Two German citizens have been held for weeks at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego after trying to enter the U.S. from Mexico on tourist visas, according to their friends and family, who say they don’t understand why they’re being detained and want them released.
The two detentions occurred separately. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to questions or request for comment on either incident.
The first involved Jessica Brosche, her friend, Nikita Lofving, said. Lofving said she met Brosche when she lived in Berlin before moving back to Los Angeles in recent years. The two had plans to meet up in Tijuana in late January, then return to Lofving’s home where Brosche would stay with her for a few weeks before returning to Germany. Both artists, they planned to create art for one another: Lofving in fashion and Brosche in tattoos.
“Basically I gave her my entire body to make her masterpiece,” Lofving said, showing tattoos from Brosche over large areas of her neck, torso and arms. “We’ve been working on this project for six years, and we meet every now and then all over the world to continue the project.”
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Lofving said they spent a weekend in Tijuana and headed for the U.S.-Mexico border on Jan. 25. She said Brosche had an Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, visa that would have expired in August.
“She hands in her passport and ESTA and her a printout of her return ticket flying back to Berlin on the 15th of February. And then they look at it, and then they're like, ‘OK, she needs to go to secondary screening,’” Lofving said. “Two hours later, she calls me and says, ‘Hey, I'm going to be deported back to Germany. They think I'm coming here to work.’”
“What me and Jessica do has nothing to do with money. We're just both artists and we make art together,” she continued.
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Lofving said Brosche has been detained for the more than five weeks since.
“Her first nine days, she was held in solitary confinement, which was absolute torture for her,” Lofving said. “She said on the ninth day, she completely lost her mind. She was punching all the walls. She absolutely freaked out.”
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement website lists Brosche as in custody at the Otay Mesa Detention Center. Also held there is Lucas Sielaff, another German tourist taken into custody as he tried to cross the border in a separate event on Feb. 14.
Sielaff’s fiancée Lennon Tyler is a doctor. She said the two met while she was volunteering in Europe and have visited each other frequently in the past three years to make their international relationship work.
They traveled from her home in Las Vegas to Tijuana in February for her dog to receive cancer treatment. They’ve crossed the border before, she said, and he also had an ESTA visa.
“We didn't expect to have any issues because we had never had any issues before,” Tyler said. “Except this experience was very different. It turned into a nightmare.”
“Lucas hands his German passport to the first checkpoint, and they look at his German passport, and they become very aggressive and hostile almost immediately,” Tyler recounted. She said English is not his first language and she believed the language barrier led to confusion in questioning, when officers asked where they were going and he told them Las Vegas.
Tyler said the officers sent them to secondary inspection and took him inside, searched their car and chained her to a bench.
“Every time I tried to ask a question, they said, ‘No one's going to answer your questions. You need to be quiet,’” Tyler said.
Hours later, she said they tried to get her to sign some paperwork, but she refused, and they told her to leave.
“They told me if I didn't leave, I would be arrested and that my dog would be thrown in a cage and my car would be impounded,” she said. “Make your choice is what they said.”
Tyler said she left, and Sielaff has been detained since.
“He violated no law. And instead of sending them home or allowing him to like voluntary depart, they didn't give him that option. They put him in handcuffs,” she said.
“What really shocked me is just the powerlessness of it all,” Lofving said. “There's nothing we can do, and there's no one that can communicate with us.”
Lofving said Brosche said she was told she will be released on March 9 and her mother booked her a flight home to Germany on March 11 – but she’s not sure if she will actually be allowed to leave.
Both Lofving and Tyler said they’ve communicated with the German embassy and private attorneys to little avail. They did not know each other prior to these incidents, but said they now both find themselves in the same position of pushing for answers and relief.
“Why are they throwing innocent German tourists in prisons?” Tyler asked. “Why is Lucas sitting in a prison when he's done nothing wrong? Nothing. He's completely innocent.”
Lofving raised the question of heightened enforcement under President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, saying, “It is not safe for anyone to visit America right now."
