A pair of backpacking German teens booted from the US lied about the purpose of their trip, Customs and Border Patrol said — but the women claim US officials “twisted” their words to trump up the allegations.
Maria Lepere and Charlotte Pohl, 18 and 19, arrived in Hawaii on March 18 with short-term travel permits ahead of weeks-long US trip but were detained by Border Patrol (CBP) and sent packing back to Germany within hours.
“These travelers were denied entry after attempting to enter the US under false pretenses. One used a Visitor visa, the other the Visa Waiver Program,” CBP officials told The Post Monday.
“Both claimed they were touring California but later admitted they intended to work — something strictly prohibited under US immigration laws for these visas.”
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.
The two women, recent high school graduates, had just spent five weeks in Thailand and New Zealand and were continuing on to the US and Central America as part of a global backpacking trip when they found themselves in a CBP interrogation room in Honolulu.
The teens claimed CBP targeted them because they hadn’t booked hotels for their entire stay in Hawaii.
“They found it suspicious that we hadn’t fully booked our accommodations for the entire five weeks in Hawaii,” Pohl said. “We wanted to travel spontaneously. Just like we had done in Thailand and New Zealand.”
They said they had gone through all the necessary steps to enter and travel the US, but after hours of being held and interviewed, CBP told them their entry was denied — and that they would be detained until their deportation.
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 were 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.
“We were freezing because the air conditioning was turned up so high,” Pohl said. “The inmates fill their shampoo bottles with hot water and use them as hot water bottles to keep them warm.”
And dinner wasn’t any better.
“The meal consisted of two slices of toast and expired cheese. The guard warned us ‘Don’t eat the cheese under any circumstances,’” Lepere said. “It was like a fever dream.”
Come morning, the women were handcuffed again and taken to the airport, where they were put on a Hawaiian Airlines flight to Japan on the way back home to Germany.
“It was a shock. We didn’t expect it. We had already noticed a little bit of what was going on in the US,” she said, referring to the Trump administration’s crackdown of illegal immigration in the country.
“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.”
While they’re back home, Pohl and Lepere told Ostee Zeitung they won’t let the US get in the way of their globetrotting and are already laying plans for a trip to Mexico and a five-week stint in Costa Rica — where they intend to find work at a surf camp.
Foreign tourism in the US has declined in recent months, so much so that Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to assure travelers that the US was safe during comments to the press earlier this month.
“I would say that if you’re not coming to the United States to join a Hamas protest or to come here and tell us about how right Hamas is or to tell us about — stir up conflict on our campuses and create riots in our street and vandalize our universities, then you have nothing to worry about,” Rubio said.
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