These new restrictions are uniquely capricious and gleefully harmful to people, but they are really only an extension of behaviors that have gone on for some time. I'd like to share a related story from the previous Trump administration:

My roommate in 2018 was an Indian here on an H1-B. He was working for a large consulting firm. (You've heard of it.) I don't recall his title but it was sort of an SRE/infrastructure position. He was a relatively conservative guy himself, in terms of his views, and a huge fan of America. He delighted in being here. He bought a brand new Mustang because it was the iconic American car. We weren't particularly close friends, but we got along okay.

In the spring of 2018, he went back to India for the first time in several years, for about a month. His return flight date came and went and I didn't hear from him until the next day: He was back in India. He'd landed in Chicago, and CBP had pulled him aside. They said his documents were flawed and he was to be deported. They said he had lied about where he was moving for his job. When he pointed out that he hadn't, they said, well, your employer didn't tell us everything they were supposed to when you moved.

He asked to see documents he had with him, or call his managers. They said no. He asked for time to go online and get his employment details. They said no. The only options he were given was: 1) Admit he'd lied, and be deported but not banned from the US, or, 2) deny he'd lied, and be deported and banned for five years. Indignant, he refused to "admit" to anything. He was deported. His entire life in the US was summarily destroyed. I spent a great deal of time helping him get his possessions either sold or shipped to him, and on the phone, I had to explain to him that he likely hadn't done anything wrong - it wasn't his fault. This was how our system had been set up to work.

About two years later, a judge concluded that there had not, in fact, been any issues with his employer or him that were material. The deportation was ruled to have been illegitimate. But by that point, he'd been back in India for years, and it was now COVID. He's probably never coming back to the US. We lost our chance to have him, because a couple of individual CBP agents in Chicago made a bad call one day in 2018 and wouldn't take no for an answer.

Even if you believe in controlling and limiting immigration, even if you think that we should only bring the best and brightest and then only in limited numbers, even if you think everyone who crosses the border illegally is a criminal, there is nothing just in what happened in this case. If you are such a person, and you think the people in power are on your side, I urge you to look at what they're actually doing over what they say they're doing. There's no justice in what happened in this case; if even legal immigrants have such limited due process and can have their lives so utterly destroyed, what rights do any of us imagine we have?

San Francisco's airport still owes me a pair of boots that they confiscated. Try finding shoes at 5 am after arriving on a red eye because the border guard fancies your boots. The cab driver thought it was a funny story, he knew many that were far worse. I think that's the last time I visited the USA.