The Statue of Liberty isn’t having a great year. Her message that America welcomes “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” just isn’t hitting like it used to. In 2025, “your tired” are shackled in the back of an ICE van, “your poor” are being smeared without evidence as psychopathic gang members, and “your huddled masses” are facing deportation and torture in North Africa.
But Trump’s repressive and questionably legal border policies haven’t just impacted refugees hoping to “breathe free”; they’ve made it difficult and dangerous to cross the US border everywhere. We’ve already seen random tourists tossed into ICE detention, and now travellers crossing the US-Canada border are reporting a disturbing and time-consuming new inspection regime.
Something’s going on
Normalizing authoritarianism bit by bit.
— Vanessa Simone 🇨🇦 (@Vanessa_Sarges) May 8, 2025
In an unusual scene, vehicles in the USA heading north to Canada through the Peace Arch & Pacific Highway crossings are being stopped by USA border patrol before they leave the country & arrive at Canadian customs.https://t.co/EZqRHu5ckV
As GlobalNews.ca reports, travellers crossing the border at the Peace Arch crossing last week quickly realized something was amiss. A woman called Leslie (who refused to give her surname for fear of US reprisal) was making a quick trip over to pick up groceries and realized the border was different: “It was like, ‘Oh, did we make a mistake? It’s like something’s going on.”
She continued: “I don’t want to call it a blockade but… they were stopping people and I held up our Nexus cards and the U.S. customs agent waved us through but as I passed, because our windows are down, he said, ‘Let’s stop and check the next one’”. What followed was border officers invasively through every inch of her vehicle, rummaging through her possessions to ensure that no immigrants or contraband were concealed inside. Leslie described the experience as “very, very uncomfortable.”
Aside from the invasiveness of having your car turned over, this also results in massive traffic queues at the border, which is deterring travel. Immigration lawyer Len Saunders said he hasn’t seen anything like this, pointing out “nobody’s going to come down here and stay in line for two hours” and “you just kind of wonder, hmmm, you know, are you going to be the one that gets hauled in and you’re there for hours?”
The federal government has quietly updated its online travel advice to remind Canadians to "expect scrutiny" from border patrol officers if they travel to the United States. https://t.co/hZbHgjKUSc
— CBC News (@CBCNews) April 5, 2025
All this, combined with Trump’s open threats to invade Canada and his aggressive tariffs, have encouraged led Canadians to stay far, far away from the United States. For example, in March 2025 alone, the number of Canadians crossing the border by car dropped by a massive 32% compared to March 2024.
It’s way too early to make predictions for the whole of 2025, but in 2024, Canadian visitors spent more than $20 billion in the United States. That number is inevitably going to shrink, delivering yet another blow to the US economy. Even a few years ago, the idea of genuine tension between Canada and the United States would have sounded absurd. But here we are, with Trump apparently willing to alienate even America’s closest allies.
Published: May 9, 2025 07:03 am