When Jasmine Mooney brought her visa application earlier this month to the San Ysidro, Calif., border crossing, the busiest in the United States, the former actress said, she was prepared to be turned away.
At worst, as she put it, she would have to pay for a flight home to Vancouver.
But Ms. Mooney, 35, a Canadian national who appeared in “American Pie Presents: The Book of Love,” a direct-to-video spinoff of the teen movie series, said that turned out to be the least of her worries after immigration officers on the U.S.-Mexico border flagged her work permit paperwork. They told her that she was in the wrong place, she said, and that she should have gone to a U.S. consulate instead.
Ms. Mooney, who had been offered a marketing job with a U.S.-based health and wellness startup, said that what happened next had blindsided her. She said that she had been led to another room, the start of a 12-day-long plight of being detained by Immigrations and Custom Enforcement.
“They say, ‘Hands on the wall,’” Ms. Mooney told The New York Times on Monday.
Her ordeal bore similarity to several other seemingly unexplained detentions at the border, which have grabbed headlines and put people like Ms. Mooney into a legal purgatory of an ever-changing immigration system under the Trump administration.
For the next two days, she said, she was confined to a small cell at the border station, where she was given a mat and a mylar blanket for sleeping. She said she had tried to reason with an immigration enforcement officer, to no avail, and had been transferred to an ICE detention center near San Diego in a jumpsuit and shackles.
“I’m not trying to be here illegally,” Ms. Mooney said she told the officer. “I just want to go home.”
As she was loaded into a prisoner van, she said, the reality of her situation sank in.
“They put you in chains,” she said. “That’s when I realized they are onboarding me into a real prison.”
ICE officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday. Neither did the White House, which has made President Trump’s executive orders governing immigration a centerpiece of his return to power.
Ms. Mooney was applying for a TN visa, which allows professionals from Canada and Mexico to stay temporarily in the United States. She initially applied for one last year for her other marketing job, but she said that it had been rejected because the company’s letterhead was missing from her documents.
She said she had successfully reapplied about a month later at the San Ysidro border crossing, but when she tried to return to the United States at the end of November, a U.S. immigration official at the airport in Vancouver revoked her visa. He explained that her application had not been processed properly, she said, and raised concerns over one company that was employing her that sold hemp-based products.
Ms. Mooney said it was not uncommon for people like her who work in Southern California to apply for visas at the San Ysidro border station, so earlier this month, she figured she would try again.
Leonard D.M. Saunders, an immigration lawyer from Blaine, Wash., just south of the U.S. border with Canada, said Ms. Mooney’s plan had given him pause when she discussed it with him. Ms. Mooney’s roommate is one of his clients. He said that a number of his clients had their visas processed at the San Ysidro border station in the past without problems, but that he was concerned that Ms. Mooney might get stuck in Mexico.
“You hear all this stuff with these Columbia students being detained,” Mr. Saunders said. “What was different? The new political climate. I hate to say it.”
Ms. Mooney’s case does not appear to be isolated. On March 7, a German national with a green card was arrested at Logan International Airport in Boston and was being detained, The Boston Globe reported.
At the same border crossing where Ms. Mooney tried to enter the country, two German tourists were detained for weeks and eventually deported.
Six days into her ordeal, Ms. Mooney said, she and a group of other detainees were awakened at 3 a.m. and were told they were being transferred to another ICE prison in Arizona, a five-hour drive. Detainees were shackled, fingerprinted and asked a series of questions about whether they had been sexually assaulted or had attempted suicide, according to Ms. Mooney, who said she and the other women had been required to take pregnancy tests.
“We had to pee in open Dixie cups in the cell, and the bathrooms are open,” she said.
While she was being held by ICE, Ms. Mooney discussed her detention with the San Diego television station KGTV, which she said had drawn widespread attention to her situation.
“Why would they waste their time on a Canadian citizen who is at the border trying to do everything right?” Mr. Saunders said. “It’s not like she’s going through the desert illegally.”
David Eby, the premier of British Columbia, Ms. Mooney’s home province, criticized her detention on Thursday when the media outlet CityNews asked him about it. He said that it had exacerbated the anxieties of Canadians.
“What about our relatives who are working in the States?” Mr. Eby said. “What about when we cross the border? What kind of an experience are we going to have? The harm that this does to the U.S. economy through impacted tourism, impacted business relationships, impacted people who are seeking visas to work in the United States who have special skills that they can’t get anywhere else: It is reckless, the approach of the president. And this woman should be brought back to Canada as quickly as possible.”
After 12 days of being held, Ms. Mooney said, she was finally driven on Friday to San Diego International Airport and escorted onto an Air Canada flight to Vancouver. Her roommate, who paid $1,100 for her ticket, was waiting for her when she landed, along with her mother. Ms. Mooney is barred from returning to the United States for five years, but she said she plans to appeal.
“I love America,” she said. “I love my friends there. I love the life I was building there and the opportunities.”