American Travelers Detained In Dubai, Again

By the time you read this, Elizabeth Polanco De Los Santos, 21, will finally be home. The young college student just returned to New York City after five months of detention in the United Arab Emirates. Her release commutes a sentence of one year’s imprisonment in Dubai’s notorious prisons, on nebulous charges of touching or ‘assaulting and insulting’ an airport security woman.

Santos and a friend had traveled to Istanbul from New York in May. They were supposed to return via Paris but wanted to visit the ultra-modern city of Dubai on a ten-hour layover on the way back.

“We thought it would be a more modern and futuristic city, but we were completely wrong,” Santos said.

Dubai Airport (DXB) has become a world gateway, roaring back from the pandemic, Dubai expects 85 million passengers to pass through its terminals in 2023, near its all-time high. Emirates Airlines Airbus A380 aircraft arrive, disgorge 500 people, and reload like so many buses. Unfortunately, the human side of the equation doesn’t always work like clockwork.

After landing in Dubai, Ms. Santos was asked to remove a medical waist-training brace by female security officers at the airport. The device was full of pins and the officers refused to help her put it back on. She tried to get her friend’s attention, but a security officer was blocking her.

Santos said she then “gently touched” the woman’s arm “to guide her out of the way.” She then desperately cried out to her friend for help.

“Elizabeth was falsely accused of assaulting and insulting a customs official when she was stripped and humiliated,” Radha Stirling, CEO of Detained in Dubai, said. London-based Detained in Dubai provides legal help to those involved in civil and criminal cases in the UAE. The organization typically works with travelers and foreign residents, but in 2018 publicized the case of a daughter of the Sheikh who tried to escape the country.

In the case of Elizabeth Santos, she was forced to stay in Dubai for five months and had to spend $50,000 on attorney’s fees and emergency accommodation. This week, she was convicted and sentenced to a one-year term.

Fortunately, Santos had U.S. Congressman Ritchie Torres of New York, the U.S. Mission to the Emirates and Detained in Dubai working on her behalf. Journalists began covering the story as well.

Finally, her sentence was commuted, she was driven to the airport, fingerprinted, handed her passport, put on an Emirates flight and deported to the U.S.

Unfortunately, Santos’ situation is not the first case of the arrest of foreigners on ambiguous charges at the Dubai Airport or throughout the UAE.

Previous crimes that have ensnared foreign tourists and residents include drinking wine on a plane, calling another woman a “horse” and wearing a Qatari soccer jersey.

The wine drinking episode involved a Swedish resident of Great Britain, Ellie Holman, and her four-year-old daughter. Holman, a dentist, planned a 5-day holiday in the UAE with friends and daughter.

The UAE is known for its beautiful beaches and desert vistas. The city of Dubai features man-made attractions like the world’s tallest building, the 828-meter Burj Khalifa, and mammoth shopping malls with amenities like an indoor ski slope.

Unfortunately, when Holman got off her Emirates flight in Dubai, an immigration officer questioned her visa and demanded to know if she had consumed alcohol, which was strictly controlled.

She acknowledged having a glass of wine on the flight. She was subjected to a blood alcohol test and had a reading of 0.04 (half the 0.08 BAC where one is considered ‘impaired’ for driving in the US). She and her daughter were immediately taken into custody and had their passports and phones confiscated.

Holman and daughter Bibi were initially denied food, water and access to a toilet. They were held in a cell together for three days. When Holman’s partner finally learned their whereabouts, he immediately flew to the UAE and brought their daughter home.

Holman was released from her cell but required to stay in the UAE for a month to face charges which could have put her in prison for a year. She spent more than $40,000, her family’s savings, on legal help to fight the charges. After a firestorm of publicity, Holman, like Santos, was deported.

The UAE’s strict laws and regulations on alcohol and cohabitation were relaxed in November 2020, while so-called “honor crimes” against women were made illegal. Tolerance of LGBT+ relationships or even public displays of affection seems less clear.

The reforms were aimed at boosting the country’s economic and social standing and to “consolidate the UAE’s principles of tolerance,” according to the state-run WAM news agency. Perhaps coincidentally, at that time the trade-and-travel-dependent UAE became a partner to the US-brokered Abraham Accords.

Unfortunately, Santos’ situation shows that problems remain. “The recent high-profile cases of Elizabeth Polanco De Los Santos and Tierra Allen serve as public media examples of what happens in Dubai on a daily basis,” said Radha Stirling of Detained in Dubai.

Allen, an influencer with thousands of followers known as TikTok’s Sassy Trucker, was arrested in Dubai in May for “shouting” at a rental car company employee. This is considered “offensive behavior” under the UAE’s laws, subject to up to two years in prison.

Allen was held in Dubai for three month and paid a $1300 fine (she was originally asked for $5000.) She was finally released and deported in August.

“People like social media influencer Tierra Allen have taken to warning fellow citizens to avoid Dubai at all costs,” says Stirling “Dubai’s justice system is routinely misused to extort victims and it’s about time the US State Department updated its travel warnings to reflect this common practice.”

To Stirling, the problems are systemic.

Dubai’s “leadership has spent billions on marketing a glamorous city to international audiences, relying wholly on the naivety of visitors and investors to bring in the dollars.” Yet “the leadership has done very little to make the venue safe for the very people they lure in. Tourists are vulnerable to vindictive, false and unevidenced allegations that could leave them languishing in notorious jails. They are vulnerable to extortion schemes like we see from airport staff, rental car agents and taxi drivers.”

Fortunately, both Santos and Allen have safely returned to the United States. But will Dubai and the UAE work to limit such situations in the future?

For now, the issues appear ongoing. In January, Detained in Dubai celebrated its 15^th anniversary of helping foreigners navigate the UAE’s byzantine legal system. As they used to say about Las Vegas, “Come on vacation, leave on probation.”

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