The dream holiday ended abruptly on Friday 26 September, as British tourists Karen and Bill Newton were trying to leave the US.
When they crossed the border, Canadian officials told them they didn’t have the correct paperwork to bring the car with them.
They were turned back to Montana on the American side – and to US border control officials.
Bill’s US visa had expired; Karen’s had not.
“I worried then,” she says. “I was worried for him. I thought, well, at least I am here to support him.”
She didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of an ordeal that would see Karen handcuffed,
shackled and sleeping on the floor of a locked cell,
before being driven for 12 hours through the night to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre.
Karen was incarcerated for a total of six weeks – even though she had been travelling with a valid visa.
Karen has no criminal record.
She is a grandmother who spent eight years working as an admin assistant at a primary school before her retirement.
“I don’t even have parking tickets in the background anywhere,” she says.
“I am not a dangerous criminal.
I didn’t enter the country illegally and I had everything I needed to be there.”
So why did ICE detain her, and keep her locked up for so long?
A possible answer began to emerge over the weeks she was incarcerated.
As Karen got to know the guards at the Northwest ICE Processing Center where she was held, she kept hearing the same thing from them:
🔥that ICE officers are paid a bonus every time they detain someone.
“Individual ICE agents get money per head that they detain – the guards told me that,” Karen says.
It’s no secret that the Trump administration has been pouring money into ICE.
Its annual budget – $6bn a decade ago – is now $85bn;
⚠️ICE is now the highest -funded law enforcement agency in the US.
Since last August, new recruits can expect to receive a signing-on bonus of up to $50,000.
Karen’s experience has left her convinced that ICE agents are being given even more incentives
– to arrest and detain anyone they possibly can, even blameless tourists who have all the paperwork they need to be in the US.
Within days of Donald Trump’s second inauguration on 20 January 2025, his administration ordered ICE officials to detain more people,
with new #quotas that would increase the total number of arrests from a few hundred to 1,200-1,500 a day.
Reports immediately began to emerge of international travellers being detained by ICE officers.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton-valid-visa-detained-ice?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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