It's one thing to refuse entry to someone who doesn't have the right documents. The fear goes to a completely different level once people see tourists getting locked up.
As someone who lived in the US for 22 years legally and most of my social and business network there, I an not taking the risk of getting locked up in ICE jail any time soon, no matter how unlikely it is.
I won't be visiting the US for the foreseeable future (used to go several times per year for work), just not worth the risk.
Out of curiosity, what do you think it's like to travel to Europe as someone who is dark-skinned, has a beard, and does not have a European passport?
From my point of view, if POTUS blathers about annexing Canada, then the US doesn't deserve my tourist dollars, neither my Netflix subscription, neither my Amazon prime subscription. I've cut back on purchases/subscriptions from US companies as much as it was possible for me and my family. Also cancelled a trip to south east US. Purely out of spite.
If there's the slightest possibility that what he says is not bullshit, then Canada needs to take it very seriously and the entire northern hemisphere security architecture needs to permanently change.
Now that it's a political issue, rather than a logistical matter, so it's no longer professional or civilised, no thanks. I have one US customer and thankfully Google Meet is enough, because I'm not getting anywhere near the US for them. I can find other customers if I have to, but I don't think legal fees for navigating the oh-we-totally-had-good-reason-to-think-he-was-a-terrorist-your-honour jail are as easily deductible. As for leisure, haha, no, there are plenty of things to see all over the world where the chances of getting jailed because you said the wrong thing about the wrong president are much smaller. My visa expires this year, I'm not planning to renew it any time soon.
I'd be interested in alternate viewpoints since I may be in a bleeding-heart, empathetic, progressive, consequence-considering news bubble.
My reasoning is that a family member who lives in the US said that they feel protected / insulated because they're in a deep blue state. I don't feel this is representative of reality, or at least they should be more alarmed than they sounded.
Exactly.
Americans generally don't understand the degree to which the rest of the world gets the CNN 5min recap of what's going on in the US, and it's very much the CNN recap and not the Fox one.
"Tourists locked up, school children shot, government defunded, California on fire, tune in at 11 for more".
The fact that ~half the country doesn't think ICE should be locking up tourists without good reason and the other ~half doesn't think ICE should be locking up anyone gets skipped.
Edit: Just to head off the nitpickers, by "good reason" I mean stuff that border guards of any nation would lock anyone up for if they found, regardless of visa type, status or nation or origin.
I think the consensus is that if the rest of the world grows a spine it will emerge far stronger and the US a weaker state to before - akin to change the British Empire post ww2 compared with before, probably with the same glee they saw the British Empire falling.
Of course it is. Because the chance of a global recession is about 50% now.
Which means millions of people are going to lose their jobs, businesses will collapse, governments will go into deficit and cut services and there will be needless suffering only a few years after COVID.
It’s funny how quickly you realize the bad guys are both sides.
I say this because often when trying to interpret media i feel the language and accent of the presenter influences me. “They sound like me” therefore i start with an assumption they think like me. Rarely anyone in fox thinks like me.
They're in a bubble.
Bubbles are great till they pop.
Basically: behaviour at US borders has been iffy for a lot longer than some folks might think.
Non-citizens at US points of entry have very limited constitutional protection. SCOTUS has consistently held that the federal government has broad authority over immigration and border control. Basically nobody has a 1st or 2nd amendment protection at a border crossing, and non-citizens have further-restricted 4th and 5th amendment protections among others.
Border agents do not need any level of suspicion or probably cause to search your person or your effects. Failing to answer questions can result in entry being denied. US v. Ramsey held that everyone, citizen or not, has no inherent right to enter the US at a particular point of entry on a particular date and time and that basically any search is "reasonable" due to national security and law enforcement needs. That ruling was half a century ago.
Shaughnessy v. US ex rel. Mezei (1953) held that even a lawful resident who is re-entering the country after an absence can be denied re-entry without a hearing as long as that denial is lawful. Mezei lived in the US as a lawful immigrant from 1923 to 1948 then went back to Hungary for just over a year and a half. A 1924 law classified him as an "excludable alien" when he returned in 1950 he was permanently barred from re-entry. This was before LPR status was codified so I imagine there is more relevant case law to that classification specifically.
SCOTUS has consistently held multiple distinctions between citizens and non-citizens at the border: Citizens have an absolute right to enter the country, non-citizens (including LPRs) do not. Everyone loses most 4A protections at points of entry, but citizens have a reasonableness bar that non-citizens do not (US v. Montoya de Hernandez 1985, US v. Flores-Montano 2004). Citizens still enjoy due process while non-citizens do not (Shaughnessy again, Kwong Hai Chew v. Colding 1953). Citizenship ensures someone is not in a legal limbo status of being detained unreasonably or indefinitely (Boumediene v. Bush 2008), a non-citizen denied entry without the means to leave is basically stuck there. Citizens are presumed able to enter the country and have faster processing, all non-citizens including LPRs must prove admissibility every time.
