A Turkish-American Twitch streamer said Monday he was stopped at the airport by U.S. border agents and interrogated over his views on the Palestinian issue and Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
Hasan Piker said he was stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents upon returning from France and was asked about his political views.
Piker, a vocal critic of Israel's brutal war on Gaza and a prominent progressive commentator in the U.S., said during a livestream that he was taken to a private room at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on Sunday and questioned for nearly two hours.
Piker, who streams on Twitch under the nickname "HasanAbi," recounted the experience.
He said the officers asked him whether he supported the Palestinian group Hamas, Lebanese group Hezbollah, or Yemen's Houthis and pressed him on his views about President Donald Trump and the Israeli government.
One of the officers "kept saying stuff like, ‘Do you like Hamas? Do you support Hamas? Do you think Hamas is a terrorist group or a resistance group?'" he said, adding that he repeatedly stated that he is a pacifist who is "on the side of civilians" and wants "the endless bloodshed to end."
"They literally straight up tried to get something out of me that I think they could use to basically detain me permanently, which is insane, because there is no direct connection or direct involvement," Piker told his audience.
Piker, born in New Jersey and a U.S. citizen, said he feared the questioning was politically motivated and aimed at intimidating criticism.
"Obviously, the reason why they're doing that is, I think, to try to create an environment of fear," he said.
He also said the agents questioned him about his Twitch bans and suggested some of the questions posed could have legal implications depending on how he responded.
"In the second part of the conversation, some real actionable items were presented. Depending on how I answered those questions, " I'm going to jail," Piker said.
"And he said, you know, you can figure out what not to do so that this doesn't happen again. And I suspect the what-not-to-do is just don't be a political commentator that speaks about American foreign policy, which is not something I'm planning on stopping," he said.
"I think the goal here is to put fear into people's hearts, to have a chilling effect on speech."
Piker said he was en route to the University of Chicago to speak at the school when he was stopped.
A CBP official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Anadolu that claims that the inspection was triggered by political beliefs are "baseless."
"Our officers are following the law, not agendas," the official claimed.
"Upon entering the country, this individual was referred for further inspection – a routine, lawful process that occurs daily, and can apply to any traveler. Once his inspection was complete, he was promptly released," the official added.
Piker is enrolled in the Global Entry program, which is designed to speed up customs processing for low-risk travelers.
The incident comes as freedom of speech is reportedly increasingly under peril in the U.S. In recent months, several people criticizing Israel have been struggling with legal hurdles.
One of them has been Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, who was released from a Louisiana immigrant detention center on Friday, more than six weeks after she was arrested while walking on the street of a Boston suburb.
Öztürk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university's response to student activists demanding that Tufts "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide," disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
