French jogger detained after crossing US-Canada border

A young French woman who went for an evening jog along a Canadian beach spent two weeks in US immigration detention after straying across the border. Cedella Roman, 19, who was visiting her mother in British Columbia, decided to run along the beach that leads to Canada’s border with the United States on 21 May. Roman told Canadian media she turned on to a dirt path for a few metres as the tide rose, and stopped to take a picture before retracing her steps. She was then confronted by two US border patrol agents who arrested her for crossing into Blaine, Washington.

“They asked me to remove all my personal belongings with my jewellery, they searched me everywhere.” “Then I understood it was getting very serious, and I started to cry a bit.”

She said she was held in a room with about 100 other people. “We were locked up all the time and in the yard there was barbed wire and dogs,” she told French news agency AFP. “We tried to help each other, there was a good atmosphere. “Seeing people who had come from Africa and elsewhere locked up for trying to cross the border, it put my experience into perspective.”