German teens denied entry to US for traveling ‘under false pretenses’ and ‘intended to work’: Border Patrol

Every time I've been to Cuba I show up in the airport and basically have a car rented, maybe first night in a hotel. Then we drive wherever we feel like and usually pick up a hitchhiker or two that will have a "sister" that has a room for rent.
It has almost always been clean, friendly, cheap, and a good breakfast. Rinse, repeat. I love travelling like this and have generally done this everywhere I've gone in the third world. Apparently the US doesn't even measure up to third world.

I saw this in an episode of border patrol Canada when a guy was coming to help his friend in Canada do yard work\landscaping. The officers said he was trying to take a Canadian job, work illegally, and was barred from entering the country.
- My buddy had the same deal going into the US. Was going to take a month off and visit and while there was going to help reno his backyard. Just lifting and hammering. Another body.
  Customs said literally the exact same thing to him (he was taking a job from an American) and said he could not allow entry. He tried to make it happen a year later and customs grilled him but let him enter that time.

They're lucky they were sent home instead of to an El Salvador concentration camp.
- They were the right color of skin.
  
  It likely saved them, but being white still doesn't guarantee your safety from the US gulags.

Travel advice to USA has pretty much always been to have your destination/hotel at hand for customs and your tickets for the flight back. They were also interested in how you would get to said destination, so better have a car rented in advance.
- It was so silly when the immigration officer asked me (at the origin, not the destination because they want to avoid to fly you back): "And what if John won't be there to pick you up at the airport?" Me: "I don't know man, take an Uber?"

Oh no! This dastardly Europeans wanted to come here and work! How dare they! Deport them!
This country was cooked a long time ago.
- From another story about the event, it wasn't even like odd jobs for a host, it was small job remote work for people in Germany and Asia. Stuff they would be doing at home and just kept doing during downtime on a long vacation.
  Don't reply to any business emails while lounging by the pool, you need a work visa for that!

This has been happening for a long time. It's just that they are from first world country. Welcome to how it feels to be from a third world country. Not only US but I have been stopped at Munich and Frankfurt airport and thoroughly scanned and document checked while everyone just walk through security.
- I'm from Canada and had to explain to border officers what my accommodations and means of personal support would be for a two week stay in the US. I was almost denied entry because I wasn't carrying sufficient cash on hand.
  The was almost twenty years ago.
- I don’t know the full context of your situation, but sometimes it’s easy to fall into the mindset of always feeling like a victim. I’ve seen people of all backgrounds get scanned or checked at airports. Have you considered if there might have been a specific reason you were stopped?
  Personally, I’ve been stopped several times too, and in some cases, I later realized it was due to something simple, like forgetting to take keys out of my pockets, which triggered the sensors.
  
  You're comparing between different sample pools, which matters when we're talking about probability adjacent stuff. We're not asking "from this large pool of people at an airport, who is likely to receive additional scrutiny?" Because of this, your comment about how you've seen people of all backgrounds get scanned isn't relevant to OP's point.
  The scope we're looking at is the pool of experiences across one person's trips. Imagine if it was every time that you got stopped for additional checks at an airport, even when you couldn't see any mistakes that you had made. If you get checked because your keys triggered the sensors, then that's a mistake that you can learn from, but consider how it would feel if you meticulously complied with everything you were meant to do, but were still consistently pulled aside for additional checks.
  I know that on the internet, you never know whether someone is being hyperbolic, or straight up spinning a yarn, but try to take OP on faith here and consider how dismissive your comment comes across. I don't know OP's particular circumstances, but I have previously made a comment similar to yours to a friend, who called me out on being an asshole. Back then, I was oblivious to the reality of these things.
  My friend explained that the first time they were pulled aside for additional checks, they opted to believe that it was just a random thing. The second time, they felt more uneasy, but actively resisted the "victim mentality" (their words). By the 20th time, they had come to expect it as inevitable, and that no change to how they packed, or what they wore would change things. They desperately wanted to believe that they weren't being targeted for additional searches, but after a certain point, it becomes impossible to believe that these things are random.
  
  I just wrapped up my 46th country. Happened to me everytime and to most of the people coming from SEA and northern Africa.

