Holocaust historian says he was nearly deported on way to visit Texas A&M

A French scholar said he was detained for 10 hours at a Houston airport and nearly deported last week as he traveled to College Station for a symposium at Texas A&M.

Henry Rousso, an Egypt-born expert on the Holocaust, wrote an article for the Huffington Post that was published Monday, detailing the ordeal.

He was scheduled to speak Friday about “writing on the dark side of the recent past,” according to Texas A&M’s Hagler Institute.

Rousso, in his Huffington Post article titled “Is the United States still the United States?” wrote that his flight from Paris landed at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston about 2:30 p.m. Wednesday.

After a random check, federal Customs and Border Protection officers interrogated Rousso for hours, he said, telling him he wouldn’t be able to give a lecture at Texas A&M because he only had a tourist visa. The officers, according to Rousso, concluded that he returned to the country to work illegally because he was being paid to speak at the Texas A&M symposium.

Academics are allowed to receive payments for work while traveling to the United States on a tourist visa, according to The New York Times.

Still, Rousso was kept in a waiting room at the airport for hours and believed he was in line to be deported.

About 1:30 a.m. Thursday, the immigration officials freed him.

A professor at Texas A&M had contacted the university president, Michael K. Young, who coordinated with a Texas A&M Law School professor, Fatma Marouf, to secure Rousso’s release, according to The Eagle newspaper in Bryan.

Fort Worth immigration lawyer Jason Mills also helped get Rousso released.

“His reasons for being here were nothing but beneficial to the United States,” Mills told The New York Times. “He is a man of experience and age. There is plenty of history there on him. I don’t understand why he would have been in for the several hours that he was. It is a little alarming.”

In the Huffington Post article, Rousso, a senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, wrote that he had been traveling here for work for 30 years “without any trouble.”

He was a visiting professor at Texas A&M in 2007, according to his work profile.

Rousso attended the symposium Friday but said he was nervous to return to the airport in Houston.

“Now [border agents] are looking really hard for reasons to deny, instead of reasons to admit,” he told The New York Times.

“My ‘case’ visibly presented a problem before even thorough examination,” his Huffington Post article said. “Maybe it’s my birthplace, Egypt, maybe my academic status, maybe my recent work visa expired, maybe my French citizenship, too. Perhaps also, the current context. Even if I had made a mistake, which was not the case, did I deserve such treatment?”

This story was originally published February 27, 2017 at 2:03 PM with the headline "Holocaust historian says he was nearly deported on way to visit Texas A&M."