Kitchen said that CBP agents “were waiting for me when I got off the plane,” and although he “had cleaned up my online presence expecting ad hoc digital sweeps,” he “was not prepared for their sophistication.”

“If you are deleting social media 48 hours before your flight to the U.S., it is already too late,” he stressed.

Kitchen wrote that the agents “just came out and said it: ‘We both know why you’ve been detained…it’s because of what you wrote about the protests at Columbia,’” he recounted.

They’re not even trying to hide that it’s political persecution, or that they are surveilling everyone on social media and storing it away. It’s probably too late for most of us to hide our political views from the US authorities, and evidently they will persecute those who hold the wrong views.