Fallout of Trump travel ban: Software engineer from Nigeria detained at airport, given test to prove his skills

According to Mashable, Omin had already spent 24-long hours on a Qatar Airways flight and upon landing at JFK airport he was questioned about the short-term visa for his US trip. He was also asked about his occupation. Several questions later, he was reportedly brought to a small room where another customs officer grilled him thoroughly.

The officer, according to Mashable, reportedly asked him after confirming his occupation to take a written test to prove his knowledge as a software engineer. He was asked to answer the following questions:

1. “Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced.”

2. “What is an abstract class, and why do you need it.”

I was just asked to balance a Binary Search Tree by JFK’s airport immigration. Welcome to America.

— Celestine Omin (@cyberomin) February 26, 2017

According to Mashable, citing a LinkedIn post, Omin was quite sleep deprived and felt emotionally drained out. Since he had nearly seven years of experience in his field, he felt the questions were opaque.

After Omin went on to complete the test ‘designed specifically to test his skills’, he was soon informed by a customs official that his responses were incorrect. Omin had reportedly told Linkedin that “No one would tell me why I was being questioned. Every single time I asked [the official] why he was asking me these questions, he hushed me … I wasn’t prepared for this. If I had known this was happening beforehand, I would have tried to prepare.”

That is the time when Omin thought he would probably never get into the country.

At this point, Omin was convinced he would not get access into the United States. But soon an official told him he was free to go. The officer apparently said, according to Mashable, “Look, I am going to let you go, but you don’t look convincing to me.”

After hearing this, Omin simply walked out without responding. He later posted his experience on Twitter and got huge support from Netizens thereafter.