The US says this Australian writer was expelled because of a drug lie. He’s not the first

The Communist smears were petering out and exhaustive tax audits had turned up nothing, but in 1952, US authorities found a simpler way to get their man.

When Charlie Chaplin, who had angered US isolationists by mocking Hitler and making the case for war against the Nazis years earlier, went overseas to promote a new movie, authorities struck. The acting megastar wasn’t allowed back into the country he had called home for decades.

Writer Alistair Kitchen, pictured here in Sydney in 2017, was expelled from the US in an incident that has gone global.Credit: Christopher Pearce/Fairfax Media

Last week, an Australian writer of much less renown, Alistair Kitchen, got the same treatment for what he said were similar reasons. Kitchen, by his account, had written sympathetically about pro-Palestinian protests in New York that have angered the Trump administration and some Jewish groups.

“Customs and Border Protection specifically and proudly told me I was detained because of my reporting on the student protests at Columbia University, before they proceeded to interrogate me on my views on Gaza,” Kitchen told the ABC.

The United States had another story.

“Allegations that Alistair Kitchen was arrested for political beliefs are unequivocally false,” a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said. “The individual in question was denied entry because he gave false information on his ESTA application regarding drug use.”

(Kitchen said he had admitted to using marijuana in New York, where it is legal, though it is still outlawed federally.)

That aspect of the saga is less Chaplin and more John Lennon. The Beatle faced deportation from the United States in the early 1970s over a 1968 conviction in London for possessing cannabis resin.

A years-long legal battle followed. In 1975, Lennon triumphed. While the government had attributed its attempt to expel Lennon to his cannabis conviction, documents submitted to the court suggested the Nixon administration had been motivated by a fear Lennon could promote opposition to the president.

Judge Irving Kaufman would have none of it. “The courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds,” he ruled.

Charlie Chaplin (shown here the 1940 film The Great Dictator) ridiculed Hitler at a time when many in the US establishment did not want to go to war against the Nazis.Credit: AP Photo

Chaplin’s exile was on flimsy grounds too. Scott Eyman, who wrote a book on Chaplin’s stoush with the US government, told NPR (National Public Radio) that authorities had no legal grounds to revoke the actor’s entry permit because he had not committed a crime.

“What was not stated and what Chaplin did not know was that if he had turned around and come back and demanded a hearing to get back his re-entry permit, they would have had to give it to him,” Eyman said. “So they actually had no legal justification for excluding him from coming back to the country.”

But times – and visa rules – have changed. ANU international law professor Donald Rothwell told the ABC that US border officials have complete discretion over whether to allow someone into the country, whether or not they hold a valid visa or visa waiver.

“They don’t have to give a reason, and there is very little ability for an Australian traveller to challenge that,” Rothwell said.

Along the way, they can search phones and luggage and detain people without providing access to a lawyer.

The system is not new, or particularly different to Australia’s border regime, but the way in which it is being used has shifted. Cases of Australians being denied entry to the US are getting coverage they have never had before.

There was the man who told this masthead’s Traveller in April he had been sent home from New York for taking a circuitous route to the US (which he said he did because it was cheaper).

And a former NSW police officer travelling to Hawaii to visit her American husband was expelled in May for taking three suitcases, which the Daily Mail reported made officers suspicious she would stay longer than allowed in the country.

Whether these deportations were caused by the Trump administration’s aggressive new approach to screening remains unclear. What is obvious is that its rhetoric has shifted.

The US Department of Homeland Security issued a statement on social media questioning the circumstances of the marriage of the former police officer who had travelled to Hawaii, Nikki Saroukos. The department said Saroukos met her husband the same day her former partner left her, and that they had married one month later.

“I never want to return back to the United States,” Saroukos said, even before the statement was issued.

It has barely dented other travellers’ appetite to go stateside. Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows 56,770 Australians travelled to the US in April 2025, down from 60,520 in April 2024.

Kitchen, the writer who was denied entry, says the US government has immense discretion that it uses to keep out people it doesn’t like.

“The question [on the visa waiver application] asks if you’ve consumed illicit drugs in the past,” Kitchen said. “If every Australian flying into Los Angeles International Airport answered honestly, the lines would get very short, very quickly.”

Chaplin’s exile deeply hurt the star, who never returned to the heights of success he had enjoyed in America. He would not go back to the country for 20 years, but was greeted as a hero with a 12-minute standing ovation at the 1972 Academy Awards.

Lennon stayed in America and was slain five years later.

Kitchen is back with his family in Castlemaine, north-west of Melbourne, and has achieved a dream of many young writers: The New Yorker published his account of his deportation.

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