An Oregon couple who spent a week detained in a 4-by-6-f00t cement cell in Kuala Lumpur International Airport are headed back to the United States Tuesday.
Samantha Henry, 18, and her boyfriend Will Lucas, 22, were preparing to board a flight bound for Tokyo last Monday, having just finished the latest chapter of a two monthlong humanitarian trip. But officers at the airport refused to let them board as both were missing a passport stamp documenting their entrance into Malaysia.
The agents ultimately detained the couple, placing them in holding cells at the airport’s immigration center. During their stay, the couple have been barred from showering or changing clothes, Samantha’s father Aaron Henry said, though he says guards had been sneaking his gluten-intolerant daughter protein bars.
For the last week, the families have been in the dark as to when their children could return to Oregon. The timeline for their deportation to the U.S. stretched from two weeks to a month. During that period, they were told the couple could be transferred to an immigration center where conditions were even more grim.
“This place – by Malaysian standards – was way worse,” Henry said.
None of this will come to fruition. The families found out on Monday that Malaysian immigration officials had agreed to deport the couple back to the United States.
“She should arrive at 7:30 tonight,” Henry told reporters. “It's a great day.”
In one of the few phone calls Samantha was able to make while detained, she told her father that the missing passport stamps were the result of confusion at the border earlier in the trip. The couple was traveling on a bus from Thailand to Malaysia. When they handed over their passports to agents at the border, the officials laughed before waving the couple into Malaysia sans stamps, she said.
“In retrospect, I think they wanted money,” she later told her father.
The confusion set in motion a weeklong nightmare for their families, who had to scramble to figure out how to extract the two young travelers from a cramped holding cell thousands of miles away.
“We went through so many emotions,” Henry said. “My wife and I were just zombies for days not eating.”
The family spent the week making calls to anyone who they thought might have the diplomatic pull to bring his daughter back – a diverse group that included INTERPOL, the Redmond police department, U.S. members of Congress and a seasoned Malaysian attorney.
Henry said, ultimately, it was the muscle of Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley’s office that secured his daughter’s release.
Merkley said he’s unsure whether it was his letter to the Malaysian ambassador to the U.S., the pressure applied by the U.S. embassy in Malaysia, or some other diplomatic avenue that changed the couple’s fate. But he’s pleased something worked.
“A lot of times, there aren’t a lot of joyful moments working on American policy,” he said with a chuckle. “And I was just thrilled when at 2 a.m. Monday morning I was up at the middle of the night and checked my phone and I had heard that they were being released.”
The couple will land at the Los Angeles International Airport at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.
