Australian man detained after overstaying US visa for 90 minutes

SCREENGRAB from GoFundMe

An Australian man was detained by border police for overstaying his American visa for 90 minutes.

According to Canberra Times, 26-year-old Baxter Reid and his American girlfriend Heather Kancso arrived at the Canadian border around 10 p.m. on April 23, a couple of hours before his visa would expire. However, they were interrogated for hours before they were denied entry and sent back to the US border at around 1:30 a.m., or one and a half hours after his visa lapsed.

Canadian officials had feared that Reid’s bid for a visa renewal would be rejected by the US and that he would become Canada’s “problem,” the report said. Although Reid is a holder of a five-year visa, he is required to exit the US every six months.

“For some reason, the Canadians kept them until 1:30 a.m. and then they refused them entry,” Reid’s father, Tom, said. “They returned them to the United States and by then they were an hour and a half over the visa, and [he] got locked up.”

Kancso also admitted to the site that their car broke down several times, turning the usual seven-hour drive to the border to 15 hours.

Because of the incident, Reid, now held at the Buffalo Federal Detention Center in New York, is scheduled to appear in court next week and could be granted bail, Sydney Morning Herald reported. While waiting for Reid’s hearing, Kancso created a GoFundMe page to raise funds for Reid’s legal expenses.

“This is going to make a criminal out of an innocent man,” Kancso wrote on the page. “This is a man who has no prior incidents with the law, not in the US or his native Australia.”  Gianna Francesca Catolico /ra