GOOD JOB, Border Force. Not only did you *almost* start stopping and checking people’s visas on the streets of Melbourne, but you’ve managed to (wrongly) confiscate an Aussie man’s perfectly valid passport for no reason at all.
Australian comedian and cartoonist Jason Chatfield – who is a permanent resident of the United States – has written about how he had his passport confiscated by a Border Force knucklehead at Sydney airport, because said knucklehead literally didn’t understand how the borders he’s supposed to be enforcing work.
You see, Chatfield’s passport had been cut. It’s what happens when you’re an Australian citizen and you get approved for an American Green Card. You send it to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Office, and they send it back with a few millimetres trimmed off the bottom. It identifies you to immigration as an Australian citizen with U.S. residency, and more importantly, it’s 100% valid.
Yet when the Border Force official saw it, he thought it had been tampered with and confiscated it, because – and we quote – “he had never seen this before.”
Chatfield writes:
“Now, here’s the problem. Had he actually checked with someone he’d have learned that “Not having seen something before” didn’t mean it was wrong. It shouldn’t give him authority over someone who actually knows that the fuck they’re doing. But it did. This is Border Force.”
Despite US Customs forcing the Border Force to let Chatfield through, he had to travel back to New York without his passport.
Again: 
GOOD JOB BORDER FORCE
This shit is absolutely worth a read, which you can do so on the website Medium HERE.
When P.TV spoke to Chatfield, he hadn’t gotten his passport back – or an apology.
“Bizarrely, the Border Force didn’t know about snipped photo page protocol,” he says. “This is what I’m trying to get confirmation on in writing.”
“[My] attorney and U.S. Officials said they should have known, [but the] Border Force remain silent.”
Chatfield did concede that as the Border Force were on strike that particular day, he “may well have copped a pencil pusher from Canberra, flown in to fill in.”
P.TV also tried to contact Border Force for comment, but they were unavailable. At this point, the only response has been via Twitter:
@Jason_Chatfield Hi, we’re looking into what happened at Sydney Airport re your passport.
— ABF (@AusBorderForce) September 24, 2015
We’ll update this story more as it develops.
Images: Twitter.
