No Country for Tourists

As Trump’s travel bans expand and ICE detains lawful residents in broad daylight, the world turns away and the American sidewalk becomes a stage for fear, abandonment, and economic self-destruction.

The American sidewalk is no longer safe ground, not for tourists, not for lab techs, not even for children. Not even for Americans.

As international arrivals plummet and foreign bookings collapse, the U.S. is becoming a global cautionary tale. Travel to the U.S. is down 6% in just the last month. Bookings from Europe have dropped 12%. Canadian visitors are vanishing too, down more than 20% by air and 35% by land. The World Travel & Tourism Council now estimates a $12.5 billion loss in international spending this year alone.

It’s no mystery why. In Donald Trump’s second term, immigration enforcement has returned with the fury of a thousand executive orders. His June 4 proclamation imposing sweeping travel bans on 19 countries may make headlines for its scale, but the real story is playing out in brutal scenes on ordinary streets. Two children left alone. Two parents disappeared into the machinery of ICE. And in both cases: no crime, no warning, no apology. Just the cold efficiency of a government that has made fear its most reliable export.

Let’s begin in New York City, where a Chilean tourist named Javiera Montero was visiting Times Square with her 12-year-old daughter. Then came the agents. Agents arrested her, mistakenly as it turned out, leaving her daughter to fend for herself in one of the country’s busiest commercial zones. No explanation, no escort, just concrete, flashing billboards, and the sudden absence of her mother.

Across the country, Lewelyn Dixon, who’s lived in the U.S. for fifty years, was returning home through Seattle-Tacoma Airport when she was snatched by ICE. A 64-year-old University of Washington lab technician and green card holder, Dixon spent three months in detention. Her crime? A decades-old nonviolent embezzlement conviction, long resolved and paid off, and kept secret even from her family out of shame. In the twisted logic of Trump’s deportation machine, this was enough. Never mind her years of service, her clean record since, her rootedness. The system had found another brown woman with a technicality.

Another case from Seattle: Maximo Londonio, a green card holder, detained after a family vacation, his past nonviolent convictions dredged up like a pretext from the ICE archives. A misdemeanor marijuana conviction led to Fabian Schmidt’s arrest in Boston; he is a German national and legal resident. All three detainedm none deported. None dangerous. But all made to disappear for weeks or months, caught in an immigration dragnet built on cruelty, suspicion, and bureaucracy.

Back to the East Coast, Waltham, Massachusetts. June 2025. A local city councilor, Colleen Bradley-MacArthur, is out on a volunteer neighborhood watch walk when she sees masked agents in unmarked vehicles swarm a man walking with a child. They arrest the man. They drive off. The agents left the child standing alone in the street.

Bradley-MacArthur films the entire event. When she asks what agency they’re with, one officer tells her to stay back. “You stay here and don’t interfere,” he barks. Then they vanish, leaving a kid behind as if he were lost luggage. And that’s the tell: to Trump’s America, certain people are no longer people. They’re baggage. Disposable. Collateral.

And all of this, these arrests, these abandoned children, this theater of control, unfolds under the umbrella of a legally bulletproof travel ban justified with spreadsheets and acronyms. Trump’s June 4 proclamation cites visa overstay rates, terrorist threats, and “identity management deficiencies” with a bureaucratic chill. But beneath the sanitized language is an all-too-familiar target list: Black and brown nations, war-torn states, and those that dare challenge American dominance. Twelve countries banned outright, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Iran, and Somalia. Seven more partially banned. Exceptions are narrow and discretionary. Transparency? Classified.

There is a grim pattern here, and it’s not about protecting Americans. It’s about manufacturing a crisis to justify repression. It’s about reminding people who belong and who doesn’t. It’s about power, raw, theatrical, and utterly indifferent to the human cost.

Trump’s America no longer just separates families at the border, it now does it in neighborhoods, airports, and crosswalks. And children? They’re just another casualty in the optics war.

A 12-year-old girl alone in Times Square. A child abandoned on a Massachusetts sidewalk. These are not flukes. They are a message: citizenship doesn’t protect you. Green cards don’t protect you. Even the presence of your child does not protect you.

In the end, it may be easier to cross into this country as a penguin from the South Sandwich Islands than as a parent from Somalia. At least penguins don’t overstay their visas, and they’re white enough for cable news.