Mads Mikkelsen, a 21-year-old from Norway, was denied entry to the United States earlier this month after immigration officers uncovered a popular meme featuring a chubby, bald Vice President JD Vance on his phone.
In an interview, Mikkelsen told Hyperallergic that he arrived at Newark Liberty International Airport on June 11 from Norway for a two-month vacation. Mikkelsen came to the US for the first time when he was 18 years old and made friends there, and he was planning to travel to Austin from Newark to visit one of them. At the end of his stay, he was going to meet his mother to explore US national parks.
While in line for passport control at the New Jersey airport, Mikkelsen said he noticed two individuals wearing civilian clothes eyeing him. When he stepped up to show his passport, the officer asked him if he had any meat in his suitcase. Mikkelsen had brought a cured sausage as a housewarming gift and the passport officer asked him to forfeit it, which he said wasn’t a problem. At that point, Mikkelsen said, the plainclothes men, who later revealed themselves to be Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, took him to an armored room, presumably to dispose of the sausage.
Mikkelsen said the ICE agents then asked him if he planned to commit acts of domestic terrorism, whether he was part of any extremist groups, and if he planned to smuggle narcotics into the country. After answering “no” to these questions, Mikkelsen said the officers asked to do a standard check of his phone.
When asked for his password, Mikkelsen hesitated, but the officers told him he could face a $5,000 fine or five years in prison for not complying with US authorities.
“I’m thinking: ‘What the fuck?’ And, ‘Oh, shit.’” Mikkelsen recalled. “I comply and give him the password, even though I really didn’t want to, this was very much against my will.”
Mikkelsen said he was taken to another room, where officers showed him a monitor displaying a photo of a wooden tobacco pipe supposedly taken from his phone. Mikkelsen recognized the object as a wooden pipe he made around five years ago in trade school, and explained to officers that it was a tobacco pipe.
The agents, according to Mikkelsen, alleged that it was “narcotic paraphernalia.”
“I, then again, try to say that it is just a pipe, and it is very obviously not a stereotypical weed pipe, because it was just a wooden pipe,” Mikkelsen told Hyperallergic. “It’s very obvious to me that I cannot argue with these people, and that they have decided preemptively that it was narcotic paraphernalia.”
The officer then asked him if he had ever tried drugs, and Mikkelsen said he had consumed marijuana twice in his life in places where the drug was legal. (Under US immigration law, drug abuse is grounds for entry denial, but drug abuse is defined as “current substance-use disorders.”)
The second photo the agents presented to Mikkelsen was the viral meme of JD Vance against a blue background. Mikkelson said he hadn’t downloaded the image on his phone, but it had automatically saved from a message someone else had sent him on WhatsApp.
As Mikkelsen attempted to explain this, he said, an officer told him the image was “illegal” and “dangerous.” He recalls that the officers may have used the term “propaganda” to describe the meme.
After being shown the images from his phone, Mikkelsen said one of the officers strip searched him with “excessive force.”
“He pushed me against the wall and was squeezing me so hard it was physically painful,” Mikkelsen said.
He was then introduced to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers, who went through his luggage. At one point, Mikkelsen said, an officer pulled out a flower-printed shirt that he claimed was also drug paraphernalia. The officers also mocked him for packing a choker necklace, Mikkelsen claims.
At the end of the hours-long affair, Mikkelsen said, the officers told him that he was being denied entry to the US over a “combination of the narcotic paraphernalia as well as the extremist propaganda, being the JD Vance meme,” in Mikkelsen’s words.
When Mikkelsen’s story broke earlier this week in Norway, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) publicly rejected the claim that a tourist was deported over a JD Vance meme, and said Mikkelsen was denied entry because he admitted to using drugs.
DHS, which oversees ICE and CBP, did not respond to Hyperallergic’s request for comment. Neither branch has responded to inquiries.
However, documents provided to Mikkelsen by Customs and Border Protection, reviewed by Hyperallergic, say that he appeared not to be a tourist but instead planned to immigrate to and work in the US, and that this was the reason for his entry denial.
“I also find that claim to be absolutely ridiculous, because I live in Norway,” Mikkelsen said. “I would be giving up all of my freedom and my superior wage and a much safer and much healthier place to live.”
Now back at home in Norway, Mikkelsen said he does not plan to pursue legal action against the US because he lacks faith in the judicial system. He has a theory, now, about why he may have been targeted: As a lone traveler, Mikkelsen believes officers assumed he wouldn’t have anyone to back him up and that denying him could be a good look for their own statistics.
“My reason for going to the media with this case was not to get revenge — it was to highlight the extremely poor treatment that I received,” Mikkelsen told Hyperallergic. He worries about what his experience bodes for other travelers.
“I am a White, European, cisgender male, which means that I, by most circumstances, received probably the best possible treatment I could receive,” he said.