A 65-year-old British grandmother has spoken of the nightmare ordeal she and her husband went through after being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the United States for six weeks.
Karen Newton told The Guardian she and her partner, Bill (66), had been on a road trip through California, Nevada, Wyoming, and Montana before they were detained. They were turned away from Canada because they lacked the right paperwork to take a vehicle across the border, and when they tried to re-enter the US, American border control officials refused on the grounds that Bill’s visa had expired.
Even though Karen’s documents were in order, she was told she had broken the terms of her B2 tourist visa by helping her husband pack. The couple were sent in shackles to an ICE detention centre 12 hours away and kept there separately for 45 days. She claims she was told repeatedly that ICE officers receive bonuses for every detention, though ICE has denied this in comments to The Guardian.
Describing the indefinite incarceration as worse than a prison, “because if you’re in prison, you get a sentence – they tell you how long you are going to be there,” Karen said her luggage was confiscated and has not been returned, despite the couple having now been sent back to the UK. She suffered hip and back pain because she had to sleep on the floor, as she could not access the top bunk of her cell and the bottom bed was already occupied. Bedding included a foil blanket, but she could not get warm. It was hard to tell day from night because of artificial lighting, and there was no access to their phones, which had been taken from them.
Consular officials said they could not help because the detention happened during the federal shutdown in autumn 2025, and the couple had little idea of their rights, with Karen unaware for some time that she could apply to “visit” her husband.
In a bizarre twist of events, having offered from the start to pay for their own flights and go straight home, the couple eventually agreed to sign paperwork declaring themselves “illegal aliens”, which meant their repatriation was covered by the US government and they received an “exit bonus” payment of $1,000 (around €847). (Such payments have since been upped to $2,600 for Trump’s anniversary.) However, volunteering for deportation means the couple lost any right to see a judge and are now banned from visiting the US for a decade.
The amount of money the US is spending on border enforcement has soared under Trump. The ICE budget has gone from $6 billion (€5.08 billion) in 2016 to $85 billion (around €72 billion) today. The Guardian reports that ICE officers receive a $50,000 incentive to sign up for the job, and, following his 2025 inauguration, President Trump issued new ICE detentions quotas of up to 1,500 people a day.
In a year when the Men’s FIFA World Cup is due to be co-hosted by the US, Karen Newton is urging would-be visitors: “Don’t go – not with Trump in charge. It’s totally out of control over there. There’s no accountability. They don’t seem to need a reason for detaining you.” Her detention is just one example among many, including thousands of immigrants who have attempted to build their lives in the “Land of the Free,” as well as dozens of Europeans and visitors of other nationalities, reportedly in possession of the right visa paperwork but refused entry to the US nonetheless, and in some cases detained for weeks. At first, Karen was reluctant to tell anyone about her ordeal, even her son, because she was so ashamed—a sentiment reportedly shared by other detainees. This implies the actual number of detainees could be far higher than thought.
The situation has led to a suite of international government travel advisories warning would-be holidaymakers about the border crackdown, as well as to an unsurprising decline in visitor numbers to the US, dropping 22% from vital source market Canada, 15% from the UK, and 11% from Germany.
Early in 2025, the US Travel Association had flagged that, under a scenario of $2.1 billion in losses from Canadian spending alone, 14,000 US jobs could go. By that calculation, with the World Travel & Tourism Council estimating 2025’s revenue losses at $12.5 billion, Trump’s border policies could result in over 80,000 people out of work.
