Celestine Omin is a software engineer for Andela. Andela is a startup that seeks to connect tech talent in Africa with U.S. employers like Facebook—which is one of the startup’s backers. Upon arriving at New York City’s JFK airport after a 24-hour flight from Qatar, Mr. Omin was detained for hours by U.S. Customs.
According to Omin, he hadn’t slept in about 24 hours and the questions he was being asked were vague and seemed like someone had Googled “questions to ask a software engineer.”
With no context or guidelines on how to answer the questions, Omin, “too tired to even think,” sat down and tried his best. But when he handed his answers back after about 10 minutes of work, the official told him his answers were wrong. “No one would tell me why I was being questioned,” Omin told me by phone. “Every single time I asked [the official] why he was asking me these questions, he hushed me… I wasn’t prepared for this. If I had known this was happening beforehand, I would have tried to prepare."
“That is when I thought I would never get into the United States,” he told me with noticeable fear in his voice.
The story gets better as Customs did eventually let him through.
“He said, ‘Look, I am going to let you go, but you don’t look convincing to me,’” Omin said. “I didn’t say anything back. I just walked out.”
That’s the classic dick move of authority figures. If he doesn’t “look convincing” to you, then shouldn’t he not be allowed to freely roam into the country? If you are letting him into the country, then he clearly does look convincing enough. This is Trump’s “extreme vetting.”