My post about how badly visitors to the US are treated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the US, with them being sent to detention centers and kept in prison-like conditions without access to lawyers and other contacts, may have prompted questions in readers minds about exactly what rights they have when trying to enter the US. The answer is: not much. This article describes what can happen. There are a whole array of scenarios that can unfold depending on the type of visa you have and the mood of the ICE agents processing you.

The reason that you have almost no rights is because being on the ground in the US but before you are allowed by ICE to pass through immigration means that you are in a kind of no-man’s-land where the laws do not apply.

“If you’re a foreign national, first understand you haven’t affected an entry despite being physically on US soil until you’re admitted properly,” said immigration attorney Michael Wildes, managing partner of Wildes and Weinberg and a professor at the Cardozo School of Law.

“It’s a term of art when you’re admitted fully to the United States,” he said. When a person lands on US soil but is not technically admitted, “you might be considered to be what’s called an ‘arriving alien’.

“You have greater rights as a criminal than as a foreign national coming with a visa.”

Is it any surprise that the tourism industry is expecting a drop in arrivals?

A string of high-profile arrests and detentions of travellers is likely to cause a major downturn in tourism to the US, with latest figures already showing a serious drop-off, tourist experts said.
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Germany updated travel guidance for travelling to the US, warning that breaking entry rules could lead not just to a rejection as before, but arrest or even detention. Three German citizens have been held for prolonged periods despite apparently having committed no crime nor any obvious violation of US visa or immigration rules – including one US green card holder who was detained at Boston’s Logan airport.
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Even before the most recent spate of detentions, forecast visits to the country this year had been revised downward from a projected 5% rise to a 9% decrease by Tourism Economics, an industry monitoring group, which cited “polarising Trump Administration policies and rhetoric”, particularly around tariffs.

It predicted that the drop-off would lead to a $64bn shortfall in the US tourist trade.
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A Canadian actor made headlines this week when she revealed US authorities had handcuffed her and moved her out of state to a detention center, where she spent several weeks in “inhumane conditions” despite not having been accused of any crime.

Neri Karra Sillaman, an entrepreneurship expert at Oxford University, told Fast Company that travellers now viewed entering the US as “too difficult or unpredictable”.

“Even if you get a visa, you have the risk of being detained or to be denied,” she said, adding that even as a valid US visa holder, married to an American, she was hesitating to visit the country in the current climate.

Travel agents are loathe to encourage people to visit the US and even steering them away from coming here.

On Facebook earlier this month, [Canadian travel agent Micheline] 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.  
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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.
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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, based in Nova Scotia, 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.
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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. 

You come to the US at your peril.