He was going to investigate the Homestead detention center. Then his visa was revoked
The founder of Forensic Architecture, a London-based international investigative group that announced Wednesday it would launch an investigation into the Homestead immigration detention center, was barred from boarding a plane to Miami after his visa was revoked by the U.S. State Department.
Eyal Weizman’s firm was slated to start its probe into the detention center — that up until November held unaccompanied migrant teenagers — in partnership with the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College.
Wednesday night was the museum’s exhibit launch, in which Weizman was supposed to speak about one of Forensic Architecture’s concluded investigations into a Chicago police shooting as well as upcoming ones like the one on the Homestead facility. The firm uses video and architectural rendering software to recreate scenes and structures with the hopes of analyzing murky, unclear events.
According to a statement released by Weizman, and read publicly at the exhibit late Wednesday, a U.S. embassy official in London vaguely told him in an email “that an algorithm had identified a security threat that was related to him.”
“I was informed in an email from the U.S. Embassy that my visa-waiver had been revoked and that I was not authorized to travel to the United States,” Weizman said. “The revocation notice stated no reason and the situation gave me no opportunity to appeal or to arrange for an alternative visa that would allow me be here.”
Ines Weizman, Weizman’s wife, and her two children were also stopped, separated and and interrogated by immigration officials at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York for two and a half hours before being allowed entry.
Eyal Weizman then went to the U.S. Embassy in London to reapply for a visa but said an officer told him that his “authorization to travel had been revoked because the algorithm had identified a security threat,” he said in his statement.
Officials couldn’t provide a clear answer as to why, he said, but then said it could be connected to places he had visited, people who he’s been in contact with or hotels he has stayed in.
“I was asked to supply the Embassy with additional information, including fifteen years of travel history, in particular where I had gone and who had paid for it,” Weizman said. “The officer said that Homeland Security’s investigators could assess my case more promptly if I supplied the names of anyone in my network whom I believed might have triggered the algorithm. I declined to provide this information.”
Sophie Landres, the programming curator at the Museum of Art and Design at MDC, told the Miami Herald “this may be a roadblock in the development of this investigation.”
Last year, Forensic Architecture worked with the New York Times on a project called “One Building, One Bomb,” which reconstructed a chemical attack by Syrian government forces on civilians. It won an Emmy Award.
The firm also worked with the British daily The Guardian on a series called ‘The Polluters,’ in which they investigated claims by an Argentina indigenous community that the oil and gas industry had irreversibly damaged their ancestral homeland and eroded their traditional ways of life.
This story was originally published February 19, 2020 at 9:50 PM.
