Planning to visit the US? Take it from this American citizen – don’t

I’m in the US right now, but if I didn’t have family here (and a US passport), I wouldn’t be. My teenagers and I flew over the week of Thanksgiving from Australia, preparing ourselves for long lines and extra questions at customs. It took less than five minutes in the US citizens’ line.

With the news this week of the Trump administration planning to implement new invasive requirements for travellers from 42 countries, including Australia, that would require five years of social media history for visas, I would simply not travel here on another passport. There are plenty of places which welcome visitors without trawling their political opinions and family history.

The proposed regulations would require ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorisation) applicants to share their social media for the past five years, email addresses they have used for the past 10 years and phone numbers and addresses of immediate family members. US Citizenship and Immigration Services now consider whether benefit applicants have ‘endorsed, promoted, supported, or otherwise espoused’ anti-American, terrorist or antisemitic views.

We came, as dual US/Australian citizens, to see family and friends, eat pumpkin pie, stomp through snowdrifts and spend time with my mother on her 78th birthday. To visit the spectacular Australian Indigenous art exhibition The Stars We Do Not See at the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art in Washington DC; Van Gogh, Monet, and Seurat at the Art Institute of Chicago, and eat Chicago-style hotdogs and southern style shrimp and grits.

We visited my niece at Boston College and the first large, free municipal library in the US, the Boston Public Library. We spent time in community food pantries and learned how undocumented immigrants are staying home, how children are being kept from school rather than risking deportation. We passed stickers on shops and restaurants proclaiming, ‘ICE not welcome here’ and billboards and light pole signs listing your rights if you are stopped by ICE.

We walked through the streets of DC past armed National Guard soldiers pacing in the cold. The night before Thanksgiving, two members of the National Guard were shot, one killed and one severely injured. The accused shooter is an Afghan refugee who was resettled to the US after serving in one of Afghanistan’s elite counter-terrorism units operated by the CIA. Immediately afterwards, the Trump administration paused all visa reviews for people from Afghanistan.

Since Trump has returned to office, the administration has worked to revoke visas of people in the US who have protested about the war in Gaza. In June, the US state department said that it would require people seeking student, cultural exchange and vocational visas in the US to change their social media profiles to public.

I love my country of birth for its diversity, innovation and opportunity, but in the time I’ve lived in Australia I’ve seen the US change. It has become a country of vast wealth and privilege in the hands of very few; of deeper divisions and waning trust. The Trump administration sows hatred and fear of the ‘other’, so it should come as no surprise that tourism numbers are dropping sharply. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the US was predicted to lose $12.5bn in international visitor spending in 2025.

I have never seen the museums and monuments of Washington DC as empty as they are now. Overseas travellers have already been staying away, and without family here, I would too. I give people precedence over politics, but I still feel deep discomfort paying tax in a country where the most recent defence policy bill authorises $900bn in military spending. A country in which the current administration has reversed rather than safeguarded the rights of women, LGBTQI+ people, immigrants and asylum seekers, and sought to restrict voting rights and remove existing environmental protections. A country that has placed travel bans on residents of 19 countries and plans to expand that to 30.

But coming here, seeing those who are working tirelessly against the Trump administration, also inspires me. Like the Rapid Response Choir one friend helps coordinate which shows up at deportation hearings and rallies to sing protest songs. Like my aunt who volunteers for the Virginia Democratic party and celebrated the election of the new Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger, in the November elections.

Will it be possible for the US to recover from the carnage of the Trump years? I can’t give up hope, because so many people I love still call it home.

If I were a tourist, though, I’d pick a less totalitarian place to travel.