Top advisor is detained 'for having t-shirt with a political message' after returning from Turks and Caicos

Daily Mail​

18 hours ago

A political advisor who's worked on Democratic and Republican campaigns said he was detained by Customs and Border Protection agents after returning from a vacation in Turks and Caicos.
On June 20, Rick Taylor, a Los Angeles-based political consultant, said he was abruptly pulled out of the security line at Miami International Airport and ferried into a holding room.
'I was shaking a bit,' Taylor, 71, told the Westside Current in an interview after the incident. 'And all I could think was, if I'm feeling this - someone who's been in rooms with mayors and senators - what must the others in that room be going through?'
His only theory for why he was singled out was that he had an Obama-Biden T-shirt packed into his suitcase.
'You go through every possibility in your head,' Taylor said. 'I thought, "Do I have something in my bag?" And then it hit me - I had packed an Obama-Biden T-shirt.'
Taylor was with his wife and daughter, who have Global Entry and breezed through security. Taylor does not have Global Entry and was in a separate line from his family.
A CBP agent asked him, 'Are you from California?' He told the agent, 'Yeah, I live in Los Angeles.'
The man who ran campaigns for Richard Riordan, Los Angeles' last Republican mayor, and for current Democratic Senator Alex Padilla when he was running for city council in the 1990s, soon found himself escorted to a waiting room.
Taylor told The Los Angeles Times that '95 percent of the population' in the room was Latino and primarily Spanish-speaking.
'If it can happen to someone like me - white, older, plugged in - imagine what this must feel like to people who don't have English, who don't know their rights,' he said. 'What's the impact on them and their families?'
Ironically, Taylor's wife, born in Vietnam and now a US citizen, had feared being flagged herself before the family trip.
Taylor said he reached out to a contact in the Trump administration before leaving, but 'never thought it would be me.'
Taylor waited in the holding room for about 45 minutes with barely any communication from the officers.
'They don't talk to you. They don't give you a reason. You're just left confused, angry and worried,' he said.
He was allowed to keep his phone the entire time and was texting his wife and daughter updates.
Eventually, an agent told him to collect his luggage and give it to them for inspection, after which he was released.
Taylor still isn't sure why he was detained, but he keeps coming back to the shirt with the political message on it.
'I kept thinking, if we're in a country where packing an Obama T-shirt makes you nervous at the border, what kind of America are we living in? This isn't the America I was raised in,' he said.
'Next time, I'll think twice about what I pack. That's not something I ever thought I'd have to consider in this country.'
His advice to others is to 'really think twice about traveling internationally while you have this administration in charge.'
Daily Mail reached out to Customs and Border Protection about this incident.
'If Mr. Taylor feels the need to, he is more than welcome to file a complaint online on our website and someone will reach out to him to try and get to the bottom of things,' CBP Public Affairs Specialist Alan Regalado told the LA Times in an email.
Former Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky was outraged by the alleged mistreatment of Taylor, who once served as Yaroslavsky's chief of staff.
Yaroslavsky compared it to how Sen. Padilla was arrested and handcuffed during a June 12 Homeland Security press conference in Los Angeles.
Padilla had been asking questions to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem about the ongoing ICE raids in Los Angeles.
'My former chief of staff and political consultant, Rick Taylor, was detained at Miami International Airport by federal authorities after returning from an international vacation,' Yaroslavsky told the LA Times in an email.
'As Senator Alex Padilla said a couple of weeks ago, "if it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone." This Federal government operation is OUT OF CONTROL! Where will it end?!'
CBP has been criticized as of late for allegedly having a heavier hand under the Trump administration.
For example, a Norwegian tourist recently claimed he was denied entry to the United States after immigration officers found a meme of Vice President JD Vance on his phone.
Mads Mikkelsen, 21, was sent away after arriving at New Jersey 's Newark Airport on June 11 for a holiday.
The guards were said to have found a meme on the device's camera roll showing an edit of Vance with a bald, egg-shaped head. Mikkelsen said after discovering the image the authorities sent him home to Norway the same day.
CBP denied this version of events in a statement, saying that 'Mads Mikkelsen was not denied entry for any memes or political reasons.'