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.”
You really are shockingly naive. Yes, CBP officers are assholes dispositionally eager to treat non-Americans harshly and changes in administration do change policy, both explicitly and implicitly. Like their comrades in ICE, they’ve been itching to “get tough” the whole time.
Do you seriously think German teenagers were regularly getting strip searched for muddled responses to whether they would do any work and it was just for some reason not reported on prior to a couple months ago?