World travellers are rethinking vacation plans to the US

Days into President Donald Trump’s second term, a German woman crossing into America from Mexico was held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for more than a month. A few weeks later, a

Canadian actress

was kept for 12 days in detention centers on the southern border after bureaucratic troubles over a work visa. A French scientist on his way to an astronomy conference was detained at the airport in Houston for a day and ordered to return home.

Friction at the US border, especially disagreements over paperwork, isn’t strange on its own, say overseas diplomats. But the harshness and length of the detentions in the brief time since Mr Trump returned to Washington are bizarre, they say. So are the headlines, which the new administration either doesn’t mind or has been unable to control. “The border agencies are under new orders, so they’re a bit stricter,” says one European consular official who asked not to be named. “But it does seem as if the American government wants to send a warning.”

A warning about what? US Customs and Border Protection says a reduction in illegal crossings has freed up its law enforcement officers to do more “vetting” at the border. “Lawful travellers have nothing to fear from these measures,” said Ms Hilton Beckham, assistant commissioner for public affairs at the CBP. “However, those intending to enter the US with fraudulent purposes or malicious intent–don’t even try.”

The heightened scrutiny means everyday tourists, conference attendees and business travellers–including those hailing from traditional US allies–are getting caught in the crosshairs. As anecdotes of hostility at the border are reported in media around the world, early signs point to a coming slump in international visitors to the US.

Canadian flight reservations to the US through September are down a staggering 70 per cent from the same period last year, according to a report by OAG Aviation Worldwide. The decline may also reflect Canadian boycotts of American products in the wake of

Mr Trump’s tariff threats

and growing concern over the president’s suggestion that Canada should become the 51st state. Sebastien Bazin, chief executive officer of French hotel group Accor SA–whose dozens of hotel brands include Fairmont and Sofitel–told Bloomberg Television that European bookings to the US this summer are down 25 per cent, surmising one reason is “bad buzz” from the border detentions.

Mr Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics, had expected things to return to business as usual for international arrivals this year after a lingering Covid-19 slump. Now he says travel won’t normalise until 2029, which risks affecting the World Cup in 2026, co-hosted by the US, Mexico and Canada, and the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

“That will essentially be an entire decade between pre-pandemic and full recovery,” he says. The border detentions, paired with Mr Trump’s trade wars and his cozier relationship with Russia, may incentivise Europeans and Canadians, in particular, to travel elsewhere. “All of those things are compounding one another and making the US somewhat of a global pariah when it comes to tourism,” Mr Sacks says.

He predicts a less dramatic downturn for all of 2025–a 20 per cent reduction from Canada, and 9.4 per cent overall, compared with 2024. Yet even those changes would result in a US$9 billion loss in visitor spending, he says. “Another irony is that tariffs are being designed to help right the US trade deficit, but the immediate effects in terms of travel is to hurt the US trade balance,” Mr Sacks says. In 2019 visitors spent US$20 billion more in the US than US residents spent abroad, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. “So that actually shows up in the trade data as contributing to the trade balance in a positive way.”

Although Brexit can’t be directly compared to Mr Trump’s tactics, its lingering effects on travel may offer a clue to the longer-term impact for the US. When Britain left the European Union in 2020, shutting its doors to passport-free travel for other Europeans, tourism and business travel took a substantial hit. The pandemic depressed numbers further, and by some metrics the situation has not fully normalised. Adjusted for inflation, VisitBritain forecasts visitors to the UK in 2025 will spend 93 per cent of their 2019 level. Back in the US, the government says the travel and tourism industry contributed US$2.3 trillion to the US economy in 2022, supporting about 9.5 million jobs. “International visitors are vital to the US economy,” says the US Travel Association, an advocacy group.

The travellers most likely to get flagged at the border, says San Diego-based immigration lawyer Jacob Sapochnick, are the ones who–fairly or not–already have a note in the CBP system, usually logged by an agent during a previous visit. “But there’s a moment in the questioning where it turns dark,” he says. “In the past, people were just denied and sent back. Now the agents say you’re not admissible, you’re going to be deported. But they don’t say it verbally. Next thing you know,” he says, you’re detained or deported.

For instance, in the widely reported case of Ms Jessica Brosche, a tattoo artist from Berlin detained for weeks on her way to a January art show in Los Angeles, border agents allegedly accused her of having worked off the books during a previous US visit. The French scientist, who hasn’t been named, had sensitive information on his phone from Los Alamos National Laboratory, in violation of a nondisclosure agreement, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a post on X.

Ms Jasmine Mooney, the Canadian actress who was detained at a border crossing in Otay Mesa, California, saw firsthand how a series of minor bureaucratic snafus can build into something much bigger. Ms Mooney had applied for a work visa in March 2024 to represent an American drink brand. Her application was challenged because some of her documents were missing the company’s letterhead. She corrected the problem, she says, but in November a new agent raised different objections. “Little did I know that, as soon as you get one issue,” she says, “it stays on your record, and that issue literally snowballed.”

In March 2025, on her lawyer’s advice, Ms Mooney restarted her application at Otay Mesa, and this time an agent said she was no longer eligible for the work visa. When she sat down, dejected, and tried to book a flight back to Vancouver, she says she was taken to a room, patted down, handcuffed, stripped of her belongings, denied a phone call and delivered to a cold, fluorescent-lit cell. “It felt like I was kidnapped,” Ms Mooney, 35, says. “I’ve had so many lawyers reach out to me, and they’re like, ‘We’ve never seen what’s happening at the borders before.’”

After three days, she was booked into a “real jail,” she says–the Otay Mesa Detention Center, not far from the border crossing station of the same name–and finally transferred to ICE detention in Arizona. Ms Mooney spent nearly two weeks behind bars, and she has since expressed skepticism about the private companies running those centers for ICE and CBP. She notes that both GEO Group Inc. and CoreCivic Inc. receive federal funding based on an estimated per diem for each detainee, giving them little incentive to release anyone quickly.

Both companies pushed back on that claim, saying that government officials decide when and where to detain people at the border, not private contractors. “CoreCivic does not enforce immigration laws, arrest anyone who may be in violation of immigration laws or have any say whatsoever in an individual’s deportation, release or transfer between facilities,” said Mr Ryan Gustin, a spokesman for CoreCivic, which runs the Otay Mesa Detention Center. Mr Christopher Ferreira, a spokesman for GEO, offered a similar comment: “Such decisions are made exclusively by the federal government.”

Yet both companies have also sounded positive about Mr Trump’s new border policies. Executives at GEO, for example, told investors on an upbeat earnings call in February that they expected “an unprecedented level of operational activity.”

A lingering question is whether stricter enforcement of relatively minor crimes at the border will serve America as a whole. Sapochnick, the San Diego lawyer, sees little advantage to anyone but President Trump. “The benefit is only to one person,” he says. “It’s essentially a message. He can say, ‘I told you what I was going to do, and now I’m doing it. Take me seriously.’” BLOOMBERG