Renowned French Holocaust Scholar Was Detained At Bush Intercontinental Airport

HOUSTON, TX — A prominent French Holocaust historian was detained by federal border agents at George Bush Intercontinental Airport last Wednesday for more than 10 hours and told he would not be allowed to enter the United States.

Henry Rousso was en route from France to Texas A&M University on Feb. 22 and was scheduled to speak on Friday at a conference organized by the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study. Rousso is an authority on France after the First World War.

Rousso said that when he arrived at Bush around 2 p.m. on Wednesday, agents began questioning his visa and his reason for entry.

He told the New York Times in a telephone interview that the agents stated that he was in violation of immigration law by attempting to enter the U.S. on a tourist visa to participate in the academic conference. He added that they initially denied him entry and said they would order him to leave on the next available flight to Paris.

Rousso, 62, who is Jewish, was to be paid an honorarium of $2,000 for participating in the conference, and the border agents were apparently unaware that academics are exempt from regulations prohibiting work on a tourist visa for special circumstances, such as conferences.

“With a tourist visa, I’m not allowed to work,” Rousso told the Times. “This is true — except for scholars.”

When Rousso, who was born in Egypt but has lived in France since he was 2, failed to meet the driver sent by the university, A&M officials began attempting to figure out what the problem was. They alerted immigration lawyers, the dean of the A&M law school and the president of the university, Michael Young.

The agent who questioned Rousso was “concerned that he was giving a lecture and was getting a good stipend to do that,” Richard J. Golsan, a professor at the university who had arranged to have Rousso speak to his class last week, told the Times.

“It would be in no means difficult to look up who he is,” Jason Mills, an immigration attorney based in Fort Worth who assisted with Rousso’s eventual release, told the Times. “His reasons for being here were nothing but beneficial to the United States. He is a man of experience and age. There is plenty of history there on him. I don’t understand why he would have been in for the several hours that he was. It is a little alarming.”

Around 1 a.m. on Thursday, agents returned Rousso's passport and cellphone and told him he was free to go. He said he was told the agent who first processed his entry was "inexperienced." Rousso then took a taxi to an airport hotel and phoned Golsan.

Rousso made it to A&M and gave the keynote address — "Writing on the Dark Side of the Recent Past” — as planned. The experience, however, has left him apprehensive.

“I’m a little bit nervous,” he said. “It’s completely irrational, I know.”

It's unclear what led border agents to apprehend Rousso to begin with, as he is a French citizen, but Fatma Marouf, a law professor who earlier this month helped craft an amicus brief against the Trump administration's order banning refugees around the world and travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations and who assisted in Rousso's release, said the border control's recent emphasis on applying regulations in the strictest manner possible was no doubt a factor.

“It seems like there’s much more rigidity and rigor in enforcing these immigration requirements and technicalities of every visa,” she told The Eagle, a paper that covers the College Station area.

— Image of Henry Rousso courtesy CNRS