Both say they were handcuffed and sent to a detention center, which they claimed was more like a prison.
“We were searched with metal detectors, our entire bodies were scanned, and we had to stand naked in front of the police officers and were looked through,” Pohl said. “Then we were given green prison clothes and put in a prison cell with serious criminals.”
Among them was someone who had spent 18 years behind bars for murder, the women said, and they were left sleeping in a double cell with tiny barred windows and metal bunks with moldy mattresses.
I really want to know what changed that made the above happen much more often.
In December, if Customs had concerns about two teenagers trying to sneak into the US to work on a travel visa, where did they go? How was it handled? Because it feels like overkill and probably much more expensive than what we used to do.
Why are we sending backpacking teenagers with visa concerns to the same place as a murderer?
Why are they being strip searched like they were drug smugglers?
But the women — who were planning to continue on to Los Angeles and then Costa Rica after Hawaii — insisted they were interrogated by CBP for hours, and that transcripts show their words were “twisted” and outright falsified.
“They contained sentences we didn’t actually say,” Pohl said of interrogation transcripts they were sent home with.
“They twisted it to make it seem as if we admitted that we wanted to work illegally in the US,” she told the German outlet Ostee Zeitung.
And then this feels like the after-the-fact coverup. Whatever they held them on was super flimsy, so they tried to make it sound worse when they realized this was going to hit the news.

The most shocking thing about this is the five weeks. Like as Americans we have no clue how the rest of the world lives. The entire country of France stops working for 6 weeks in the summer. And we fight to get 2 weeks if we're lucky.
- I'm a middle aged American and have never had a paid vacation.
  
  I feel solidarity for you. My dad was a self employed mechanic, and the only vacation he ever took was when he broke his leg.
- Pretty easy to take off 5 weeks when you are unemployed.
  The entire country of France stops working for 6 weeks in the summer.
  The French get 25 days off per year, which is on the higher side in Europe, but not quite 6 weeks.
  
  Does the 25 days include national holidays like Xmas, etc? Perhaps it's more than 25 once the national holidays are factored in?
  
  I'm not trying to be mean, but the difference between 10 days and 25 days is the difference between night and day.
  
  Don't understand why you're being downvoted. Because you're exactly right. They just finished school and very likely don't have a job. Very likely they are going to want to study later on and are spendig their time between the final school exams in spring and the start of the winter semester at university travelling, as man young Germans do.
  Vacation time in Europe is a lot better than the US, but this has nothing to do with it. Depending on your contract you could get 30 days off in Germany, and since you don't have to count the weekends or state holidays, if you work a regular Mo-Fr work week, you can arrange for a 6 week trip, but they had already spent 5 weeks in Thailand and NZ, were planning 5 weeks in Hawaii and then keep going other places. The way they are travelling is out of reach for most employees in Germany and it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for many.
  
  Why so many downvotes for this guy? I don’t understand. As a student I could easily do some courses next year and take time to travel. Even better when you’ve just finished studying and go travel before starting a job. It’s not that weird, right?

Why would anybody travel to that shithole country?
- I guess they learned their lesson.
  I think it is sad, I would really like to travel in the USA as I think the nature and the culture are really interesting. But for my entire adult life the USA actually would have been a gamble to travel to.
  The laws around entry to the country are also really weird, as the immigration officer that checks your visa has the ultimate authority of whether you are allowed entry. There are no concrete laws that limit their say over this.
- Because people booked last year and can’t get a refund.
  
  Ah yeah, that's fair.
  
  To anyone who was paying attention this was already a pretty clear possibility last year. Not to mention that all the people voting for this outcome also make it an unpleasant place to visit on a more personal level, even if the election had gone the other way.
  
  Is losing your non-refundable booking a worse outcome than a few nights in a detention cell?

"We wanted to travel spontaneously."
This is how my sister and I do our road trips. We get in the car and drive until we are tired then search for a hotel. If we find a town we like we might stop there even if the day is young.
- Criminal scum
- On bike? Believe it or not, also jail.
- lol, that's how I did my trip to Germany. I got my first hotel for only a few days, then decided when/where to go next based on that. Rinse-Repeat for a few weeks
- Yeah, I've always travelled like this. You just get a ho(s)tel for the first few nights, and then you just stay longer if you like where you are or you move on to the next place based on what locals/other travellers recommend.

Having not fully booked your accommodation for the entire trip could get you denied entry to the US before Trump. Just saying. Especially if you aren’t white. Same with not having an outbound ticket.
- Not allowed to go camping unless you're a citizen I guess
  
  Likely they did not have enough fund to stay in Hawaii that long. It becomes a liability.
- I'm sure it happens occasionally but I've never actually heard of CPB asking for hotel bookings, just outbound flight number. This is stuff you'd submit on a visa application. If the US wants to make Europeans get visa to travel then they should just do that.
  
