The horror stories about US immigration officers harassing visitors to the country keep piling up. It seems like they seek even the most trivial of reasons to give visitors a hard time. Take this example.
Two teenage girls from Germany were detained, arrested, and deported at an airport in Hawaii after immigration officials said it was suspicious they had not booked a hotel room.
Backpackers Charlotte Pohl, 19, and Maria Lepere, 18, arrived in Honolulu from Auckland while undergoing a round-the-world trip. The duo planned to spend five weeks in Hawaii before moving onto California and Costa Rica for the next legs of their journey.
But despite having ESTA travel authorization, immigration officials accused them of attempting to enter the U.S. to work illegally, and they were placed in handcuffs and taken to a nearby detention center they later learned was a deportation facility.
Upon arrival, they were subjected to full-body scans, strip searches and forced to wear green prison jumpsuits, German outlet Ostee Zeitung reports. They were then placed in a holding facility with serious criminals, including an alleged murderer who had been locked up for 18 years, and were forced to spend the night in a freezing cold double cell.
“It was all like a fever dream,” Maria told the German outlet. “It was a shock; we didn’t expect it. We had already noticed a little bit about what was going on in the U.S. But at the time, we didn’t think it was happening to Germans. That was perhaps very naive. We felt so small and powerless.”
After a sleepless night in the freezing cell, the girls were woken early and escorted back to the airport in handcuffs. Upon arrival, they were forced to board a Hawaiian Airlines flight to Tokyo and were told they would receive their passports back once they arrived in Japan.
Included in their travel documents were interrogation transcripts signed by the girls, which “contained sentences we didn’t actually say,” said Charlotte after the ordeal. “They twisted it to make it seem as if we admitted that we wanted to work illegally in the US.”
Stories like these are getting wide coverage in the home countries of these visitors, sparking outrage. Is it any surprise that the numbers of people coming to the US is steadily dropping?
The turnaround for the industry is stark. Last December, the research group Tourism Economics projected an 8.8 percent growth in international visitation in 2025, to go along with a 16 percent increase in visitor spending. By early April, Tourism Economics had reversed course, predicting a 9.4 percent decline in international visitor arrivals, with an even more pronounced 20.2 percent decrease for Canadian travelers. It could mean a $9 billion loss in visitor spending, the group said.
“Vastly all of it” is a direct result of Trump’s actions at the White House, Aran Ryan, director of industry studies at Tourism Economics, told POLITICO.
…In March, 17 percent fewer visitors came to the U.S. from Western Europe than in the same month a year prior, according to the Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration. That same month saw a 24 percent drop in travelers from Central America and a 26 percent fall for those coming from the Caribbean.
…Lena Ross — chair of the board of IITA and the chief operating officer at America 4 You, which works with international partners to curate travel itineraries throughout the country — said current bookings for the fall through her business are down 30 to 50 percent.
Ross said the majority of those refraining from travel to the U.S. are worried about the perils of cross-border travel.
“Am I going to be detained at the border? What are the documents I need? Those are the things that are really stopping the majority of travelers from coming,” she said.
Meanwhile Trump makes the absurd claim that tourism is booming.
But Trump has dismissed concerns about the dip in international travel, projecting confidence in an ABC News interview marking the first 100 days of his administration.
“Tourism’s doing very well,” he said on Tuesday. “We’re doing very well. We’re doing very well. Wait till you see the real numbers come out in about, in six months from now, wait till you see the numbers.”
Ryan Grim of the excellent Drop Site News (to which I subscribe) is not one to be hyperbolic but he says that the interview Trump gave to Terry Moran of ABC News was even more disturbing that usual in what it revealed about Trump’s mental state.
Not only are other countries advising their people not to come to the US if they can avoid it, I hear stories of even US citizens living abroad being reluctant to return home for visits for fear that ICE agents will trawl through their phones and social media and use anything they find there that they do not like to give them a hard time as well. The same applies to US citizens living here who may have thought of traveling abroad but are concerned about what they might face when they come back. I have no overseas travel plans for the near future but if I did have, I would be apprehensive since even a cursory look at my online presence would reveal that I have been highly critical of Trump, Republicans, and the Israeli government’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, enough these days to get me thrown me into a freezing ICE detention center for some time.
my brother is an american citizen with american daughters who are adopted, was thinking about visiting canada with them this summer. he has changed his mind. the slightest offbeat thing about their situation could become an excuse for who knows what abuse. we know ICE agents molested minors at the southern border during biden’s time. what will they do now that they’re wilding out, not caring at all about PR?
“Strip searches”. I would be horrified and I’m an old man, not a teenage girl. 8-(
I came back to the US from a work trip and entered at SFO from Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago. There was a regular stream of folks being escorted to secondary screening, many more than I recall as typical.
Many moons ago, I too was invited to secondary screening. Not the most pleasant experience and I’m so white and Anglo-Saxon that I’m almost a caricature.
Trump’s cognitive decline has been obvious for so very long. Astonishing that some people are only now getting to the “can’t quite make enough excuses for it” stage.
