Australian Writer Deported from US Says He Was ‘Targeted’ for Writing About Pro-Palestinian Student Protests

Melbourne (Quds News Network)- An Australian writer said he was detained upon arrival at Los Angeles airport and deported back to Melbourne due to his writing about pro-Palestinian student protests on university campuses.

According to reports, Alistair Kitchen said he left Melbourne on Thursday bound for New York and was detained for 12 hours and interrogated by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials during the stopover in Los Angeles.

He said he was “clearly targeted for politically motivated reasons” and said officials spent more than 30 minutes questioning him about his views on Israel and Palestine including his “thoughts on Hamas”.

Kitchen said officials asked him for his “thoughts about the conflict in a very broad sense”, including about student protesters, what Israel “should have done differently” and “how I would resolve the conflict”.

“It was quite an in-depth probing of my views on the war,” he said.

Kitchen said he was deported and landed back in Melbourne on Saturday morning.

“The CBP explicitly said to me, the reason you have been detained is because of your writing on the Columbia student protests,” he told Guardian Australia on Sunday.

Kitchen said he lived in New York for six years and wrote about the protests staged in support of Gaza at Columbia University while he was a master’s student at the college, before he moved back to Australia in 2024.

This year, Kitchen published a piece on his blog, Kitchen Counter, on the Department of Homeland Security’s detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the lead negotiator of the Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Khalil is one of several foreign nationals connected to prestigious American universities who were arrested under the Trump administration for their pro-Palestine and anti-genocide activism.

In the article, Kitchen said Khalil had been arrested “on utterly specious grounds by a neo-fascist state” with the goal of “the deportation of dissent”.

On Wednesday, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told the ABC accusations Kitchen was arrested for political views were “unequivocally false”.

“The individual in question was denied entry because he gave false information on his [Electronic System for Travel Authorisation (ESTA) application] regarding drug use,” a DHS spokesperson said. Kitchen said he admitted to previously taking drugs after a border agent searched his phone and claimed to have found evidence of prior use.

Hi everyone. Reactivating twitter to share this

I was denied entry, detained, and deported from the USA at the end of last week because of my reporting on the Columbia student protests

I arrived back in Melbourne on Sat 6am and had my phone handed back to me upon landing

— Alistair Kitchen (@alistairkitchen) June 16, 2025

“Customs and Border Protection (CPB) specifically and proudly told me I was detained because of my reporting on the student protests at Columbia University, before they proceeded to interrogate me on my views on Gaza,” Kitchen told the ABC on Wednesday.