Don’t Fly During Ramadan (2013)
By the way, this is the primary reason I've never travelled to the United States.<p>The US is missing out on tourism because people overseas read horror stories like this and scratch it off their want-to-go list. I categorise the US alongside wonderful places like Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia as a place where human rights <i>aren't</i>.<p>I'm a white male of Christian background, I'm not on any "lists" that I know of, and have no reason to be. I work with government departments in my home country and have multiple clearance checks, some of which are <i>very</i> thorough. I sail through airport customs checks in every country.<p>But clearly the US is number one mainly at being a police state. It's the world's richest third-world country. It's authoritarian to its core.<p>In our country we have state-local police, one branch of federal police that exists only to protect politicians and a few other special duties. That's about it for uniformed people with arrest powers. Oh, technically we have the Office of the Sheriff for enforcing court orders, and I think Border Patrol aren't technically Police. I don't even know. It doesn't really come up as an issue for law abiding people, irrespective of their skin colour or time of year. Oh sure, you hear the homeless drug addicts complain about "the pigs" loudly, but... yeah. They're bound to.<p>Meanwhile, allow me to list the US police forces or police-like groups that I know of <i>the top of my head</i> just by watching US-made television shows: State Troopers, Local and county police, Sherrifs, DEA, ATF, DHS, Military Police, FBI, ICE, Marshalls, Campus Police(!), Secret Service, and I'm probably <i>forgetting a few</i>.<p>This is why the black-lives-matter riots are still going on. Your nation's law enforcement is a militarised, authoritarian nightmare. For someone who doesn't like being "not arrested for 18 hours" for "looking wrong" and using cleaning products, it's a place to avoid, not visit.