They have verbatim told me they would deny me entry into the country merely for not answering things like random questions about what work I do in the country or whether I own guns (I am a US citizen). They involved HSI and tried to get my passport revoked, they tossed me in a jail cell and vans with my hands and feet bound. They wrote lies in a search warrant, tied the source of the lies to anonymous individuals and animals that can never be held to account, and then got a judge to sign a search warrant that turned up nothing. They got doctors to write in my medical record that they think "I am a drug packer" despite never finding anything or any evidence to support it.
You will find "temporary" can be long enough to make your life extremely unpleasant, that they can do unpleasant things to your body (another lady at my point of entry was raped, sued, and lost, -- the raping was done to "probe for drugs" and held to be justified), that they can run up debt in your name (what they did to me is just travel around to different ER and tell them an emergency, then bill it to my name, and to multiple hospitals to rack up the debt), that they can put you on a list so that you have no hope of making any airport connections for many years. I don't even bother scheduling same-day international connections anymore, and I have to plan on family members and animals being taken care of for at least 72 hours in advance before I cross the US border.
You later contact a lawyer, several lawyers in fact, only to find out they've handled many of these cases, always lost, and reluctant to bother trying again.
Respectfully, you don't realize how horribly naïve you are. You are not dealing with people that follow the law, rather genuinely evil people that will do whatever they can get away with because they can get away with it and find supreme satisfaction in sadism.
Why do I get the feeling there’s more to this story....
Anyway, there’s wide gulf between not giving up the passcode to my life and not answering basic questions.
You'll hear the same "more to the story" if it happens to you, as well. Hope you never have to experience it, but if you do, you'll find the same as me. No one believes it until it happens to them, always "more to the story" or "a lie" or some such right up until they find out reality. Then they find out that "gulf" they thought they saw was a mirage.