I wouldn’t describe it as a happy ending — but a settlement in which the U.S. government will pay comedian Mohaned Elshieky $35,000 after he was harassed by the Customs and Border Patrol is a small measure of justice served. In 2018, returning home to Portland from a gig in Spokane, Washington, Elshieky and three other passengers aboard a Greyhound bus were questioned by CBP agents. The agents gave Elshieky, who was granted asylum in the U.S. after fleeing his native Libya, a particularly hostile and nonsensical going-over, refusing to believe he was in the country legally and rejecting the documentation he provided. Following the incident, Elshieky publicized his experience through media such as Twitter.
It is not as if we were wanting for instances of CBP and ICE abuses — but Elshieky’s experience, and his insistence that the government be held to account for its actions, is a reminder of the many, many cases of immigration enforcement gone awry that we never hear about. Elshieky had the presence of mind to push back against the harassment while it was happening, and the confidence to pursue a lawsuit in its aftermath; but for every person like him, you have to imagine there are hundreds or thousands of immigrants who are bullied without seeking recourse.
One glaring perspective illuminated by Elshieky’s experience is the way that overly aggressive immigration enforcement seeks to assert that immigrants are interlopers in American society, rather than integrated and integral parts of the social fabric. The CBP agents who mistreated Elshieky probably never imagined he was a well-known comedian in Portland, part of the city’s life and culture (since the incident, Elshieky has moved on to New York City, where he now works on Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal TV show). In enacting what appears to have been an illegal search lacking probable cause, and then threatening and intimidating Elshieky, they weren’t just harassing an immigrant; they were hacking away at the fabric of our society, which requires at its core the ability to exist without fear of government coercion or intimidation. Elshieky took the full brunt of this intimidation, but make no mistake: it was an attack on us all.