NRI PULSE STAFF REPORT
New Jersey, September 9, 2026: An Indian-American author and former Wall Street investment banker says he was detained and questioned by U.S. border officers while returning from a vacation in Greenland, an encounter he says left him questioning whether all Americans are treated equally when entering their own country.
“I am a U.S. citizen, and I was detained reentering my own country from vacation,” Neal Bakshi said in a video posted on Instagram, recounting the experience.
Bakshi, who was born and raised in the United States and is the son of Indian immigrants, said he had landed from Greenland and was using Global Entry when a border officer told him he had been “randomly selected” for additional screening.
Bakshi said being selected for additional scrutiny was not new to him.
“After being randomly selected since my teenage years, this felt drastically different,” he said.
According to Bakshi, officers initially declined to tell him why he was being taken for further processing. He said he was escorted to a large, windowless waiting area where, by his observation, everyone else waiting to be processed was a person of color.
“The windowless room was lit with a sallow yellow light,” he recalled, adding that cushions on the benches were ripped and the bathroom door had no lock.
Bakshi said he was subsequently taken into a smaller room, where officers sought extensive personal information and questioned him about affiliations with certain groups.
He said he was eventually told that the questioning was “for my own safety, given everything that was happening in the news with war.” Bakshi did not identify the groups he was questioned about or specify which conflict or security concern officers were referring to.
As he was being released, Bakshi said he witnessed another encounter that troubled him. He said an officer spoke to an elderly Hispanic woman who did not speak English, telling her to “sit down and think about what lie you want to tell me next.”
Bakshi acknowledged that border screening can identify people who pose legitimate security concerns, but said what he witnessed raised questions for him about who is subjected to heightened scrutiny.
“While I’m sure some nefarious people are stopped with these tactics, it’s hard to dismiss the assumption of guilt based on a clear subset of the population,” he said.
He ended his account with a broader question about citizenship and equal treatment.
“Are all Americans being treated fairly?” Bakshi asked. “Or is this just part of the price some have to pay for their own freedom?”
Bakshi is an author, entrepreneur and spiritual guide who previously spent nearly a decade on Wall Street. FINRA records show that he was registered with Goldman Sachs & Co. from December 2015 until July 2022, after previously working with Lloyds Securities. His biography says he rose to vice president in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and worked on more than $100 billion in transactions.
A graduate of New York University with degrees in economics and history, Bakshi says he was raised in New Jersey in a family of Indian immigrants and was introduced to meditation and the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda at an early age.
After leaving Wall Street, he founded Awaken Mind Sciences and moved into writing, speaking and spiritual coaching. He is the author of Banking on Angels: How an Investment Banker Found Spiritual Fulfillment and Inner Peace and describes himself as a consciousness researcher, spiritual guide and TEDx speaker.
His experience comes at a particularly sensitive moment for travelers and immigrant communities, as heightened immigration enforcement and scrutiny at U.S. borders have generated growing debate over security, due process and racial profiling.
For Bakshi, however, the encounter ultimately came down to a more fundamental question — what it means to be an American citizen and whether that citizenship affords everyone the same experience at the border.