So there's a century (or more) of case law supporting what some might call extreme power on the part of the federal government to deny non-citizens entry at any port of entry, for any or no reason. But what it boils down to is whether there are any countries in the world that don't have this policy? There is no country in the world where as a non-citizen I enjoy the same rights and legal recourse as a citizen if I am denied entry, and no country where it is not on me to affirmatively prove to the border agent(s) that I am legally permitted entry. It is always a privilege to enter a country other than your own.
Edit: At the risk of breaking guidelines and making for boring reading, I have to question the odds of someone being able to read this comment in ~30 seconds, process the argument, and decide its worth a downvote vs. "oh I don't like this first sentence."
This means if you're going to be denied entry it will probably be in Dublin which will make it a preferred airport of origin within the EU -- this is massively more convenient than getting stuck in JFK.
For what it's worth, we're also starting to have similar (though so far less pronounced) reactions to domestic travel. There's a number of states that are unsafe to travel to if you or someone in your family has a gender identity that's not on the approved list--and that has an outsize effect. I won't go to those places since they don't deserve my tax dollars, and am just jumping on a bandwagon of plenty of other people in making that decision.
For this Summer we wanted to visit my sister, so we bought tickets last December. I've always been pretty vocal about my dislike for Trump too. Well, for the first time, I'm worried that, when traveling to the US, some overzealous TSA agent could ask me to get access to my social media accounts, and that I could be refused entry, or even get sent to one of those wonderful privately owned jails; you know, for lèse-majesté. I reckon that the risk is too little to warrant us canceling our trip, but honestly, if I didn't have my tickets already, I would probably not have bought them now.
This is the craziest timeline.
Having said that, weigh up the benefits and drawbacks of scrubbing your social media accounts to minimise that particular concern?
I don't have any, so I don't know what I'd be losing, but I can say that I feel sorry for some family members of mine who have been sucked in to the social media dopamine addiction farm. They'd be better off without it and having more time to be their own selves and live their own lives rather than other people's.
/rant (sorry)
I've been a vocal Trump supporter on social media. By this measure they should give me a green card if I'll ever plan to visit US.
I've turned down a 7-day-all paid-trip my company was offering me to San Francisco for this (and I had in the past a bad experience at Puerto Rico's border).
In Australia, we just had someone [1] who was detained for 8 hours with their phone/laptop searched all because they stopped over in Hong Kong rather than flying direct to the US.
It's that kind of irrational, unpredictable behaviour that makes travellers stay away and instead choose from one of the hundreds of other desirable travel destinations who want you to visit.
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/traveller/travel-news/an-australian-w...
It's just a 4 days trip, but I have an entire family that needs me to come back and not sent for a decade to a random overseas prison.
We read about it, too. It just seems absolutely nobody close to power is willing to do anything to even tap the brakes.
Trump can't even keep track of who started the war in Ukraine...
People don't realize how much good will is being toss aside.
All of it is being tossed aside.
At this point it's also about standing with our countrymen and spending our tourist dollars at home.
And they shouldn't. As far as I know, those cases of German getting locked up media coverage was intense, but the stories didn't check out. Those were cases of Germans entering by foot via Tijuana, making condracting claims to the ICE officer - raising suspicions with those officers. In case of entering the US by plane, I haven't seen and credible articles that resulted in detention.
(It’s not clear to me if he has been released. The last media reports are from two weeks ago)
They appear to be testing the boundaries by going after easy targets.
They don't know or don't think canadians takes this seriously and it's not fucking funny.
I wouldn't take any risks either.
Why would someone end up in a jail if he doesn't break any law?
The reverse scenario is happening too. There are americans that refuse to go to europe because of the examples they seen of immigrants committing crimes and ruining neighborhoods.
As someone who spends a lot of time on both locations, I know that both scenarios are rare, and can logically overcome the emotional response after seeing examples online. But for people who don't travel much I understand.
As much as the scenarios can be rare, there is an undeniable sense of everything hanging by a thin thread when traveling around the USA, which I've only experienced in Latin American countries in all my trips.
