Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing detention and deportation from Thailand. Specifically we're sort of discussing Thai Immigration jail in the Immigration Detention Centre; if you want to call it the Thai Immigration jail, I guess you can call it that too. 

The point of this video or actually the inspiration for it came from Pure Guava, over on X, over on formerly called Twitter, I'll go ahead and put a link in the description below. So, basically and we'll create a thumbnail from this video, what he put up is a video of two foreign travellers coming to Thailand and if you watch the video and I urge you to go to the link in the description below, basically they had been gone for 45 days, they come back and they are not allowed to enter Thailand and they are told they're being turned away. As a result, they go into detention facilities and they do some photos of the detention facilities out at the airport, I believe they are at Don Muang. I personally have not been to that Detention facility at Don Muang. I've been to the one in Suvarnabhumi, I've also dealt with IDC out near Suan Plu over here, the old Immigration main office before they moved out to Chaeng Wattana, but the Immigration Detention Centre is still over at Suan Plu, or the main one I should say. They're actually, they have sort of little "brigs" in different places where they have Immigration checkpoints where they can hold people. Now first observation from the video is, and I've said this in other videos, you don't want to be in Immigration Detention if you can at all avoid it, because depending on your situation, you could get stuck there for a while, most notably as they are trying to find you a ticket to get out, and they basically want to deport you as quickly as possible to a country that will take you. 

This is another issue that comes up with regard to deportation. When I say deportation, people view that especially Western foreigners is they view that as something "that couldn't happen to me". Well it does, as you can see in the video. When you get deported from a country, it leads other countries to not want to take you, because they see on your sort of file, on the manifest of you coming in, you're a third country national, you're a foreign national in that country too, and they say, "you know what, it's just not worth it", and they just don't want to take you either. In many cases you oftentimes have to go back to your home country if you're being deported, because effectively a third country won't take you. This is kind of different than times past. When people used to get turned away at the airport here in Thailand, oftentimes they would get back on a plane, go to Malaysia or go to Singapore or whatever. Yeah, that era has largely come and gone. As a practical matter, as we have seen it and operate here in the office on many different cases, if they see that you're being deported from Thailand, whatever the receiving country is on the next leg, may not want to take you and this is one of the reasons it takes a while for Thai Immigration to do a deportation because they have got to verify that wherever they are sending you, is going to accept you so that you are out of their hair; that's basically how they look at it, okay?

Again, I don't want to get into sort of the details of that video. This video is more to just talk about Immigration Detention and how you possibly can be deported. I note in there though that they did say something along the line, "oh we've been gone for 45 days, and now we're back and they just wouldn't let us in." I'd be curious to know the travel history under those circumstances. If it's somebody that has effectively been living in Thailand for the aggregate of you know a year prior to that 45-day gap, it's very possible Thailand might not let somebody like that in because they view them as somebody that's just effectively trying to obfuscate the fact that they are effectively trying to live in Thailand, without living in Thailand, without getting a visa to appropriately live in Thailand. 45-day gap, I mean again I would like to see the travel history. That seems like a pretty long period of time to make that call on them, but again if that person, the people in the video had been in Thailand like 18 months or a year total prior to that 45-day gap, and then these people are coming back in on tourist status, I can see the argument as to why an Immigration Officer would feel the way that they felt. Again I don't know the further facts of the underlying case, and I really don't want to get into the merits and all that because it does look to me like these folks were acting in good faith. They just flew in; they thought they were going to be able to get in and they were not. They were detained and they were deported.

That being said more to the point is yeah Immigration Detention not some place you want to be. Yes, they have facilities at airports. Is it like a Hilton, is it a five-star hotel? Not really.  Would you call it like cruel and unusual? No I don't think you could call it that. I don't even think it's inhumane but oftentimes it is basically a waiting room and that is not the best place to be. Purgatory is a waiting room too. It is not exactly the place you want to go, is what I am sort of saying. So the point I'm trying to make with this video is yes, you can be deported, you can be detained by Thai Immigration. Neither is something you want to be, so it's a good idea to have your Immigration ducks in a row before arriving here in the Kingdom of Thailand.