'American Pie' Actress's Story Of ICE Detention Will Send Chills Up Your Spine
My God, what the hell have we become?
If we want to get technical about it, Canadian Jasmine Mooney was not one of the stars of American Pie, or even of the direct-to-video American Pie spin-off sequel she actually did appear in, American Pie Presents: The Book of Love. It was just a minor role in what might be the only installment of the franchise that my sister has not seen. Not that I’m judging, mind you. I, myself, am one of the few Bring It On completists in existence.
However, I hate to say it, but if she or whoever thought of presenting her that way had not done so, it’s entirely possible we might not have heard her story of being detained by ICE for two weeks. It’s even possible that she would have been detained for longer. After all, this is America and a lot of people easily ignore horrible things until they happen to a “celebrity.” People are more likely to click on an article implying that something bad happened to Alyson Hannigan, Jennifer Coolidge, Natasha Lyonne, Mena Suvari, or Tara Reid (who, by the way, seems to be doing well these days! Good for her!).
But goddamn if it isn’t something we all need to hear. While reports of her detention filtered up into the news cycle on Tuesday, on Wednesday, The Guardian published her recount of the whole ordeal — and frankly, nothing else you may have read about it can compare to the actual story itself.
Mooney did everything “right.” You know how smug Republicans keep saying “Well if they did things the right way …”? She did things the right way. She did things the only conceivable way she could have.
She got her trade NAFTA visa in order to work for an American brand of health tonics called Holy! Water on her second try and went back and forth between the US and Canada for work. However, one day she ran into a real bastard of a border patrol agent who decided the way she got that visa was simply not good enough for him and confiscated it.
I started working in California and travelled back and forth between Canada and the US multiple times without any complications – until one day, upon returning to the US, a border officer questioned me about my initial visa denial and subsequent visa approval. He asked why I had gone to the San Diego border the second time to apply. I explained that that was where my lawyer’s offices were, and that he had wanted to accompany me to ensure there were no issues.
After a long interrogation, the officer told me it seemed “shady” and that my visa hadn’t been properly processed. He claimed I also couldn’t work for a company in the US that made use of hemp – one of the beverage ingredients. He revoked my visa, and told me I could still work for the company from Canada, but if I wanted to return to the US, I would need to reapply.
She ended up leaving that job, but was hired by another US-based health-and-wellness brand — so she started the visa process again. However, when she went down to the San Diego office to get that taken care of, she was told she had to apply at the consulate and would be sent home to Canada.
But they did not send her back home to Canada. Instead, while she was looking for flights, a man came up and led her off, telling her only that she was being detained. She spent the next two weeks being transported from facility to facility — some migrant detention centers, some jails — sometimes kept in freezing cold places without even a blanket, without knowing if or when she could ever go home.
I was told to shower, given a jail uniform, fingerprinted and interviewed. I begged for information.
“How long will I be here?”
“I don’t know your case,” the man said. “Could be days. Could be weeks. But I’m telling you right now – you need to mentally prepare yourself for months.”
Months.
I felt like I was going to throw up.
She didn’t eat because she was afraid of the food and then when she finally did eat, got sick from the food. She slept on cement floors with hundreds of others, she slept in prison cells where “the only available water came from the tap attached to the toilet in our cells or a sink in the common area, neither of which felt safe to drink.”
It took two weeks before she was allowed to go back to Canada.
My Ice agent, who had never spoken to me, told my lawyer I could have left sooner if I had signed a withdrawal form, and that they hadn’t known I would pay for my own flight home.
From the moment I arrived, I begged every officer I saw to let me pay for my own ticket home. Not a single one of them ever spoke to me about my case.
To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me. Yet, I was still detained for nearly two weeks.
Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there.
While Mooney told her own harrowing story, she gave more space to the other women she met there, using the fact that her story attracted so much media attention — not to mention that she happens to be a pretty, white, Canadian middle class lady who briefly appeared in a beloved American teen movie franchise — to get their stories out as well.
[A] woman from Canada had been living in the US with her husband who was detained after a traffic stop. She admitted she had overstayed her visa and accepted that she would be deported. But she had been stuck in the system for almost six weeks because she hadn’t had her passport. Who runs casual errands with their passport?
One woman had a 10-year visa. When it expired, she moved back to her home country, Venezuela. She admitted she had overstayed by one month before leaving. Later, she returned for a vacation and entered the US without issue. But when she took a domestic flight from Miami to Los Angeles, she was picked up by Ice and detained. She couldn’t be deported because Venezuela wasn’t accepting deportees. She didn’t know when she was getting out.
There was a girl from India who had overstayed her student visa for three days before heading back home. She then came back to the US on a new, valid visa to finish her master’s degree and was handed over to Ice due to the three days she had overstayed on her previous visa.
There are many more, so I encourage you to read the whole thing. No human being on earth deserves to be treated this way — tossed into detention with no idea why, what they can do to get out, or when they can leave. It’s an actual nightmare and there is a reason why we have multiple provisions against this kind of inhumane treatment in the Constitution.
If this is not cruel and unusual, I don’t know what the hell is.
Donald Trump and others like him have drummed up so much abject fury against immigrants that people have gotten to the point where there is absolutely nothing that they would consider “going too far,” no line in the sand, when it comes to their (mis)treatment. These people are so hysterically angry that you could tell them that the Trump administration was getting ready to round up 80-year-old undocumented grandmothers to send to Guantanamo Bay or to simply be killed off and they would respond with something along the lines of “Good! They committed a crime by staying here and deserve it!” or something about how Trump was protecting them and how we’d feel differently if one of those old ladies went full Dorothea Puente (a US citizen, mind you) on our loved ones.
And that’s partly because they’re on such an anger high that it doesn’t feel real to them, and because they still kind of think it’s all hypothetical. Mooney’s story is real, and it’s the story of someone who did every goddamned thing the “right” way and still got tortured for two weeks straight. Sure, some will still believe it is worth it so that they don’t have to go around being scared of non-existent pet-eating Haitians, but there might just be a few who think to themselves that maybe this is not the kind of country we want to be.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
The difficult thing that we have to take stock of, is this exact kind of system is what many Americans desired. Hurting people who are different is fun, especially in the service of xenophobia and other bigotries.
People being renditioned to El Salvador and surely being tortured is a “fun video” according to the current spokeschancre. When someone in a minority they hate suffers, it gives many Americans joy.
This, indeed is what we are up against. Americans only need excuses to vote for these atrocities. And we have to dig deep to get out of this. It may be that the electorate must upgrade as it had to decades post-Taney Court 1.0. But we must try.
What we have to do now is protect the vulnerable and ensure that as many of us survive. The more of us survive, the more likely the dream of freedom does not die. Tactically, clawing back power in Congress goes a long way. We might as well try and get the numbers up for the cause of freedom. There are special elections this year. I am not saying donate money since people hate that, but turn out the vote. Weird things happen when people vote.
My ancestors faced odds this long when they toiled under broken electoral systems and the scourge of racism. But persist they did and I stand on their shoulders. They show that good things are possible in dark times.
Congratulations United States of America, you are the Nazis now.