But will you be able to Re-enter the US?

      I was having coffee with a college classmate in my hometown of Falmouth, Mass., last week when he told me he’d have to travel to Bogota, Colombia, to see his young grandchildren.

       “Why is that?” I asked.

      He told me his daughter-in-law, a Colombian native, is not a U.S. citizen like her husband and children. She is afraid to travel to the United States.

      A few days later, in my French conversation group, a friend told me a similar story.

      His son and family won’t visit Falmouth from Frankfort, Germany, this summer. His German daughter-in-law is not comfortable visiting the United States right now given the horror stories of how the Trump Administration is handling immigrants and international students.

      Perhaps you consider these women to be overly cautious.

      I don’t.

      PBS recently reported, for example, that tourism from Canada, which last year sent more tourists to the United States than any other country, has declined sharply this year. Some of those staying home are furious with Donald Trump’s threats to annex Canada as the 51st state. But others find his and his administration’s rhetoric – and actions -- frightening.

      They have growing reason to feel that way, even before the expected sharp escalation in the hiring of federal immigration agents under the administration’s new mega-law.

      Just last week, The Boston Globe told the story of 36-year-old Wilmer Chavarria. He and his husband were returning to the United States from a visit to Nicaragua when customs agents in George Bush International Airport in Houston separated them. Chavarria told The Globe he was questioned for four to five hours, forced to endure homophobic remarks, threatened and denied access to an attorney. What’s most extraordinary about the story is that Wilmer Chavarria is a U.S. citizen. He also is the superintendent of schools in a Winooski, a small town near Burlington, Vt.

       “I don’t wish this on anybody,” Chavarria, who holds dual Nicaraguan citizenship, told The Globe. “It’s utterly terrifying, as a US citizen, to be told you have no rights and you should stop talking about your rights.”

      The Customs and Border Protection agency didn’t respond to requests from The Globe for a comment. Nor has it apologized to Chavarria, whose presumably undocumented brother, sister-in-law and two nieces chose to “self-deport” from Vermont to Nicaragua earlier this year rather than face ICE arrest.

      Chavarria’s grilling, at least, was resolved in a matter of about a half day of terror. That’s better than the circumstances that faced three other men as they tried to enter the country in the last several months.

• One was Chris Landry, 46, who lives inPeterborough, N.H., with his longtime partner and five kids, all U.S. born. Landry has lived as a legal resident in the States since he was 5. But when he visited family in Canada, where he was born, earlier this month, he wasn’t allowed to return home.

Landry, according to New Hampshire Public Radio, had been arrested in 2004 and 2007 on misdemeanor charges of possessing small amounts of marijuana. He represented himself in both cases, paid fines, and was released.

Since then he’s regularly crossed and recrossed the border to visit Canadian family and return without incident. Until this year.

Landry supported Trump in 2024. But as he waited in Canada for a U.S. judge to hear his case, he appeared to have some second thoughts, according to aNew Hampshire Public Radio report.

“If I had known that he was going to do this to hundreds, if not thousands of people across America . . . I don’t know if I would have supported that,” he reportedly said in an interview with Canadian media

On July 24, the last story I could find about Landry on googlenews.com reported thata Cheshire County Superior Court judge in New Hampshire had vacated his past misdemeanor convictions. This at least opened the door to his seeking to re-enter the states, the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel reported. I cannot, however, find anything about a reunion with his family, so either the media dropped the ball or he’s still waiting on the Canadian side of the border.

• Alistair Kitchen, an Australian journalist, told the story of his arrival in the United States in the June 19 his On June 19 New Yorker magazine. The prior week, Kitchen had been detained in Los Angeles as he entered the United States from Melbourne.

Kitchen, who had covered the Gaza War protests at Columbia University while studying there, was grilled by Custom and Border Protection agents after his plane landed and forced to watch while agents rifled through his phone and asked deeply personal questions. He then was held in a windowless, freezing room at the airport for 12 hours before being put on a plane back to Melbourne.

 “I did not know … whether I would be out in one hour, one day, or one month,” wrote Kitchen of his frightening experience.

His only “crime” appeared to be exercising the First Amendment right of freedom of the press while at Columbia.

• Fabian Schmidt, 34, an electrical engineer and long-time green card holder who lives in New Hampshire wasn’t so lucky when he arrived at Logan Airport March 7 after visiting his father in Germany. He said he was detained, strip-searched and harshly interrogated by federal agents before being shipped to an ICE detention facility in Rhode Island. He was held there for nearly two months.

Schmidt, like Landry had had a misdemeanor charge for marijuana possession. His case was in 2015 in California.

      There are, of course, many hundreds and likely many thousands of cases of immigrants, documented and undocumented, who in the first six months of the Trump Administration have been whisked away by masked federal agents, who abducted them from streets, job sites, their cars, immigration courts, and near the college campuses where some have worked and studied.

      I’ve chosen to remind you of these cases because all these individuals arrived at either a U.S. airport or a border crossing. All were documented, one a citizen. Yet all were interrogated, their phones confiscated, their privacy violated and in Schmidt’s case, his freedom taken from him for nearly two months.

      I personally have no plans to travel internationally in the near future. But when I do travel, I know I’ll do four things:

1) Make certain close relatives know what flights I am leaving and returning on.

2) Make arrangements to contact them at a specific time after landing.

3) Make plans with them for what they should do if they don’t hear from me.

4) Carry only a burner phone overseas.

      As an American-born citizen who has never been arrested for anything, it’s appalling to me that I should even have to think about such things. But these are not normal times.

      Those of you convinced that the shadowy arrests and abductions going on with regularity do not threaten anyone but undocumented immigrants need to look more closely.

      Remember the story of Wilmer Chavarria, citizen, school superintendent and international traveler.

      Then ask yourself, “How long will anyone truly be safe?”

(This story is from Jerry Lanson’s Substack blog. “From the Grass Roots.”)