IN LIMBO

Tourist Detained Indefinitely by ICE Despite Return Ticket

A 26-year-old German tourist has been held in an ICE detention center for more than a month.

A German tourist is being held indefinitely in an immigration detention center after she was denied entry at the San Diego border and taken into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody last month, The Guardian reported. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection are holding Jessica Brösche, 26-year-old German tattoo artist, after she tried to return from Tijuana, Mexico with her American friend Amelia Lofving. They both were traveling with tattoo equipment. “I just want to get home, you know? I’m really desperate,” Brösche told ABC 10 News in a phone interview from a detention facility. Lofving, who is a designer, had just moved to Los Angeles when she met Brösche in Tijuana. Brösche was carrying a visa waiver to enter the U.S. in her German passport, however she was still pulled aside for a secondary inspection by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent. According to KBPS, Brösche was accused of planning to violate the terms of the visa waiver program to extend her time as a tattoo artist in Los Angeles. She was eventually moved from a detention cell in San Diego to the Otay Mesa center where she has been stuck for more than a month. “She says it was like a horror movie. They were screaming in all different rooms. After nine days, she said she went so insane that she started punching the walls and then she’s got blood on her knuckles,” Lofving said of Brösche’s experience. Lofving claims she asked ICE agents if her friend could just be sent back to Mexico, but they told her because of Brösche’s lack of legal residency there she would be deported back to Germany.