AMHERST — A University of Massachusetts Amherst student was among numerous Iranians and Iranian-Americans held and questioned at the United States-Canada border on Saturday following the U.S. assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani a day earlier.
Darian Vaziri, a senior journalism major at UMass, said that what started out as a day trip to Canada during a family vacation in Seattle became a four-and-a-half hour long wait in a U.S. Customs and Border Protection building at the Peace Arch Border Crossing between Blaine, Washington and Surrey, British Columbia.
“I was just thinking how crazy it was,” Vaziri said to the Gazette. “We were in there just because we’re Iranian. This is all taking forever just because we’re Iranians.”
Vaziri, 21, and his sister, Kiara, 19, were both born in the United States and have never visited Iran, Vaziri said. His parents moved to the U.S. around 40 years ago and are naturalized U.S. citizens, and the family now lives in Los Angeles. Vaziri was also recently interviewed by the Los Angeles Times.
After border control agents checked the family’s passports at the crossing point, they were directed to pull over then wait inside a room in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection building, Vaziri said. They were held in this room for about four and a half hours from 8 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. with around 30-40 others of Iranian descent.
Vaziri said that the border agents “weren’t disrespectful,” but that the process was unnecessarily long.
Border agents called people up and questioned them individually in the same room, Vaziri said. He and Kiara were asked questions such as whether they had Iranian passports, what their parents did for a living and if they had military affiliations.
His parents were also asked about military connections and their professions, as well as if they had Shia affiliations and what high school they went to in Iran, Vaziri added.
Everyone appeared to be of Iranian descent, and those who were not Iranian were allowed to leave, he said. Around 20-30 people remained in the room after midnight.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection has disputed that it is detaining Iranian-Americans, tweeting Sunday that “social media posts that CBP is detaining Iranian-Americans and refusing their entry into the U.S. because of their country of origin are false.
“Reports that DHS/CBP has issued a related directive are also false,” the tweet read.
The Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations advocacy organization reported on Sunday that it was “assisting more than 60 Iranians and Iranian-Americans of all ages who were detained at length and questioned at the Peace Arch Border Crossing in Blaine, Washington.” Many of those detained were returning from an Iranian pop concert in Canada on Saturday, according to the organization.
“Many more were reportedly refused entry to the United States due to a lack of capacity for Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to detain them,” the organization wrote in a statement, noting that one person who was detained told the group that her family had been held and interrogated at the facility for over 10 hours.
Jacquelyn Voghel can be reached at jvoghel@gazettenet.com.