Disabled Woman Denied Entrance To US Due To Private Medical Records

Jah-Wren Ryel writes "In 2012, Canadian Ellen Richardson was hospitalized for clinical depression. This past Monday she tried to board a plane to New York for a $6,000 Caribbean cruise. DHS denied her entry, citing supposedly private medical records listing her hospitalization. From the story: '“I was turned away, I was told, because I had a hospitalization in the summer of 2012 for clinical depression,’’ said Richardson, who is a paraplegic and set up her cruise in collaboration with a March of Dimes group of about 12 others.'"

Comments

Collusion

[Anonymous Coward]

How did they get her Canadian medical records? Canada's hospitals are run by government... did the government really hand over all of Canadians' private medical records to a foreign country?

What scum.

Umm, what?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's not exactly a surprise at this point that the only thing keeping the DHS from telling you where you left your keys this morning is the fact that they are unhelpful assholes, not the fact that they don't know; but why would the DHS consider a depressed Canadian (whose itinerary, and thus the fact that she'd be on a boat for most of her time here, were presumably also known to them) an entry problem? Tourists, while occasionally irksome, are basically pure profit, and it's not like she's going to be sponging off our kick-ass public health system, or stealing our jobs from her wheelchair.

Is there some catch-all 'medical refusal' category left over from the good old days of TB screenings at Ellis Island that somebody felt like powertripping on? What sort of insane logic is at work here?

Re:Umm, what?

[Solandri]

This is CBP (customs and border patrol). Although they are a part of DHS now, they've pretty much had free reign to deny people entry at the border for whatever reason long before they became a part of DHS.

I lived in Point Roberts and commuted to Canada for work 5 days a week for 3 years, with weekend shopping trips to mainland Washington. So I got very familiar with how CBP works. You're probably right that it was some border agent power tripping. But aside from U.S. citizens, nobody has an inherent right to enter into the U.S. (and sometimes they even make U.S. citizens feel like you don't have a right to enter). Their default is to deny a foreigner entry unless the agent feels comfortable letting the person in, not let the person in unless the agent can find a reason to deny them entry. If you do or say anything which makes the agent wary or suspicious, you risk being denied entry. If pressed, they will just make up a reason if they're deciding based on a gut feeling. Be polite, answer their questions openly, no veiled insults, no jokes which might be misconstrued, and you'll usually fly right through. If they say something insulting to you, smile and ignore it.

Yes that leaves a lot of opportunity for agents to act like an asshole or practice all sorts of discrimination. It doesn't matter to them. There's very little consequence for them incorrectly denying someone entry, while they suffer huge consequences for incorrectly allowing someone in. Most of the agents I met were polite and professional. All were strict. Only a few were jerks (all of us who commuted cross-border knew who the jerk agents were). Their job isn't to be fair, it's to prevent threats from entering the country. If you're trying to judge them based on fairness, I could write pages of crazy things they did (like strip someone of their Nexus pass for life because a half-eaten sandwich in the car's trash had a slice of tomato, tomatoes being on the USDA's prohibited list that month - yes the list changed monthly). I don't necessarily agree with it, but that's just how CBP works. The whole system is designed to err on the side of the country's safety - denying entry to lots of innocents is considered a worthwhile tradeoff for prohibiting entry to one threat.

Re:Not due to private medical records

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Not due to private medical records, due to her medical condition being advertised all over the internet

There have been at least 12 others with similar experiences at the border. I think it is unlikely that they've all written books about their circumstances.

Re:Not due to private medical records

[qbast]

Interesting theory, but TFA says: "A personal relationship breakup in 2012 caused her clinical depression and hospitalization (there was no police involvement)." So in other words they could not have known about hospitalization in 2012 (which was specifically cited as reason for denial) from police reports. The book mentioned in comments also was published several years earlier, so it could not be source of information either. It leaves either Canadians voluntarily sharing confidential medical record with US (which makes health minister lying scum) or NSA obtained illegal access and is sharing with other agencies.

Ridiculous border restrictions

[GauteL]

This reminds me of a former co-worker of mine at a university in Britain. My co-worker was Indian, held an MSc and a Research Fellow position at said university, while also being halfway through a PhD at the same university.

He was scheduled to attend a conference in the US together with our line manager, but had to cancel as the US blankly refused him entrance on the grounds that the risk of him becoming an illegal immigrant was too high. Letters from the university did not help.

