This week, Aussie influencer Mikaela Testa revealed she was detained by US border forces for more than 24 hours before being deported back to Australia. On Thursday, she took to her TikTok to explain what went down.
After flying from Perth to Los Angeles, she was immediately approached and detained by American officials due to an accidental violation of her Electronic System for Travel Authorisation (ESTA).
“I just had that sinking feeling in my stomach that I’m in trouble,” she said tearfully on TikTok, as she explained what happened.
@mikaelatestapart one♬ original sound – Mikaela Testa
Once she was detained, officers began asking her questions about the people she knew in LA, their financial status and whether they engaged in any illegal activity together. She also had to hand over her phone.
“When you’re detained, you have no rights. They can seize your devices forever, they can go through them, they can download anything off your phone. You have no rights, they basically own you and everything when you step foot into their country,” she said.
It wasn’t until an official pulled her to the side and asked her whether she was an OnlyFans creator that her mistake came to light.
“She pulled me over and said ‘You do OnlyFans, right? That’s not on your ESTA’,” the creator recalled.
“I did my ESTA years ago, I wrote my employment down as self-employed because in Australia, pretty sure any OF people write ‘self employed’. Anyway, I’m from a different country, things are so different to the US,” she said.
Testa was then asked whether she’d ever collaborated with any creators in the US. While she replied that she hadn’t, the officer found photos of a collaboration with other American creators on her Twitter and accused her of lying.
“I just said to her ‘ma’am, I thought you meant had I collaborated with anyone in the US, on the US soil,” she explained.
“Not with US girls in a different country.”
Following this misunderstanding, Testa was moved to another room which she described as something from “the war movies”, and was held by the US government for almost two days.
@mikaelatesta Replying to @❔ ♬ original sound – Mikaela Testa
As the hours ticked by, she became more and more distraught, and explained that she was terrified that she was going to be banned from the country like some of the other girls she’d met in the detention room had been.
“The only thing she could think about in that moment was ‘no more American boys’,” she said.
“I still have marks in my eyeballs from crying so hard over the fact that I’m not going to be able to see American men anymore unless they come to Australia.”
I understand that there are plenty of reasons to sob when you’re detained by government officials but American boys are not one of them. It’s a big no thank you to the long cargo short-wearing men who talk at least 40 decibels louder than everyone else in the room, if you ask me.
Mikaela was then deported back to Australia.
“I still feel like I need to go talk to somebody about what happened,” she said.
Before sharing her story on TikTok, the OnlyFans star took to her Instagram Story to reveal her ordeal, which honestly sounded gruelling AF.
“I’ve just been locked in the US border force room for over 30 hours with no phone and had my visa revoked,” she wrote online.
“They’ve just deported me back to Australia and I can’t enter the US.”
She said she was grateful to feel safe again, but claimed others weren’t so lucky.
“I’m so grateful to come home to a safe country, some of the girls that were detained with me will not,” she wrote.
“Some had been there for over three days with no contact to the outside world.”
Testa didn’t share why she had been deported, but it’s not the first time she’s been detained while travelling in the US.
Last year, Testa revealed in a video on TikTok that she had been detained at LAX airport for five hours after her friend was picked up for not having purchased a return flight.
“I know for a fact that he [the officer who detained them] thought she was a prostitute or an escort looking to work in the US because they love detaining Australian girls and accusing them of that until they ‘tell the truth’,” she claimed in the video.
@mikaelatesta Replying to @KJ
In case you aren’t across Mikaela Tetsa, she’s best known for her absolutely eye-watering OnlyFans earnings — in February 2021, it was reported she was earning $162,000 a month. Imagine how much that has grown since… I’m crying into my homebrand tissues as we speak.
While Testa is pretty beloved on TikTok, she’s also had her fair share of controversies around classic cringe influencer behaviour — one of the more cooked ones being when she thought it was a good idea to drive through an impoverished area in her Tesla and then flex it. Girl, no.
Testa first shot to fame when she began dating Atis Paul, another early twenties TikToker who quite frankly I don’t care about.
However, the two had a pretty bitter breakup, and now she’s doing *very* well for herself without him.
If you need me, I’ll be watching her Maldives TikToks and feeling poor.
