown into jail by American border officers because Leigh had tweeted that he wanted to "destroy America and dig up Marilyn Monroe in LA".

Although he explained to immigration officers that "to destroy" means to "party really hard" in English slang and that the remark about Monroe was just a bad joke, it didn't stop the border officials from actually searching the couple's bags for spades and shovels. But I didn't tweet anything about destroying America or exhuming dead movie stars; I simply arrived at Minneapolis airport with a guitar, not unlike – I'd imagine, at least – thousands of other people arriving in the US with instruments every year.

Is it too narcissistic to assume that a couple of blogs I wrote – one about how I’m not a huge Obama fan and another about drone warfare – landed me in trouble? Or perhaps, for whatever reason, that they had been reading my emails to the bars I'd been arranging gigs with? That might seem a little far-fetched and like a complete waste of their time and resources, but after Edward Snowden's PRISM revelations, it's clear that anything can be done to protect the country from the threat of such nefarious figures as an amateur German musician with a guitar and a bus pass.

Follow Johannes on Twitter: @JohnVouloir

More times people have been unfairly arrested:

I was Slapped About then Arrested by Turkish Riot Police

New York Cops Will Arrest You for Carrying Condoms

I was Arrested for Trying to Report on Saturday's EDL Rally