Until now this would have been a stupid question - this is my home. But we’re in a strange timeline. My background is I was born in the UK, met first husband, married, got green card, that went tits up, divorced, met husband 2, found forever love, married, naturalized in 2021. Have my passport and everything.

It’s my dad’s birthday, and he lives in the UK. I want to go back and celebrate, but I’m nervous about reentry into the US. I naturalized during the Biden presidency, and I am a Democrat, I feel nervous that I have a target on my back. I have a home and pets here. Am I ridiculous for worrying or should I be cautious about leaving right now?

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    3 days ago

    You are now an American citizen, so you should have the rights the rest of us have. You should be fine. They haven’t gotten around to threatening to denaturalize people yet. When they do, they will concentrate first on people from countries they don’t like, that used old policies they have since rescinded. And they will have to use more due process than they are using on these non-citizens.

    The one thing I would be cautious of, though, is the state of your cell phone. They are very thin-skinned when it comes to criticism lately, and may decide to look through your phone’s social media to decide if you are insufficiently loyal. They have broad powers to do that when you re-enter the country. As a US citizen they cannot deny you entry, but they can still make your life difficult on entry. And this group doesn’t exactly pay attention to laws, do they?

    At minimum, you might want to shut down your cell phone before getting off the plane. Explain it by saying it is a long flight, and you wanted to save your battery for arrival. If they confiscate a phone and try to dump all its data, they are more limited if the phone has just rebooted. They would basically need the PIN to do anything. If you want to go further, you can also log out of all of your social media accounts and remove their apps before the flight, so they even if they force you to divulge the PIN they won’t find your social media history.

    That may all be too paranoid, but we live in stupid times.

    • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      As a US citizen they cannot deny you entry, but they can still make your life difficult on entry.

      Just to add, even if they obey every law, they can still mess with you a lot.

      They can:

      • Hold you for 48 Hours withiut any charges
      • Confiscate all your belongings (and probably they will try to crack any encryption on devices)
      • Put you on a no-fly list
      • Conduct targeted surveillance on you
      • Send Pegasus malware to your new phone
      • Use cell tower triangulation, doesn’t matter if its Graphene OS, it still needs to connect to cell towers if you wanna make calls or use data.
      • Randomly send agents to tail you make you feel scared, park in front of your house and constantly monitor your activity.
      • In certain scenarios, use thermal imaging to see inside your house (even though some courts have ruled against it), and it would be difficult to even prove they were illegally using thermal imaging, since its passive.

      These are all legal and previous administrations could technically already do that, it’s just that they usually weren’t this crazy.