I respect your opinion but disagree... yes some bureaucratic mechanisms are moronic but immigration rules / regulations are created for our safety among other things. The immigration official was doing his job yet Boris expecgts him to violate his integrety, break the rule -law- and get himself fired? If Boris doesn't like it there are other ways of getting one's point across or causing change rather than whining in a newspaper article.
The way I read the piece is that it was not an ICE employee, or even a British immigration and/or customs person, it was a Continental Airlines employee.