  They have asked for both and in one case they have asked for bank statement. This happens very often to citizens of third world country. We just knew what to carry with us all the time and no issue.
- I met a good chunk of Europeans and Aussies while thru hiking on the AT a few years ago.
  All of those folks did not have full accommodations booked in advance, that would have been impossible. They seemed to find that pretty normal and were not turned away.
- This. It also gets you denied in Australia and other countries. This is non-news.
  Source: Previously my guilty pleasure was watching Border Security Australia Not so much anymore.
  
  Denied entry is far different than being strip searched and locked up in a jail with serious criminals.
  
  Is it that common? How do they handle backpackers?
  I've literally never gone on a single multi-week vacation in my entire life with fully booked accommodation for the whole thing. I book the majority of the first week and I know when I'm flying back, but in between I'm mostly guided by the wind.
  I can't book hotels in places I don't know I'll be going.
- yeah, it is not newsworthy when CBP does their normal, admittedly rather annoying job

I don’t get it. Why would anyone still travel to the US without being forced to?
- There's a significant amount of the US population who still don't realise how bad things are, you really expect everyone outside the US to be any better?
  
  I assure you, everyone outside of the US knows how bad the US is.. the US is the laughing stock of the world right now. We get daily reminders how shit it is, how shit the economy is, how many mass shootings there were today. The world is fascinated by it, sometimes bored.
  In this case with the young travellers, they have probably had the holiday booked for ages. Some people just think it wouldn’t happen to them. These sorts of checks would seem random anyway. These sorts of things appear on near every episode of Border Patrol (in Australia) where someone is being sent home because of lack of funds to sustain their length of stay etc..
- I wouldn't go to USA even if you pay me. To be "mistakenly" deported to El Salvador and then they fucking "don't know" how to get you out. Fuck no.
  I used to say this about 3rd world countries to avoid them, now USA is on that list. Imagine USA being that bad. Well, it is that bad now. When it was under Biden, I wouldn't even think about it. With this orange baboon, no fucking chance you see me go to USA.
  
  Even before, having to be treated like cattle in their border checks for hours? No thank you.
- Read the article - they clearly don't read the news, and had no idea that other Germans had already been detained.
- like didn't Germany issue a travel warning?
  
  It was explicitly not a travel warning ("don't go there") but a note to be aware that an ESTA does not guarantee entry to the US. Because our authorities are lame and still want to avoid looking like they're somehow opposed to anything the US does.
- They might have booked the trip before it was clear it was going to be so bad, and I doubt you can get your money back on a ticket for something like that. They probably rolled the dice and hoped for the best. It's always been a roulette of whether you'd get a 'good' border patrol agent or some guy with a chip on his shoulder. It's just that the latter feels more empowered now and there's nobody keeping them in check.
- People travel to China because there is nice stuff to see and great food to try. While US doesn't have the great food they have the nice stuff to see and are still way better than China.
  
  I'd visit China before I visited the US right now.
  
  Ngl right now id rather travel to China. If I dont do anything particularly dumb it looks good for them right now to have normal tourism working, particularly when the US is being this shit.
  
  While US doesn't have the great food
  That's just ignorant. There's plenty of absolutely fantastic food in the U.S.
  I have no idea why anyone would visit us now, but if you manage to get past the fascist scum, there are plenty of amazing places to eat.

I completely believe these women, and I am sure Border Patrol invented sentences and put them in the transcript, altering what the women said in some parts and outright making stuff up in others. People assume transcripts are correct, but any corrupt authority can alter them or attribute anything to anyone. I called the Border Patrol to find out more and they surprisingly admittted to this corruption, saying "Yep, we alter transcripts all the time in between felching each other and praising Moloch."

When they denying whiter than white German kids, shit done got real.
- They need to come up with enough people to deport to justify their lies about the border.
  
  Yes, this is border agents filling their quota.
- Interestingly.as far as I'm aware ~~Germans~~ Italians were one of the last "ethnicities" to be considered white, alongside the Irish.
  Edit: Originally said Germans, left the comment because it's more about how whiteness is more about in group acceptance than actual skin tone.
  
  You're thinking of Italians. While some 'german' ethnicities were indeed swarthy whites along side Nordic countries in the 1700s, nearly all were included in the white umbrella by the start of the 1800s. Italians, Irish, and Mediterranean whites took well into the 20th century to be white.
  
  If the Germans aren't white, what the fuck is white?!

“But at the time, we didn’t think it was happening to Germans,” Lepere said. “That was perhaps very naïve. We felt so small and powerless.”
They never think it could happen to them until it does. It already happened to Germans months ago tho and there was lots of press coverage, so this case of "i didnt know" is extra odd. I guess people just dont pay attention to actual relevant news.
- They were teenagers who had spent the last 5 weeks traveling the world. They probably just didn't think keeping up with developments in the US was important. That plus a healthy dose of white privilege (and probably a wealthy background given that they were teenagers on a world tour) telling them oppression was something that happens to other people.
  
