My Pearson Experience - Denied for a Research Assistant

CBP Officers often band together and are sometimes reluctant to overturn another officer's decision unless it was a complete screw-up. Perhaps this explains why you encountered a hard time initially.

It is when you are dishonest with them that potentially bad things can happen such as execution of summary exclusion. Your situation was not really an intentional lie. It was more to due to misunderstanding the question so she gave you a big, big break!

You often get stopped at the border as denials can remain in the system for years and are difficult to remove.