America doesn't care anymore, detains beloved children's book author

Imagine how America would react if Australia was mean to the late Maurice Sendak or even Eric Carle, author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

That's how the latter feels now, after hearing that beloved children's book author Mem Fox was left in tears after being detained for hours at Los Angeles Airport and accused of having the wrong visa in early February.

Author of such subversive texts as Possum Magic and Ten Little Fingers, Fox told the Advertiser the experience was traumatic and humiliating.

"The way I was treated would have made any decent American shocked to the core, because that's not America as a whole, it really isn't," she said. "It's just that people have been given permission to let rip in a fashion that is alarming."

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Fox, who claims she had a valid visa, has reportedly received a written apology from the United States embassy in Canberra. The Embassy and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have been contacted for comment.

She told the outlet she was aggressively questioned, and suggested President Donald Trump has created an atmosphere in the U.S. that makes such behaviour acceptable. Fox now doubts she'll ever return.

"I am old and white, innocent and educated, and I speak English fluently," she added. "Imagine what happened to the others in the room, including an old Iranian woman in her 80s, in a wheelchair."

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On The Project Tuesday, she went into more detail about her "awful" experience.

"The treatment of people in that room while I was there, which I observed, made me ashamed to be a human being," she said.

Really America? The woman literally wrote a book about magic possums called little Hush and Grandma Poss -- there's nothing nicer than that. Naturally, Australian Twitter reacted with outrage, and plenty of jokes about the location of known trouble maker, "the green sheep."

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UPDATE: March 1, 2017, 10:25 a.m. AEDT Tweet added from The Project.