Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney said in an interview this week that she was detained in “inhumane” conditions for nearly two weeks by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.
Mooney, whose credits include American Pie Presents: The Book of Love as well as Kid Cannabis and episodes of Loudermilk and iZombie, tried on March 3 to cross at the U.S.-Mexico border, she said, in hopes of renewing her work visa. Mooney says she crossed at San Diego because that’s where her lawyer is. Instead of being granted entry — or sent back to Mexico — she was detained. That began an odyssey she said felt like a “deeply disturbing psychological experiment.”
The actress told San Diego outlet KGTV that, in the privately-owned Otay Mesa Border Crossing Detention Center, she was “I was put in a cell, and I had to sleep on a mat with no blanket, no pillow, with an aluminum foil wrapped over my body like a dead body for two and a half days,” she said. Mooney said she was also forced to sleep on a concrete floor. In the middle of the night, the actress said she was transferred to an Arizona facility “wrapped in chains.”
She added, “I have never in my life seen anything so inhumane.”
Mooney is the co-founder of the Holy! Water brand, which reportedly contains Delta-9 “full spectrum hemp.” There was some speculation in the media that that connection may have raised a red flag with I.C.E., but neither the actress nor reporters have been given any official reason for her detention.
“No one told me anything. Not once,” Mooney said on landing safely back at Vancouver International Airport this week.
“I still don’t even know how I’m home,” she added. “My friends and my family and the media are the reason, I think, that I’m home.”
Asked whether her ordeal might have any relation to President Trump’s trade war with Canada, she responded, “I have no idea. I don’t want to point fingers at anything. I really – I don’t know. But, obviously, people can speculate what they want.”
Would avoid such situations in the future? “Of course. If I knew that that was even a possibility, like even a possibility that that could happen, I would have never, in a million years gone there. I’m telling you, from the second I got there to now, I can’t even process what just happened.”
The actress also said that her situation was far from the worst.
“When I got to know everyone else in there, and heard all of their stories and how long they were in there, I was like, ‘OK, I’m not allowed to feel sorry for myself at all, because every single person in here is in a way worse situation than me,’” she said, noting one girl had been in detention for 10 months.
British Columbia Premier David Eby, who put pressure on U.S. authorities to get Mooney released, said her experience “reinforces the anxiety that many British Columbians have and many Canadians have about our relationship with the United States right now and the unpredictability of this administration and its actions.”
He continued: “What about our relatives who are working in the States? What about when we cross the border? What kind of an experience are we going to have? The harm that this does to the U.S. economy through impacted tourism, impacted business relationships, impacted people who are seeking visas to work in the United States who have special skills that they can’t get anywhere else: It is reckless, the approach of the president. And this woman should be brought back to Canada as quickly as possible.”
