'Don't go to the US - not with Trump in charge': the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks

Source: The Guardian

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks

Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone’

Jenny Kleeman
Sat 21 Feb 2026 06.00 GMT

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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.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton-valid-visa-detained-ice