A Presque Isle physician, barred from re-entering the U.S. in April, spent five months returning home from Canada.
Her exile ended Friday. Dr. Behnoosh Dashti was flooded with a jumble of emotions as she drove closer to the border. She got the word that the U.S. was happy to readmit her.
“I was excited, nervous, very happy, overwhelmed,” the Northern Light A.R. Gould Hospital physician said. “I tried to leave any difficult things and anger behind. I was overexcited to see my family. I couldn’t wait to come back to hug them and to be with them, so it was a day full of different emotions.”
In July, the Iranian-born doctor, a Canadian citizen working in the U.S. with an employer-sponsored H-1B authorization, filed a lawsuit against U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security after Customs determined that she could not return to the U.S. after what she thought was a routine border stop. It all started when her driver’s license didn’t renew.
Dashti, 52, the only family medicine provider in the women’s health practice at A.R. Gould Hospital, has lived in Presque Isle with her husband and two children, ages 22 and 13, and worked at the hospital since 2023, according to hospital officials.
On Monday, Dashti dismissed her lawsuit in U.S. District Court of Maine in Bangor after the government entered into an agreement to facilitate her re-admission into the U.S., according to her attorney James Monteleone.
A team of people were involved in securing her re-entry, Monteleone said on Wednesday.
Dashti was back at work Wednesday, but is still settling, she said.
“I can’t say I am 100 percent back to where I was. It’s a process,” she said. “For the first couple of nights I still couldn’t sleep, but I am gradually getting there and today was my first day at work. I’m trying to get back to my life.”
Her five-month ordeal began on a day off in April. She had spent most of the morning on the phone with the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles trying to find out why her driver’s license had not arrived because she needed it for an upcoming road trip.
The system was not updated with her work authorization status and bureau staff suggested she go to the border and ask agents to update the system, she said.
There was still snow on the ground, but it was afternoon and Dashti, thinking it would be a fast errand, ran out with only a light sweater. It was not the first time she presented at the border for a similar thing, she said.
In Canada for minutes, she turned around to re-enter the U.S., but unlike previous trips, border agents said they wanted to do more investigation.
“It was not a surprise because I know there are some sensitivities with certain countries and the country of my birth,” she said. “So I wasn’t surprised although it was not the procedure they usually had done.”
As time ticked on, Dashti thought she needed to be patient. The border agents were respectful, offering her water or snacks, she said. She was sure she’d be back home when they were done.
Her husband, who is a surgeon at A.R. Gould Hospital knew she had gone to the border for her license. But when she didn’t return home, he came to check on her and bring her food, she said.
The agents told him it may take longer and he left.
At midnight, agents told her she was inadmissible.
It was frightening, she said.
“I was in shock. I was trembling. I don’t know if it was stress, cold or all of it together,” Dashti said. “I couldn’t process that they told me ‘not admissible.’”
With nothing but a light sweater, her purse and her passport, she had nowhere to go. The temperatures had fallen into the mid-30s.
She found a hotel in Grand Falls, New Brunswick. There were no rooms available, but the clerk suggested another.
“They should have a room for you, just keep knocking on the door until they open,” the clerk told her. She found a room at 3 a.m.
For the first two weeks, she believed she’d go home soon. She went for walks, watched television and waited for morning to turn to night. Despite having friends in Ontario, she was not leaving the border.
“I was expecting that every day it’s going to be the last day before going home,” she said. “I wanted to be as close to the border as I could so any moment that I was informed I could go back immediately.”
She felt like the walls and ceilings of her hotel rooms were pressing down on her chest. That’s when Dashti started “drifting along the border like a nomad,” staying one night here another there.
“I was hoping as I changed rooms the weight would lift off my chest,” she said.
As someone who had witnessed wars and lived under the dictatorial Islamic regime in her youth, Dashti was no stranger to tumultuous events and hardship, she said.
“But what I was going through, with all the unexplained causes and uncertainties, was by far the hardest to bear,” she said.
Around eight weeks in, she had bursts of severe anxiety and insomnia and thought she had to do something before she became clinically depressed.
That’s when she started running, something she hadn’t done since middle school.
“It was difficult, but it was good practice for pushing myself,” she said. “ It was a way of staying strong and I think it was a great experience for me to start running.
Perhaps hardest of all were the FaceTime visits with her children and especially her daughter, who was 12 at the time.
She had many questions, “how long is this going to take?” “When is this going to finish?”
No one had any answers to those questions, Dashti said.
To this day, she does not know why she was denied entry.
The border agents had asked questions about her mother’s work for the Iranian government in 1980, and Dashti and Monteleone thought maybe that was the reason, but there is nothing they know for sure, she said, adding that her family did not want to live in Iran.
“My father is deceased but he was an activist opposing the regime and we had hardships we faced when I was young back in Iran,” she said.
Presque Isle’s hospital is glad she has returned.
“We are grateful that our colleague, Dr. Dashti, has returned to Maine and to her family, community, and patients,” said Dr. Jay Reynolds, president of Northern Light A.R. Gould Hospital. “We all will be thrilled to see her and welcome her home.”
Dashti said she was showered with messages from people in the community. Colleagues and neighbors found her on Facebook. Those helped get her through her ordeal.
“I was trying to focus on those messages when I was nearing the border to focus on what it means for me to go back to a community where now I feel even more connection,” Dashti said.
“Although I have been away from the community I have a stronger feeling than before. I try to cherish these pleasant emotions and be grateful for the love and support that I received.”