Giving that I'm originally from Brazil even though with Swedish citizenship, I won't be traveling to the USA anytime in the near future. I have no idea what could happen, might be a completely rare occurrence to be profiled at the border, jailed for no cause, etc., but there's nothing in the USA worth enough to make me even more paranoid at crossing its borders. It's more like the straw that finally broke the camel's back, it's been brewing for a while, I've been stopped by CBP for holding both a B-1/B-2 visa on my Brazilian passport as well as an ESTA on my Swedish one, I do not want the potential issues that another interrogation by CBP at present times could create, like being sent to some jail for 20 days instead of just being refused entry and put on a plane to get back to the EU.
That's actually the nature of bayesian probability: if something is happening a higher proportion of the time vs. before, it's more likely to happen now vs. before. If that something is bad, that means higher risk. It's expected that a rational actor would act to minimize risk to them.
> As someone who spends a lot of time on both locations, I know that both scenarios are rare
Precisely how rare is it, over the last couple months, for US immigration officials to detain someone (perhaps "for further questioning", perhaps to a prison) who hasn't violated any laws? Claiming "it's rare" isn't very useful. Remember, the expected probability is ~0.
The lack of due process and the threat of extradition on a whim is one that feels less likely to happen to me as a caucasian with US citizens as family, but the impact of it would be life-changingly poor. I'd rather just not travel to the US, for tourism, family or business reasons.
I'm not sure anything done in the last 3 months is much of a surprise to people who listened to his campaign talking points. It seems to me that people just thought he was a lying politician who lies, and this was just more lying. What's caught people out is that he's doing it all, and believes SCOTUS will never condemn or find illegal a thing he has done so due process is an abstract concept only, and others consider themselves immune for actions covered by Exec Order.
It's all quite sad and worrying.
Well, so far, that belief seems to be correct.
small thing, but learned at work that often there's a weekly pattern (and I'd bet there is for airplane travel) so you ought use a rolling 7 day average instead of 30 because there are different numbers of weekends in each day's 30 day number.
This is why there's a slight zigzag in the line charts in the article.
[spoiler]
*
*
*
*
*
The dates of Chinese New Year move around across the year and they have such a big effect on the stats that it's easier just to lump the two months together.
[/spoiler]
> Using forward booking data from a major GDS supplier, we've compared the total bookings held at this point last year with those recorded this week for the upcoming summer season. The decline is striking — bookings are down by over 70% in every month through to the end of September. This sharp drop suggests that travellers are holding off on making reservations, likely due to ongoing uncertainty surrounding the broader trade dispute.
* https://www.oag.com/blog/canada-us-airline-capacity-aviation...
* https://thehill.com/business/5218113-us-canada-airline-booki...
I’m American and this administration has set this country back decades. The only way people will rise up here is if their pockets are hurting.
401K accounts are down bad.
Imports of American goods down significantly.
Industries that relied on global trade partners (agriculture?) are getting decimated.
Folks have effectively self owned themselves.
People will only wake up when the economy really hurts. That's why they voted for 47 in the first place, so I hope they're even more awake now.
I make an effort to avoid and me mindful/critical or news/culture war stuff but at the same time.
I’ve got this instinctive vibe that now is not the best time to be visiting the US.
And then add all the other rethoric and actions, which don't make the contemporary U.S. the place it was once idealized to be.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/british-comic-creator-r-e-bu...
"While every item in her bag was swabbed and dismantled, she was subjected to a full body search. "I was in this very loud, weird, industrial space with pipes and conveyor belts and lights and sirens, being told to open my legs. I was silently crying, watching all my stuff being torn apart as someone else was searching every crevice of me."
I can't understand how this is allowed to happen.
The simplest explanation is that this administration wants the US to be hated and sees atrocities as an important tool in that effort.
Then it turns out that she was using Workaway, which is like AirBnB or Uber but for foreign labor on tourist visas. They don't tell you that you need a work visa to work in another country [1], but you almost certainly do anywhere you go, not just the US. The woman in the story was working in exchange for accommodation, which is legal for citizens but not for aliens: work permits and visas exist to deter illegal immigration. She didn't have intent to immigrate illegally, but the scheme under which she entered the country was illegal, and she confessed to it in her statement to the border guards.
The real bad actor in this story was Workaway, and I'm surprised they haven't been shut down yet. They offer an alien labor arrangement that is almost certain to get you detained if caught with the wrong visa, don't give you advice on visas, and aren't there to help if something does go wrong at the border. I doubt there are many countries who welcome their alien labor arrangements, either.
[1] "Workaway is a listing site that enables contact between members, we are unfortunately unable to arrange or advise on visas. There are so many countries with different regulations or laws for different types of volunteering activity, so we would suggest directly getting in touch with the relevant embassy of your destination. It is the responsibility of the host and/or volunteer to make sure they are within the law." https://www.workaway.info/en/stories/workaway-for-newbies-co...
