General
Canadian Who Was in an ‘American Pie’ Video Says ICE Held Her for 12 Days
Jasmine Mooney, 35, said she was put “in chains” after immigration enforcement officers flagged her visa application paperwork. The former actress was finally allowed to return to Vancouver.
When Jasmine Mooney brought her visa application earlier this month to the San Ysidro, Calif., border crossing, the busiest in the United States, the former actress said, she was prepared to be turned away.
At worst, as she put it, she would have to pay for a flight home to Vancouver.
But Ms. Mooney, 35, a Canadian national who appeared in “American Pie Presents: The Book of Love,” a direct-to-video spinoff of the teen movie series, said that turned out to be the least of her worries after immigration officers on the U.S.-Mexico border flagged her work permit paperwork. They told her that she was in the wrong place, she said, and that she should have gone to a U.S. consulate instead.
Ms. Mooney, who had been offered a marketing job with a U.S.-based health and wellness startup, said that what happened next had blindsided her. She said that she had been led to another room, the start of a 12-day-long plight of being detained by Immigrations and Custom Enforcement.
“They say, ‘Hands on the wall,’” Ms. Mooney told The New York Times on Monday.
Her ordeal bore similarity to several other seemingly unexplained detentions at the border, which have grabbed headlines and put people like Ms. Mooney into a legal purgatory of an ever-changing immigration system under the Trump administration.
For the next two days, she said, she was confined to a small cell at the border station, where she was given a mat and a mylar blanket for sleeping. She said she had tried to reason with an immigration enforcement officer, to no avail, and had been transferred to an ICE detention center near San Diego in a jumpsuit and shackles.
“I’m not trying to be here illegally,” Ms. Mooney said she told the officer. “I just want to go home.”
