When they were turned back from Canada, and US border control agents saw that Bill’s visa had expired, Karen fully expected to be allowed to return home. The Newtons immediately offered to pay for their flights – they had funds available to cover the tickets – but the officials “weren’t interested”, she says. Instead, they were taken into an office and made to wait there, from 10.30am until nightfall.
At first, Karen was bewildered. “There was no reason to hold me,” she says. “Bill’s an adult. Why am I held responsible for him?” When she asked why she was being detained, an officer told her his supervisor had instructed him to hold her. The hours ticked by. “It was scary. You have no way of knowing what’s going to happen. It got darker and darker. And then other agents turned up with all these chains and handcuffs.”
Karen and Bill were shackled at the wrists , waist and ankles and bundled into a vehicle. Karen doesn’t know how long they were on the road for. “It just seemed to be a never-ending day.” They arrived at Sweetgrass border patrol station in Montana in the middle of the night, and were held there for three days, sharing a cell without beds; they slept on mats on the floor, under foil blankets. “I was very nervous and frightened the whole time. And I was chilled to the bone – I couldn’t warm up.”
They were interviewed separately. Karen was not offered a lawyer; she wasn’t entitled to one, she says, because she had been detained, rather than arrested. She didn’t think she needed one, anyway. “I just thought, ‘When they listen to me, when they come to their senses, they are going to let me go.’ I thought they might escort me to the airport and put us on a plane – hopefully both of us. But that didn’t happen.”
Bill had been working in the US with a valid work permit, but did not have a green card – fed up with the appeals process, he had decided to leave and retire back in the UK. Karen was told that she was “guilty by association”, and that she had broken the terms of her valid B2 tourist visa by helping her husband pack for the trip. “It just went from crazy to ridiculous. It felt like they just wanted an excuse to detain me.”
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“He said, ‘If you volunteer for self-removal – and because of the special relationship the US has with the UK – it will be over very quickly,’” Karen continues. They’d have to sign a document that would mean they would be banned from the US for up to 10 years, and waive their right to go before a judge. If they chose not to, and waited for their day in court, they would be prolonging the ordeal, she was told.
“I said to him, ‘I’m on holiday. I want to go home.’ I would have taken the shortest route, whatever it was, which he said was volunteering for self-removal.” So they signed. Karen had no way of knowing that she was only on day three of what would turn out to be 42 days of detention.
