Celestine Omin is a Nigerian and works as a Senior Consultant at Andela. He left Konga in September 2016 to join Andela.
He was on a work trip to the United States on Sunday February 26 when he was stopped by Customs. (Omin was helping NYC-based fintech startup First Access create a JavaScript application for emerging markets).
Hmm….Here is a Nigerian coming to US for the first time and going through Qatar Airways.
Should there be any problem with this? Guess not, since he is not from any of the muslim countries on Donald Trump’s banned list.
So I wonder why he was taken for questioning to ascertain the purpose of his visit to the US. I don’t think the Customs officials felt he was really a Software Engineer as stated on his short-term joint B1/B2 visa.
According to reports, after questioning him about his job, he was escorted into a small room by a border agent and told to sit down.
The following ensued:
“Your visa says you are a software engineer. Is that correct?” – Customs officer
“Yes” – Celestine Omin
Presenting him with a piece of paper and a pen, “answer the following questions”
- “Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced.”
- “What is an abstract class, and why do you need it?”
Well he answered the questions to the best of his knowledge, the customs officials told him his answers were wrong.
I was just asked to balance a Binary Search Tree by JFK's airport immigration. Welcome to America.
— CO. (@cyberomin) February 26, 2017
As Celestine told Caroline Fairchild, the New Economy Editor at LinkedIn on phone after the ordeal,
“No one would tell me why I was being questioned. Every single time I asked [the official] why he was asking me these questions, he hushed me… I wasn’t prepared for this. If I had known this was happening beforehand, I would have tried to prepare.”
“That is when I thought I would never get into the United States.”
Omin tells Caroline that the answers to the questions were technically correct, but he suspects the customs official interrogating him wasn’t technically trained and couldn’t understand his answers.
After wasting some time, the customs officials casually came back and told him that he was free to go
“He said, ‘Look, I am going to let you go, but you don’t look convincing to me,’” Omin said. “I didn’t say anything back. I just walked out.”
Apparently the customs officials had confirmed from Andela that Celestine’s story was true before letting him go. Andela Co-founder Christina Sass was the one that received the call to defend Omin.
