I'm sorry, but the article seems to obscure a key fact, which is that she travelled to the US AFTER her initial visa was revoked.
It seems dumb to travel to a country that has explicitly revoked your visa without being granted a new one!
Nobody stopped her from getting on a plane because nobody checks if Canadians have a visa or not since they don't need one for short visits or stays. In this case her visa was revoked, so she was probably flagged in the system as temporarily not allowed in.
This is speculation, but maybe somebody here can weigh on the technicalities of the situation.
This is not to excuse the inhumane treatment, which if true is disgusting. Dealing with the CBP is always negative, even as a citizen (when returning from abroad).
Edit:
This really stretches credulity:
> I was taken to the nurse’s office for a medical check. She asked what had happened to me. She had never seen a Canadian there before. When I told her my story, she grabbed my hand and said: “Do you believe in God?”
Edit2 (more dumb):
> There were around 140 of us in our unit. Many women had lived and worked in the US legally for years but had overstayed their visas – often after reapplying and being denied. They had all been detained without warning
>Another woman from Canada had been living in the US with her husband who was detained after a traffic stop. She admitted she had overstayed her visa and accepted that she would be deported. But she had been stuck in the system for almost six weeks because she hadn’t had her passport. Who runs casual errands with their passport?
Really? Not having your passport on you is the big mistake here?
Edit 3 (Even more dumb):
> One woman had been offered asylum in Mexico within two weeks but had been encouraged to keep going to the US. Now, she was stuck, living in a nightmare, separated from her young children for months. She sobbed, telling me how she felt like the worst mother in the world.
> Many of these women were highly educated and spoke multiple languages. Yet, they had been advised to pretend they didn’t speak English because it would supposedly increase their chances of asylum.
Trying to game the asylum system by lying to immigration authorities.
I'm not sure how all these cases are supposed to sustain the main thrust of the article, which is that all these people are innocent victims of some Kafkaesque nightmare for which they bear no responsibility. They clearly do.
We shouldn't be treating people like this period, but this is just really stupid behavior.