Below Deck alum Natalya Scudder is detailing her alleged experience in an immigration detention center after she said she was held for “30 to 40” hours.
“I basically got pulled from, like, this main waiting area to the behind-the-scenes area of the airport, which is like a detention holding center,” Scudder, who starred on season 7 and 8 of the hit Bravo reality TV show, alleged while speaking to TMZ in an interview published on Saturday, July 25. “Dirty blankets on the floor; there’s stains all over the walls; there’s a shower but there’s no towels.”
Scudder added, “I said, like, ‘How long am I going to be here for?’ And they were like, ‘You’re going to be here from one to five days.’”
The reality TV alum, an Australian resident who had a visa to visit the United States but not work in the country, said she landed in LAX and was going through immigration when she realized “something is wrong here.”
“They were just like, ‘In 2024, you took photos on the land that generated this much money.’ They said that, ‘You earned this money by taking photos on American soil,’” she alleged. “And they had a problem with it, saying I legally worked on the wrong visa.”
She continued of her alleged experience, “There’s no, like, consent form — they just take your iPhone. They went through absolutely everything — your ChatGPT history, your notes, your texts. They even pulled up deleted messages. Whatever you think is deleted in your iPhone is not deleted it all goes into, like, some storage.”
Scudder claimed that the authorities went through “everything you’ve ever screenshotted, taken a picture of, googled,” calling the experience “embarrassing” and alleging that some agents were laughing when they “came out of this room.”
“So you get taken to, like, a detention center where I was the only girl and they give you no information — they just tell you you’re detained,” she continued, adding that after asking for a blanket she was allegedly told she’s not at the “Beverly Hills Hotel.”
“I said, ‘If I’m here for one to five days, how will I shower?’ They said, ‘Oh, you just wash yourself and dry yourself with your dirty clothes and put them back on,’” she claimed.
Scudder said that after finally calming down and managing to fall asleep, agents shook her awake for her official interview. After answering “the first few questions,” she claimed, she said she knew she was going to be deported.
She said that after a 17-hour flight to the U.S., she was detained for 30-40 hours and then sent back to Australia via another 17-hour flight.
“I love America, but I think the laws — the warning from this, for anyone who does content creation, would be: they really have locked in now on people who do Instagram or make any money from YouTube, OnlyFans, Playboy,” she concluded, adding that if a person is “taking pictures on American soil” they should have a work Visa.
Us has reached out to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials for comment.