The "kids in cages" Southern border immigration detention ran through both the previous Trump administration and the Biden administration. Some pretty horrific stories from then, especially during COVID.
This goes for most arrests, probably damn near all of them when it comes to nonviolent crimes.
First, do it for your own safety. A wrong form or the wrong answer to a verbal question after 18 hours of travel could land you in weeks of brutal detention.
Second, do it to help the cause. We here in America need to suffer the consequences of our actions. We need to see conferences canceled. We need to see imports stopped. We need to see people refusing to bring their knowledge and expertise here.
It is going to be a long, dark four years for the globe. It's going to take all of us working from within and without to have any hope of dismantling this evil empire.
With so many fewer people coming the ratio of fliers to immigration people is going to be lower, chance of getting hassled is going to be that much higher.
Personally I'm unlikely to return while these stories of bad things happening to people at the border continue
(this isn't a new thing, in particular because the US has no exit processing infrastructure - people get tagged as overstaying even though they've left, get popped into detention when they return - always keep your boarding passes when you leave).
It's not surprising that people are reluctant to travel to the US now.
"It was useless to close one's eyes or turn one's back to it because it was all around, in every direction, all the way to the horizon. It was not possible for us nor did we want to become islands; the just among us, neither more nor less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame, and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species - we, in short - had the potential to construct an infinite enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act."
- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
These days, my favorite place to visit is Europe. Even the UK, which can sometimes be tricky for travelers, has never been an issue for me. I’ve only ever had polite and respectful interactions there. And when crossing into Germany in particular, I’ve found the officials to be consistently professional and efficient.
Huh, city centers in Europe are way nicer than anything I've seen in the US. But maybe you're more interested in other things.
Its days are counted now that they know about its existence.
The latest month available is still February though.
Great time to go to disney, nyc, etc.
This isn’t just dead season
Also NYC doesn’t have a “dead” season. It’s crowded versus overcrowded.
edit: they actually even say that the data "go back for 3 years", but only show 1 year of data.
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/04/foreign-visits-american-air...
- A sight uptick followed, but the number was still down 18.4% as of March 28 versus the same time last year.
- Compare that to the number of U.S. citizens returning to the country, which was up nearly 14% by late March from the year earlier.
Can someone state the obvious for me please?
The two thoughts in my head were "this is because tourism is down" and "this is because migrants/asylum seekers aren't crossing the border at the moment".
I would think you'd draw different conclusions if it's one or the other, but, regarding the latter, I don't know how many of them cross the border at the border and how many typically do it with a plane ticket.
* The US has repeatedly threatened military invasion of a country (Denmark) near mine.
* The US has basically given Russia the green light to invade the rest of EU when ready.
* Mentioned elsewhere in this thread: The many reports of travellers being detained for weeks.
* The US has recently started an economic war on the entire world, except Russia.
Why would I want to visit?
Tourism is not down in other countries. Migrants/asylum seekers don't typically fly in by plane to the top 8 airports in the US, and those that do, do not do so in numbers anywhere near large enough to account for the change in numbers.
I thought the problem the US had was people crossing the land border from Mexico?
I'm not eager to visit a country where a psycho border agent can decide to detain people for multiple weeks.
Some sent to a super max prison in El Salvador [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/20/deported-bec...
French universities offering to adopt US academics
Based on a quick online research, I estimate there are about 30-40k visitors landing from Europe in the US on any day. So roughly 3 million people in the last 3 months.
I have seen maybe 5-10 very prominent cases in the last 3 months.
Are these numbers roughly correct?
Do we have any knowledge that this number is higher than before?
1. Erase your phone before entering the US. Restore it from backup after arrival. CBP has the right to inspect your phone. While you may be able to refuse, likely this means you'll be denied entry and there's nothing you can do about that unless you're lawful permanent resident ("LPR");
2. Don't post on social media under your real name about topics that are likely to get you into trouble. The big ones are anything pro-Palestine or anything critical of Trump;
3. If you are an LPR, do not sign anything they want you to sign if you're detained. What they're trying to do is to get you to voluntarily surrender your LPR status [1]. You have the right to be paroled into the US. Only an immigration judge can forcibly revoke your status;
4. There's stricter enforcement of rules that always existed, particularly abandonment of residency. A green card isn't (and was never intended as) a way to visit the US freely a few weeks a year while living somewhere else;
5. If you are a visa holder you have fewer rights. If you live in the US on a valid visa, I would be extremely hesitant to travel outside the US at all; and
6. Notify friends and family of your travel plans. Additionally, if your country supports it, register your travel with your embassy. The US version of this is STEP [2]. You want someone to make enquiries on your behalf if you are detained and are unable to make outside communications. It's wild that this is where we are.