Now, you may well be proud of your country, but is it really realistic to expect someone to be so desperate to live in the US that they will drop a relevant, career-progressing and decently paid job in another Western country to work in the kitchen of a golf club as an illegal immigrant?

He now ironically works in the UK for a large, very high-tech US company.

Re:Ridiculous border restrictions

[Alioth]

It doesn't surprise me. An Indian friend of mine told me of all the extra things Indians have to do to get a visa that British people don't, for example if an Indian has to go to the US Embassy to apply, they have to turn up in a suit or they get denied. British people can turn up in jeans and T-shirt. Immigration services (and this isn't just the US) are often filled with arbitrary rules made up by petty officials who enjoy being little Hitlers. I lived in the US for something like 6 years. The INS in the US wasn't a particular problem, but the US Embassy in London may have come out of the pages of Franz Kafka.

I had two run-ins with the US Embassy in London. The first was when getting my L-1 visa issued. They refused it, and told me I had to go to the Embassy for an interview. Since I don't live anywhere near London it's quite a trip, so I get there nice and early. Once you go past an airport-like security, you go into this large waiting room with all the other foreigners wanting visas. It's sort of a bit like a cross between a delicatessen and a railway ticket office - you get given a deli-style ticket with a number on it and they announce your number when they want to see you, and then you go to a train station style window to be interviewed (no privacy of course). I had no idea why they had refused the application, they just stamp it "224(g)" (IIRC) which means they need more information. The numbers don't seem to be read out in any particular sequence so you can't tell when you're going to be called, and you know if you miss your number they won't call it again and they'll make you come back another day, so you can't even get into a good book while you're waiting (typically 3-4 hours). They have these "newspapers" around the waiting room, I think they were called "Going USA". The first part of this newspaper was about happy emigrants who had left your country (and for some bizarre reason, the majority of them seemed to go to the US to run gas stations), how shit your country is and how wonderful the US is. The second half of this newspaper is dedicated to telling you how we're not going to give you a visa anyway.

Finally I got called for my "interview", the guy asked me one question: how long have you worked for your company? I told him, he stamped my passport and said "Your visa will be in the mail".

They could have asked me that on the phone. Or even an email. Instead of wasting money and time on a day going to London and waiting in that awful room for half of it.

The second time was when my visa was extended in the US. That part of it was pretty painless. However, I wanted to go and see my family and you have to get a new visa put in your passport. This should be a formality since the visa is already approved by the INS, so really it should be a matter of filling in the form, sending off the passport to the US Embassy in London, and a few days later getting it back. Oh no, not so easy. They refused it again! They said the form I used was out of date. So I went to the US Embassy website and downloaded the new form. It turned out to be IDENTICAL to the old form, except for the date printed at the bottom. That stupidity cost an airline change fee and an extra two weeks off work that I would have rather taken off when I chose to take them off.

Don't think I'm ragging on the US exclusively here. This kind of douchebaggery isn't confined to the US. My next door neighbour is Albanian, and exactly the kind of person we want coming to our country, she has an engineering degree, speaks three languages fluently and is a very smart person. However the British Embassy treated her as if she were a criminal, straight up saying to her "You're a liar" about her relationship with her husband. The treatment she was given in my country's name made me ashamed to be British.

Re:D for douchebag?

[Seumas]

It's the "H" in DHS that you need to be concerned about. How does it not make everyone extremely uncomfortable as soon as a government institution (that spreads and entangles everything everywhere) starts referring to "the homeland". It has a very specific cold-war connotation to it and accurately conveys the mentality behind the department (and the government, overall) of the last decade.

Re:very understandable

[bob_super]

Slightly offtopic, but I can't resist reposting one of the Onion's best predictions (jan 17 2001)

Re:very understandable

[Trepidity]

That's an interesting social difference I noticed after moving to Denmark. It's super hush-hush to get any kind of treatment for mental illness in the U.S., and many people avoid doing it at all because of the stigma. But here, someone will just casually mention in conversation that they were out of work for 3 months last year because they enrolled in a treatment program to treat their depression + drinking problem. The state paid for medical leave and provided a treatment program, it worked, and they went back to work 3 months later, and they have no problem disclosing that. It's just seen as a thing that can happen and should be properly treated, but otherwise no need to be ashamed of it.