Amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on U.S. immigration, Canada and several European countries have issued travel advisories urging their citizens to closely follow the U.S.’s entry rules, citing recent detentions and deportations.
“We have seen too many stories of citizens being pulled out of airport lines, and being fingerprinted and deported, as if they were criminals. Citizens being kidnapped to illegal detention by ICE…this is not the actions of a Democratic nation,” said Charlie Angus, a leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party.
While the exact number of travelers from Europe and Canada who have been detained or deported by U.S. immigration authorities remains unknown, several cases have made headlines. German tourist Lucas Sielaff was detained for 16 days after returning from a trip to Mexico. “Nobody is safe there anymore to come to America as a tourist,” said Sielaff, who was on a 90-day U.S. tourist permit and engaged to an American citizen.
Jessica Brösche, another German tourist, was held for over six weeks, eight days of which were in solitary confinement. According to her friend, Brösche said ICE detention “was like a horror movie.”
“They were screaming in all different rooms. After nine days, she said she went so insane that she started punching the walls and then she’s got blood on her knuckles,” her friend said.
In other cases, a British woman was held for three weeks in what her family described as “horrendous conditions” due to a visa error, and Canadian actor Jasmine Mooney was reportedly detained for nearly two weeks under conditions her mother called “inhumane,” after trying to cross the Mexico-U.S. border with incomplete visa documentation.
“There was no explanation, no warning. One minute, I was in an immigration office talking to an officer about my work visa, which had been approved months before and allowed me, a Canadian, to work in the U.S.,” Mooney wrote for The Guardian. “The next, I was told to put my hands against the wall, and patted down like a criminal before being sent to an ICE detention center without the chance to talk to a lawyer.” Mooney was confined to a bare concrete cell with no natural light, constant fluorescent lighting, no blankets, and restricted bathroom access.
Other travelers have been denied entry at the border, including a French scientist whose electronic devices contained messages criticizing President Donald Trump. This has prompted U.S. universities, such as Brown, Columbia, Cornell, and UC Berkeley, to advise students not to leave the country for spring break.
“There is a strong chance that upon trying to reenter the country, [student protesters] are stopped in the airport and detained for their activism,” said UC Berkeley student Cole Stanton. “The general advice is to not go unless you absolutely have to.”
These warnings follow recent incidents involving activists detained by immigration authorities, including Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, and Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University fellow on an employer-sponsored visa who is married to a Palestinian and has publicly condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Amid fears of deportation and detention sparked by increased immigration crackdowns — including news of a possible U.S. travel ban targeting several countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon — the Trump administration’s attack on transgender people is also raising concerns among international travelers.
“You should avoid non-essential travel to the United States… Trans people who still may need to travel to, transit through or immigrate to the United States should exercise a very high degree of caution,” Celeste Trianon, a transfeminine East Asian-Canadian jurist, recently warned.
Denmark, Finland, and Germany have specifically advised transgender and nonbinary travelers to exercise additional caution when planning trips to the United States. Danish officials now recommend contacting the U.S. Embassy before travel, and Finland recently warned transgender residents that if their “current gender as recorded in their passport differs from the gender they were assigned at birth, U.S. authorities may deny entry.”
These warnings come in response to several anti-trans Trump administration directives, including the rollback of a U.S. State Department policy that previously allowed transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people to update their passports with the gender marker “X,” as well as a travel ban targeting transgender athletes
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