[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/i-407
[2]: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
The company I work for has a small branch office in DC, the VP of our US option was out here in just back in December and we were chatting at the Christmas party how I was keen to head over at some point if it would be useful for a project we’re doing for a US customer.
Today I would probably politely decline and just continue meeting remotely if they asked me if I could travel over for a week or two.
Why would anyone fly to a country that's proud of shackling them and keeping them in detention without notifying their families? With the added bonus that next week they might be rendered to a slave gulag in El Salvador?
Charles Lindbergh for example blamed the Jews for WW2
> National polls showed that when England and France declared war on Germany, in 1939, less than 10 percent of our [USA] population favored a similar course for America. ... The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Squ...
https://www.smh.com.au/traveller/travel-news/an-australian-w...
New?! They've been suspicious about these travels for the past 20 years or so.
Is the reporting and media coverage on this, going to contribute to the potential harm of this being a long term impact? (is the hype creating the conditions?)
Is the media coverage supposed to entertain the powers that be, or to report things as they are?
Who's there?
Me, can I come in?
I don't know, come in and we'll find out.
...ok
WHAT THE HELL WHY DID YOU COME IN YOU'RE NOT WELCOME HERE
...sorry but you said-
I DON'T CARE WHAT I SAID.
...OK fine I'll just be leaving.
OH YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST LEAVE? YOU CANT LEAVE! You'll be locked in my dank basement for the next five days while I fill out the paperwork for you to be dragged out of the house!
But I just said I'm willing to leave voluntarily!
They can deny you entry, but you're not going to be locked up in some sex dungeon for a week in Toronto
Or has that already been privatised?
And now we can see the problem that this can create you huge problems just by posting lawful content that is not positive to Trump and his policies...
For European visitors, they can see the fascism miles away. A lot of Europe was occupied by Hitler while the US wasn't. The extraordinary claim that Musk's salute wasn't a Nazi salute is mind boggling. Even when people have seen it side by side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Zwiv8erk0
News of tourists getting imprisoned for weeks or longer have been all over the news, but so far Europe doesn't seem to have actually brought out a general warning for that kind of danger.
That said, the people I've spoken to (most of which aren't LGBT+) are hesitant to go to the US now. There's a stark difference between the "haha, what the fuck, US" sentiment I used to sense and the "what the fuck, US" we're getting now.
Can you post the plain text of these "travel warnings"?
Trump has ruined basically all our credibility on a global scale.
Trump seems to be going nuclear with this plan, and because he obviously is not particularly smart or diplomatic, I don't think he grasps the immense second and third order effects this will have on perceptions of America. American goods might get cheaper, but maybe no one will want to buy them. No one will want to travel to the US. No one will want to live in the US.
So dumb.
So for Canadians still travelling to the U.S. it might actually increase their carbon footprint.
The US is made up of 350 million people. Only one of them is Donald Trump. Most of the country didn’t vote for him. We still value our friends and allies, even if the stooge Putin got elected does not.
We're fully aware that the guy who put tariffs because he got angry at us on a whim is the same guy who can launch the nukes.
The fact that that happened shows something is deeply wrong in the US.
The US government, (mostly) democratically elected, has decided to harm the rest of the world.
Even if there are good people in the US, they can't seem to win. So one could argue, what use are the good people in the US, for everyone else?
So the reaction is kind of expected and natural.
It doesn't matter if you didn't vote for this guy. You collectively didn't do enough to stop him from getting reelected and now you're not doing enough to stop him from hurting former allies.
Fix your domestic problems and then we can look towards starting up a dialogue of reconciliation.
Most of the country couldn't vote at all because they are immigrants (not citizens) or because of any of the structural reasons why they couldn't take time off to vote or they were intimated at the ballot box. Voting day still isn't a federal holiday.
If anything I feel sympathy for the American people now that I and many others feel strongly compelled to avoid US services and products, and avoid travelling and spending my tourist and business dollars into your economy based on the actions of Trump and the Republicans!
I mean if I was just put on a flight back (for a tweet they found on my phone or such), that'd be kind of bearable. At least one visitor from the UK got locked up in a facility for a week.
Because it worked so well in the last years. /s
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43610246
Fewer Foreign Passengers Are Flying to the US (jasher.substack.com)
212+ points, 128+ comments (posted slightly earlier)
