Travel restrictions bar surgeon from U.S. meeting
A. Pieter Kappetein, MD, PhD, was looking forward to a busy week of meetings and activities at the annual meeting of the American Association for Thoracic Surgeons (AATS) in late April. Dr. Kappetein, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and secretary general for the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery, was giving two presentations at the meeting and had a full schedule of committee meetings, board meetings, and the like.
But on his way to the United States, Dr. Kappetein was pulled aside by U.S. immigration officials in Dublin and questioned about his travel background. After a long interrogation, he was informed he could not enter the United States and had to return home. The reason? His passport showed he had traveled to Iran 2 years earlier.
He was forced to give up his ticket to Boston, buy a new ticket home, and miss the work he was scheduled to do.
“I was angry,” Dr. Kappetein said. “They had to go get my luggage off the plane. I lost my ticket to Boston. It [was] a lot of money. I was very busy in Boston. I had meetings from early in the morning until late in the evening, and I had to give lectures as well. There were a lot of obligations that I could not fulfill.”
Restrictions hamper streamlined process
Dr. Kappetein’s ruined travel plans result from recent changes to the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). The program enables most citizens and nationals of participating countries to travel to the United States for tourism or business for 90 days or less without a visa; U.S. citizens and nationals get reciprocal travel access.
But changes to the program starting in 2015 mandated that most people who had traveled to or had been present in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, or Yemen on March 1, 2011, or later, were no longer eligible to travel to under the VWP. The changes were part of the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015, signed by President Obama, which aimed to prevent travelers with ties to countries that pose terrorist threats from entering the country.
These new restrictions to the VWP have been enforced since January 2016, Jennifer Gabris, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said in an interview. She stressed that the eligibility requirements do not bar travel to the United States; rather, travelers who do not meet the requirements must obtain a visa.
Dr. Kappetein, however, said he has traveled to the United States from the Netherlands at least 10 times since his visit to Iran 2 years ago and encountered no problems until this year. He was under the assumption that travelers coming to the United States for business were exempt from the restrictions.
“I never had any issue at the border,” he said. “So the immigration officers, either they hadn’t seen [the passport stamp], or they had ignored it, or they didn’t care about it. I even got this prescreening [approval], so when I was in the States, I didn’t have to go in the line where you have to take off your shoes or your jacket.”
A Department of State spokeswoman referred questions about airport enforcement to the Department of Homeland Security, which declined to comment for this article.
“It takes time to implement, even after it’s signed,” Mr. Cohen said. “I don’t know to what degree it was being enforced, but the limited application means it probably just didn’t raise much attention.”
He noted there was little publicity surrounding the VWP restrictions until President Donald Trump called out the changes to justify his controversial travel ban, Mr. Cohen added. In his revised executive order released in March, the president noted that the countries named in his ban had already been “identified as presenting heightened concerns about terrorism and travel to the United States” through their exclusion from the VWP.
