Scholar hesitant to return to U.S. after detention
A prominent Holocaust historian detained last week at Bush Intercontinental Airport en route to speaking at Texas A&M says he might think twice before returning to the United States.
A prominent Holocaust historian who was detained at George Bush Intercontinental Airport en route to speak at a Texas A&M University symposium last week said Sunday that he might think twice before returning to the United States given the new climate surrounding immigration.
“No question, I’ll be a little reluctant to come back, even if I love this country,” Henry Rousso wrote in an email to the Chronicle as he prepared to board a flight back to Paris. “The problem is that this incident can happen any time to anybody.”
Rousso was denied entry into the U.S. and whisked into a room where roughly 30 people waited Wednesday afternoon. One officer said he would soon be deported, according to an account he published Sunday on the Huffington Post.
His detention, officers later said, was because an “inexperienced” immigration official did not realize that a tourist’s visa would suffice to allow Rousso into the U.S. for research and educational purposes, according to Rousso’s
essay and a Texas A&M professor. Texas A&M secured his release after 10 hours, Rousso said, and representatives for ICE and Customs and Border Patrol did not return requests for comment.
His account comes as federal officials have put almost every immigrant here illegally on notice for deportation and just weeks after a national travel ban from seven majorityMuslim countries caused widespread confusion at airports across the country, including IAH.
Grilled with questions
Academics have been vocal in their protest of Trump’s immigration policies. More than 6,500 professors worldwide said in a petition they would no longer attend U.S. conferences because of Trump’s executive action on immigration. University presidents in Texas urged international students, especially from Trump’s seven banned countries, to avoid leaving the U.S., fearing that they would not be able to reenter the country.
Rousso, who spoke at A&M about “Writing in Dark Times” on Friday, described in his written account a half-dozen people he waited with in the early hours of Thursday morning. Two officers showed one man a plane ticket, told him to stand up and put him in handcuffs.
“I could not believe my eyes,” Rousso wrote in French on the Huffington Post. “I wondered if this was the same fate that awaited us.”
Rousso wrote he was grilled with questions about his mother, his father, where he lives, where he works. Perhaps at issue, he guessed, was that he had a recently expired visa from an employment stint at Columbia University. He said his birthplace — Egypt — also could have played a role in his treatment. An officer told him it was a random check.
Rousso said he sat in the waiting room for nearly half a day without a phone. He said he was regularly offered food and water, and then signed a log to indicate if he accepted.
Meanwhile in College Station, Richard Golsan, director of the Melbern Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M, received a call from an immigration official.
“‘We have a man here who claims to know you,’” the man said, according to Golsan. He answered several questions about the purpose of Rousso’s travel, Golsan said, and he thought the matter was solved.
No comparison ‘so far’
Hours later, Golsan heard Rousso would be on the next plane back to Paris. The A&M scholar called the director of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study, which hosted the symposium, who then mobilized Texas A&M President Michael Young. A legal team secured his release. Golsan said Rousso was escorted out of the airport early Thursday morning, when he flagged a taxi and stayed at a local hotel.
“This is not the way we want to bring visiting dignitaries to the U.S., or to Texas A&M,” Golsan said Sunday afternoon, calling Young’s foresight in preemptively organizing legal assistance “incredible.”
“My situation was nothing compared to some of the people I saw who couldn’t be defended as I was,” Rousso wrote on Twitter on Saturday.
Rousso’s scholarship considers the southern French Vichy government that operated during World War II, and he has spoken at Texas A&M several times.
At last week’s symposium, he addressed how historians should write about recent issues “in an era where opinions, ‘post-truth’ and so called democratization of knowledge are predominant.”
As he waited at the Houston airport on Wednesday, he told the Chronicle, he weighed connections between the topics he studies and current U.S. policy.
“The arbitrary power of an administration is the same whatever is the epoch,” he said. “And obviously, there is a context of a growing xenophobia. But I won’t compare the context of the Nazi occupation of France with the situation today in the U.S. So far.”