Mem Fox reads to children at the library

Mem Fox is a beloved children’s author in Australia. In fact, she’s like the little kids’ Australian version of JK Rowling. Earlier this month, the 70-year-old Australian was detained by immigration officials at Los Angeles International Airport. Fox reports that she had never in all her life been treated with “such disdain.”

“I felt like I had been physically assaulted which is why, when I got to my hotel room, I completely collapsed and sobbed like a baby. And I’m 70 years old,” she told the ABC.

While Fox has since received an apology—the result of complaints she lodged with the Australian embassy in Washington, D.C., as well as the U.S. embassy in Canberra—she says she won’t likely be returning to the United States.

She told the ABC she was questioned for two hours by customs officers who appeared to have been given “turbocharged power” by President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration. “I have never in my life been spoken to with such insolence, treated with such disdain, with so many insults and with so much gratuitous impoliteness,” she said.

Fox has traveled to the United States well over 100 times in her life. I guess this was lucky 116? She also understands that as terrible as her experience was there are many others receiving the same Gestapo welcome to our country—people who are more vulnerable than she is. She saw it firsthand.

She said the treatment of others in the airport holding room, including Iranians, Taiwanese and a Scandinavian parent with a small child, was just as poor, and all appeared to eventually have been released. "I thought: 'How can human beings treat other vulnerable human beings in this fashion, in public, in full view of everybody?'

Of course, as our fascist-in-chief has told us through our tele-screens, everything about his administration’s Muslim ban immigration directive has “worked out nicely.”

You can listen to a reading of Fox’s Possum Magic down below. Watch out, the writing may or may not be subversive to white supremacy.