Neal Bakshi is an American author, entrepreneur and spiritual life coach who has found himself in the spotlight after claiming that he was detained and questioned while re-entering the US following a holiday.
Who is Neal Bakshi?
Bakshi was born and raised in the United States and comes from an Indian immigrant family. His parents moved to the US decades ago, and he grew up there before going on to build a career around writing, entrepreneurship and spirituality. He is a US citizen.Much of Bakshi’s work centres on personal growth and self-awareness. He is the founder of Awaken Mind Sciences, through which he explores subjects such as spirituality, mindfulness, meditation and personal development. His work has given him a following among people interested in looking at everyday life, relationships and personal well-being from a more spiritual perspective.He has also worked as an author and uses social media to talk about his ideas and experiences. But it was a very different kind of personal experience that recently put him in the news.Bakshi shared a video on Instagram in which he described what happened when he returned to the US from Greenland. He said he was travelling through Global Entry when a border officer stopped him and told him he had been “randomly selected” for additional questioning.For Bakshi, the explanation didn’t quite add up. He said he had been randomly selected for checks a number of times since he was a teenager, but felt that this particular incident was different.
He wasn’t informed
According to his account, officers initially didn’t tell him why he was being taken aside. He said he was eventually taken to a larger waiting area where several other people were waiting to be processed. Bakshi claimed that the people in the room were all people of colour, which made him question whether race or ethnicity had anything to do with the additional scrutiny.He said the questioning continued in a smaller room, where officers asked him for personal information and questioned him about his affiliations with certain groups. Bakshi also said he was told the questioning was “for my own safety”, against the backdrop of the ongoing war-related news.The experience clearly left him unsettled. Bakshi questioned the assumption, as he saw it, that certain people could be treated as suspicious simply because of who they were or what they looked like.He was eventually released and allowed to leave. Bakshi said that while his own release was being processed, he overheard an officer speaking to an elderly Hispanic woman who was also being questioned. According to Bakshi, the officer told her to sit down and think about what “lie” she wanted to tell him next.
Questions raised about how travellers are treated at borders
That moment appeared to reinforce Bakshi’s concerns about how some travellers were being treated at the border.It is worth stressing that the claims about the incident come from Bakshi’s own account. His video has nevertheless struck a chord because it comes at a time when immigration, border security and scrutiny of travellers remain highly debated issues in the US.Bakshi’s background also adds another layer to the story. He isn’t describing the experience as a foreign visitor who was unfamiliar with the country. He was born and raised in the US and holds American citizenship. For him, the central question was why returning to his own country as a citizen resulted in what he described as an unusually long and intrusive interrogation.
