By midday Wednesday, Canadian travel agent Micheline Dion had received another two emails from clients canceling their travel plans to the United States or voicing worries about their safety should they keep them. One client sought to nix his cruise out of Puerto Rico, while another wrote that they were worried about visiting Rochester, N.Y. this coming May.
Their messages all stemmed from “fears of how they will be treated, their safety,” and whether they’ll be allowed entry, Dion, who is based in Ontario, told Salon. “No one wants to enter a possible volatile situation and even worse be denied entry.”
Dion said she’s been receiving an influx of these emails from clients since President Donald Trump began targeting Canada and enacting his crackdown on immigration — and as stories of U.S. border officers denying entry to or detaining tourists in harrowing conditions made international headlines. Since Trump took office in January, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has detained at least four tourists, three from Europe and one from Canada, each for upwards of 10 days after they attempted to enter the country. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has also been denying entry to foreign nationals — in one French scientist’s case, doing so over text messages criticizing President Donald Trump.
The combination has made potential visitors scared to travel to the U.S. out of fear they, too, will be detained, turned away or targeted. Now some travel agents, like Dion, are loathe to encourage U.S.-bound trips altogether.
On Facebook earlier this month, Dion cautioned her clients against using U.S. dollars in other countries and flying out of the nearest American airport in Buffalo, N.Y., and urged them to rethink their travel habits. Though she knows a few Canadians who are crossing the border to visit close friends and family, she said she couldn’t in good conscience continue to encourage her clients to travel to the U.S. under the circumstances.
She cited Trump’s economic attacks of Canada, the lack of education on Canada’s role as a close U.S. ally, recent plane crashes, a fear of facing potential violence from Trump supporters and the recent increase in her clients facing heightened scrutiny when attempting to cross the border as the primary reasons pushing her to make her posts.
“As long as there is no stability in the U.S., we will not feel safe or confident to go back,” she said in a phone interview, emphasizing that she will continue to advise against travel to the U.S.
About 10 of her clients have reported encountering more intense questioning from border officers when attempting to enter the U.S. in recent weeks, she said. Dion herself had wanted to plan a 14-day cruise out of New York later this year but decided against it because of the uncertainty of how long the crackdown will last.
“If I’m limited that I’m not going to travel for my own safety, I’m going to educate other Canadians to do the same because the last thing you want is another something coming up saying, ‘Oh, we’re having trouble coming back home. They won’t let us go. They’ve arrested us. They put us in a detention place,” she said.
“We already know that the Trump administration is not even listening to the court there in the U.S,” she added, referencing the president’s recent defiance of a court order blocking a deportation. “So what are our chances going to be if we had to end up in court?”
Those fears have only heightened following reports last week that ICE had detained a Canadian traveler, Jasmine Mooney, over visa concerns. Mooney, who had been offered a marketing job in a U.S.-based startup, had attempted to enter the country in early March after applying for a TN visa, which allows Canadian and Mexican professionals to stay here temporarily. She told The New York Times that she first applied for the visa last year but was rejected because her documents didn’t include the company’s letterhead.
Mooney had successfully reapplied a month later, but a U.S. immigration official in a Vancouver airport revoked the work permit, citing improper processing and concerns over a company employing her also selling hemp-based products. Upon bringing another work visa application earlier this month to the San Diego border, an immigration officer told her she needed to apply through the consulate.
Another officer soon whisked her away to a different room, where she was searched and interrogated. She was transferred to the first of two detention centers ICE would hold her in and would then spend 12 days in detention. She was finally allowed to return to Vancouver last Friday.
In an article for The Guardian, Mooney likened the detention experience to being kidnapped.
“It felt like we had all been kidnapped,” she wrote of her and her fellow detainees, “thrown into some sort of sick psychological experiment meant to strip us of every ounce of strength and dignity.”
Mooney’s detention came on the heels of that of Rebecca Burke, a Welsh comic artist who ICE detained for 19 days at a Washington state facility over concerns she had violated her visa. Before Burke, who returned to Wales on Tuesday, ICE had held two German tourists in a detention center for up to six weeks. Both were permitted to return home earlier this month.
These detentions, experts recently told Salon, mark a clear escalation in enforcement under the Trump administration as border officers take strict interpretations of laws governing tourists’ and other foreign nationals’ entry into the country. While legal, the actions threaten the nation’s relationship with affected countries, 43 of which the U.S. has made agreements with to allow citizens relatively free access to enter with the Electronic System for Travel Authorization visa waiver. They also open Americans up to greater scrutiny and the possibility of receiving similar treatment by these countries when going abroad.
As tourist encounters with CBP and ICE escalate, foreign governments have moved toward issuing travel advisories for citizens seeking to travel to the U.S., warning that their ESTA visa waivers do not guarantee them entry to the country. The UK issued a travel advisory on Thursday, while Germany updated its’ advisory on Wednesday after previously issuing a warning for transgender and gender-expansive citizens who wish to travel to the U.S.
In Canada, Mooney’s detention has inflamed already tense relations ushered in under Trump. Since the president threatened to annex the country and imposed tariffs on its exports into the U.S., Canadian citizens have engaged in boycotts of U.S. travel and goods, and encouraged others to instead buy Canadian to bolster their nation’s economy.
Trump’s threats to Canada’s sovereignty, coupled with his executive orders and rhetoric targeting LGBTQ people — particularly transgender people — and diversity, equity and inclusion, made independent travel advisor Karen Wiese, also based in Ontario, decide in February she would no longer be assisting her clients with travel to the U.S.
“I support a lot of different racialized and LGBTQ+ clients who are just very nervous about being attacked and going anywhere in the United States,” Wiese told Salon in a phone interview.
She announced her decision on Feb. 1, telling followers on Facebook that she can’t support or promote tourism in a destination that doesn’t align with her values, which privilege inclusivity and respect. Since seeing ICE’s treatment of Mooney — and the increase in tourist encounters with border officers in general — she’s become even more firm in her decision.
Facing possible detention “is terrifying for anybody who wants to be able to travel to a destination,” Wiese said. “I’m all for my clients going to a different destination to just avoid anything like that that may happen.”
Wiese said that around 40% of her roster of some 250 clients have canceled trips they were planning to take to the U.S. in recent weeks while a smaller percentage are still mulling whether to do so. Many say that they’re afraid to come, while others refuse to support the U.S. economy. Ahead of her phone interview with Salon, one client emailed her to cancel a Christmas cruise they’d planned that is set to leave from Los Angeles over concerns for the safety of their gay son.
“It’s been constant people saying, ‘We don’t want to do this. What else can we do?'” she said. “It’s just a pivot moment where we look for something else. Mexico might be an easier place for them to visit.”
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