WA lawmakers push back against Border Protection's detention of Iranian-Americans

Washington Representative Pramila Jayapal and Governor Jay Inslee said they stand in solidarity with an estimated 150 Iranian Americans who were stopped at the US-Canadian border last weekend.

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egah Hekmati talked to reporters at at a press conference with Congresswoman Jayapal on Monday.

She was stopped for five hours by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Blaine, Wash., along with her husband and two children as they were returning from a skiing trip in Canada.

“As soon as they realized we were born in Iran ... they led us to the office. They asked many personal questions ... like our Facebook accounts, my parents' full names and birth dates, my uncles in the U.S., about my cousins, everything.”

Hekmati says she makes the trip into Canada once a month, but has never experienced being stopped like this.

Hekmati's report is among many others who say their car keys and passports were taken while they were shuffled into secondary inspection areas at the US-Canada border.

For Representative Jayapal, this was clearly connected to heightened tensions following the recent killing of Qasem Soleimani, a top level Iranian General, by American forces.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection denied that agents stopped people because of their country of origin. In a statement, it said that wait times did extend up to four hours at the Peace Arch in Blaine, but said that was because of reduced staff during the holidays.

Governor Inslee responded to the reports in a statement: “Customs and Border Protection denials of these reports are simply not credible. There are multiple firsthand accounts of CBP agents seizing people’s passports while they waited for up to 12 hours for re-entry into the United States. By all accounts, this is detention, regardless of whether the waiting area has bars on the windows,”