After a dozen days being shuffled between detention centres in the U.S., Jasmine Mooney has made it back to Vancouver.
The Canadian entrepreneur, who was detained after applying for a visa at the U.S.-Mexico border on March 3, touched down at Vancouver International Airport shortly after midnight Saturday morning.
“I’m still, to be honest, really processing everything,” Mooney told reporters who were waiting for her at YVR’s international arrivals area.
“I haven’t slept in a while and haven’t eaten proper food in a while, so I’m just really going through the motions.”
Speaking to CTV News via a fellow detainee’s phone earlier this week, Mooney said she had received hardly any information about why she was being detained or when she would be able to leave.
At the airport Saturday, she said she remained in the dark about the reasons for her detention even as she was transported from Arizona back to San Diego to board her flight back to Canada.
“No one told me anything. Not once,” Mooney said.
“I still don’t even know how I’m home,” she added. “My friends and my family and the media are the reason, I think, that I’m home.”
Mooney acknowledges that she had a previous U.S. visa cancelled, but she did not think that she’d have any issue applying for a new one with a new job offer.
Her story resonated with Canadians at a time of heightened tensions between Canada and the United States as U.S. President Donald Trump continues to threaten his northern neighbour with annexation.
B.C. Premier David Eby weighed in on Mooney’s story earlier this week, saying it “reinforces the anxiety that many British Columbians have and many Canadians have about our relationship with the United States right now and the unpredictability of this administration and its actions.”
Asked whether she felt Trump’s border policies led to her detention, Mooney couldn’t say.
“I have no idea,” she said. “I don’t want to point fingers at anything. I really – I don’t know. But, obviously, people can speculate what they want.”
She said even the guards who brought her back to San Diego looked at her paperwork and were “very confused” about why she had been detained.
Asked if she regretted attempting to apply for a visa at the border, Mooney laughed.
“Of course,” she said. “If I knew that that was even a possibility, like even a possibility that that could happen, I would have never, in a million years gone there. I’m telling you, from the second I got there to now, I can’t even process what just happened.”
Her advice for Canadians who are applying for visas in the U.S. right now?
“Don’t go where you can’t come directly back to Canada,” she said, explaining that the U.S. officials she spoke to when she first presented herself at the border told her she hadn’t done anything criminal and would be sent back to Canada.
Mooney said she started looking into booking flights, thinking that she would be able to show the border patrol officers that she had made arrangements to return to her home country.
Without warning, she said, she was taken into custody and began her detention odyssey. She said the other detainees she met were confused by her situation.
One of the women she met had been in detention for 10 months, Mooney said.
“When I got to know everyone else in there, and heard all of their stories and how long they were in there, I was like, ‘OK, I’m not allowed to feel sorry for myself at all, because every single person in here is in a way worse situation than me,’” she said.
With files from CTV News Vancouver’s Penny Daflos and The Canadian Press