In your Ryan Grim clip about Trump’s denial of tourism “numbers”, I recognise Trump’s reflexive denial of something which he perceives as reflecting badly, which prompts the concoction of an immediate rebuttal. In the early days, that rebuttal effort can sound like over-confidence, then obstinacy or set-in-ways wilfulness, but in the later stages it sounds like fact-free rambling and easy answers. The person saying it thinks that they’re plausible and “on it”. The person listening is perplexed and can even try to twist themselves to “understand what they really meant to say”.
In Trump’s case, we’ve been doing that for 6–8 years.
So none of this is news. The recent acceleration of Trump’s decline is the scary factor.
The only thing keeping him in charge inside the White House is his susceptibility, and his malice were anyone to be perceived as a challenge.
Don’t forget that Trump saw his own father’s decline, manipulated his father to change his will, and later treated him poorly. He will project from his own experience, and he will be watchful for anyone trying that with him.
This is America, and the one thing you are not allowed to do is mess with corporate profit. Everything is secondary to that. You do not “meddle with the primary forces of nature” without ATONEMENT*. These chickens are on their way home to roost.
*See the movie “Network”.
Sunday Afternoon @ 3
Re. “Many moons ago” …reminds me…
-People around El Presidente are neither moral, nor particularly smart.
For instance most humans achieve ‘object permanence’ by age 3.
“White House ‘Press’ Briefing Welcomes Influencer Who Thought The Moon Disappeared One Time”.
Kids, remember this: Every month the moon enters a phase when it turns the shadowed side towards Earth. This does NOT mean it is gone.
Future headline:
Hillary Clinton deported to El Salvador.
J D Vance “She turned me into a newt”.
It’s an interesting contrast with the fascist regimes of the 1930s. I believe both Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany were keen to be seen as welcoming to visitors -- to show off the achievements they boasted of, and to demonstrate that they were not being shunned.
Next year, the soccer “World Cup” is due to be held in North America -- jointly hosted by the USA, Canada and Mexico. Millions of sports fans are expected to visit, and to travel between venues and the three countries. How on earth is that going to work? Will there even be room in the deportation facilities for all those who fall foul of the immigration authorities’ paranoia?
While the police state proclivities of the US deserve the most attention and denunciation of this story, I’d like to throw a tiny spotlight on the sheer obliviousness of the reporting:
@Pierce R. Butler #9: I’ve seen that sort of juxtaposition a few times before, and it doesn’t seem all that contradictory or weird. I imagine it meaning something like “unable to sleep despite being tired, finally collapse into unconsciousness from physical and/or mental exhaustion at 4am, suddenly roused at 6am”. Of course without further detail it’s impossible to say whether that’s an accurate reflection of what really happened, I just tend to be reflexively generous as to a speaker’s intended meaning.
I am a Canadian with a Green Card. I work in the travel industry. This year my company will give me multiple kilobucks to go travel and support the industry. My original plan was to take a week long tour of my old stomping grounds in South Western Ontario and visit old friends, some whom I’ve not seen in person for 25+ years. I now expect to not cross the border until the end of this administration. I may not even do something domestically and forfeit the subsidy.
Why is this news? It’s been like this since forever; it’s just that Trump is more brazen about it. The Italian playright Dario Fo was denied entry to the US for being critical of Regan. And the girls in this article won’t be allowed into Japan either if they don’t have an address they can enter on their arrival forms. They’l be detained in a notorious gaijin tank instead. The system has always been horrendous; maybe now enough people will wake up to it that they’ll fight back.
Yah not very wise scaring tourists away. As the very definition of “tourism” is “let’s go where we want” and the inside of a cell is hardly a desirable destination, masochists excluded. Maybe that’s the sector ICE should focus on?
Apart from this, I’d say DT’s mental condition is getting to be the brachiosaurus in the room. Just by observing his posture, walk, expressions and way of talking I’d say he’s pretty far gone, so looking for logic in his behavior is pretty useless. It’s just random mental storms and has been so for quite some time.
There’s going to be some grim interest in watching how long the charade will be kept up before he’s dragged out of the game, one way or the other.
Snowberry @ # 10: … I just tend to be reflexively generous as to a speaker’s intended meaning.
Very reasonable -- in the case of amateurs. Professional word-smiths should hold to higher standards.
But then, even more so should law enforcement. Their mistakes & crimes have much worse consequences.
I agree that the MN (malignant narcissist) has enormous cognitive problems. I believe, though, that it is difficult to determine when he is hallucinating and when he is lying. He is unable to admit it when he is wrong. He continues to insist that other countries pay tariffs and that trade deficits demonstrate that other countries are stealing from the US. He has said that tourism is fine and he will not admit he is wrong. His cult followers, excluding those who might be personally harmed by a drop in tourist dollars, will never know the difference. The right wing propagandists are masters at lying and deflecting.
Check out any right wing web site and you will be amazed at the nonsense they do cover and the serious problems they ignore. It would be like reporting on Ted Bundy: Ted combs his hair neatly!
But there is a silver lining: tourism in Europe is increasing. In Helsinki number of hotel nights by foreign tourists increased by 20% in March (from last year). Most were tourists from Germany, UK, and USA. Also China and Japan are growing fast.
The report doesn’t tell how many of them are seeking political asylum.
/s