Palestinian American journalist questioned, phone searched at NJ airport

Freelance journalist Hebh Jamal was flagged for additional security screening, questioned about her work and had her cellphone searched upon arriving at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport on March 24, 2025.

Jamal, a Palestinian American reporter and documentarian who holds a U.S. passport, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that she also advocates for Palestinian rights in Germany, where she lives with her family. She said that while this was far from her first experience with additional screening, it was the first time it was at the hands of U.S. authorities.

“My husband and myself, we’re both advocates. We were put on a list by the border police here in Germany, so that whenever we travel at the airport, we get secondary screening automatically,” Jamal said. “But it was never Interpol, it was never communication with the Americans. So I would travel from Germany and then, in the U.S., I wouldn’t have any issues.”

She said she was flying from Frankfurt with her husband and two children to visit family in the United States, and wasn’t surprised when they were directed to additional screening. It was unusual, however, that the German border authorities questioned whether they planned to engage in any pro-Palestinian speech.

After they arrived at their gate, they were also approached by U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents who checked her husband’s visa, took photos of each page of his German passport, and asked him about where he had lived in Gaza and about his family there.

Upon their arrival in Newark, Jamal said both she and her husband were flagged for secondary screening and were taken to separate rooms by border officials.

“At first they were very nice. They were like, ‘Yeah, you know, this is just routine,” she told the Tracker. “They asked me all sorts of questions about where I traveled, asking me a whole bunch of Middle Eastern countries that I’ve been to and if I’d been there.

“And then they saw the Rafah border stamp.”

Jamal said she had traveled to the southern Gaza city bordering Egypt in 2022 to visit family. The officers asked her about who she met and why, whether anyone she encountered was affiliated with Hamas, if she had felt unsafe and if anyone from her family was part of the government in Gaza.

Afterward, Jamal said they began questioning her about her journalism and the last article she had written, which she noted was about detained pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil.

“I know that they already knew I was a journalist because they told my husband, ‘We know your wife is a journalist and we know that you guys are, like, active,’” she said.

Officers also asked for her phone number, email and social media handles before letting her go, Jamal said. They quickly called her back, however, and demanded that she hand over her cellphone and write down her password.

“They said, ‘We need your phone.’ And I said, ‘What happens if I don’t give it to you?’ And they said, ‘No, you have to or we’ll take it by force,’” she told the Tracker.

Jamal said she ultimately complied, noting that she had been aware that U.S. agents might ask for her devices so she had not traveled with a laptop and had factory reset her phone.

The questioning lasted approximately 20 minutes, Jamal said, but the secondary screening as a whole took around an hour and a half.

Her husband was also questioned and his cellphone searched, but she said officers subtly threatened him, warning him not to engage in any sort of political activity.

Jamal said she waited until she left the United States to make the incident public, and has been in touch with Amnesty International to determine whether any spyware was installed on her phone. However, she told the Tracker she’s unsure whether she’ll take any further steps.

“I feel that if I really push about it — outside of just talking on social media — it’s just going to get sort of worse for me,” Jamal said.

In an op-ed for Al Jazeera about the experience, Jamal wrote that the screening was targeted and intended to intimidate them.

“Whether it is in Germany, in the US, or elsewhere, the goal of these tactics is the same: to make us feel small, isolated, criminalised, and afraid,” she wrote. “They want us to doubt the worth of every word we write, to question every protest we join, to swallow every truth before it reaches our lips.”