  Agreed. As a white German woman myself, I can tell you that we are very used to being above any suspicion. I have been waved on in every traffic control and border check I've ever been in.
  Also the German passport is one of the strongest in the world, we can basically go wherever we want when travelling. And now suddenly the US of all places is a country we have to be cautious in.
  This is of course a very privileged position to be in, but they are teenagers, they probably haven't had to think about that until now.
- As far as I know it wasn't all that widespread news in Germany, at least on the channels I see. Besides, ppl. have a tendency to think that something would never happen to them.

Apart from work trips, I can't think of the last time I had accommodation all booked. I don't really see the point of travelling if you don't make plans after being there a while and getting to know good info from locals. A lot of the time locations or weather just sucks, so I keep on and adventure somewhere else instead. That's kind of normal outside of resort holidaying.
- Right here officer this post. This guy is sus.
- I wonder what passport people like you hold? This sounds like passport privilege. Those with "good" passports get to travel where they want without a thought.
  There are many countries where they scrutinise where you're going to be staying and how you're going to pay. You can't apply for any visa without giving proof of accommodation bookings and showing bank statements.
  I've been to America before Trump and there were plenty of questions at the border about where I was going and to see my confirmed hotel bookings, and I went with a "good" passport (UK) at the Canadian border.
- Not everyone has the money you have to be able to all of that.
  
  You mean hostel and Greyhound bus money as opposed to just hostel money for one place?
  
  Assumptions will rarely end up in your favour.
  You perhaps didn't read they were teen backpackers? Of all the travellers in the world, find me a majority in the financial position to book all their accommodation with the confidence that no matter what, it's going to be great because that's the assurance of such a travel style and the price tag it comes with.
  It's not like you're going to find the best deals online in a place with a hundred places to stay. Or maybe you can and that's the irony of your assumption.

Why go to US, Germany is far more wonderful
- Germany is not tropical.
  
  How about France ?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2025/04/21/german-tourists-turned-away-us-border/83195396007/
"These travelers were denied entry after attempting to enter the U.S. under false pretenses. One used a Visitor visa, the other the Visa Waiver Program," CBP Assistant Commissioner Hilton Beckham said in a statement. "Both claimed they were touring California but later admitted they intended to work – something strictly prohibited under U.S. immigration laws for these visas."
Provided that that's true, and I'm not saying it definitely is, that would be a valid reason to deny entry.
- I've said "I might answer some emails" at the EU border before, and the agent just shook her head and was like "try again, business or pleasure?"
  This particular rule has been loosely enforced in post COVID times and people just need to re learn how to cross borders.
- I think we're pretty well past giving the gestapo the benefit of the doubt.
  “They contained sentences we didn’t actually say,” Pohl said of interrogation transcripts they were sent home with.
  “They twisted it to make it seem as if we admitted that we wanted to work illegally in the US,” she told the German outlet Ostee Zeitung.
  
  This really doesn't seem like something the administration has a hand in.
  When you travel internationally and land the first thing that happens is you fill out a slip go through immigration. The slip asks how long you are staying and where your are staying among other things.
  Not accounting for your accommodations for the full duration of your trip will get you flagged for more questions. If the immigration officer things you are going to work during your stay they will deny you because it's illegal on a tourist visa.
  What the girls should have done was just say they were staying at the hotel for the whole time (although 5 weeks at a hotel is probably also a red flag)
- I agree, but you can imagine that when you have young adults in a room for hours, you can guide them toward those answers as well. When I was younger, I would book tickets to travel and explore the world without any idea of what the next day would bring. You can see how discussions can lead to questions like, "So, in five weeks, will you work if you don't have a hostel?" and the response being, "Oh yeah, why not?" I'm not suggesting that the young person didn't plan for this, but considering they were coming from Thailand and New Zealand...
  
  ... and I'm not saying it definitely is ...
  In case you missed that part.
- I would bet it was for a WWOOFing or Workaway style thing where you do a few hours menial labor in exchange for room and board. Often attracts backpacker types. Typical advice is to lie to Customs (in any country) and just get a tourist visa, which is always a gamble at best.
  
  That's what I was thinking too. And afaik that's just legal.

Don't go in USA. There are planty other places in the world.

They just plain don't even want the tourism money

Too late for these two, but why not just find the name and address of a US resident and say you're staying with them for the entire visit? I've stayed with friends and even slept on the porch of people I didn't know very well, when traveling. I've also stayed in two hostels in Honolulu when I was in my early 20s. You just kind of show up at those places and ask for some beds.