Australian travellers continue to shun the US, with visitor numbers plunging in the past year according to new data.

It comes after reports emerged at the weekend of a British grandmother’s weeks of being detained by American immigration authorities in horrendous conditions.

“Don’t go – not with Trump in charge. It’s totally out of control over there. There’s no accountability. They don’t seem to need a reason for detaining you,” Karen Newton, 65, told The Guardian.

She said the nightmare began for her and her husband Bill, 66, after they tried to cross into Canada from Montana last September. Canadian officials turned them away due to incorrect paperwork for their vehicle.

Newton, a retired primary school worker with no criminal record, had a valid visa, but her husband’s had expired. On the US side of the border, the couple offered to pay for flights home, but were denied and instead taken to an office where they waited all day.

“It was scary. You have no way of knowing what’s going to happen,” Newton said. “It got darker and darker. And then other agents turned up with all these chains and handcuffs.”

Eventually, they were taken, in shackles, to a border patrol station and held there for three days, sleeping on floor mats and participating in separate interviews.

“I was very nervous and frightened the whole time. And I was chilled to the bone — I couldn’t warm up,” Newton said.

She was eventually told she’d broken the terms of her tourist visa by helping her husband pack for the holiday and that she was “guilty by association”.

“It felt like they just wanted an excuse to detain me,” she said.

Newton said they were then separated and held in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in Tacoma. Eventually, she got to see her husband and called their son, Scott.

Britain’s Foreign Office told Scott the US government shutdown at the time had prevented his parents’ release, while the British consulate told the couple that it could not interfere, according to The Guardian.

Then without warning on November 6 – six weeks after they were first detained – a guard told Newton she and her husband were leaving. They eventually returned to their Hertfordshire home without their luggage, which had been confiscated at the border.

“I don’t even have parking tickets in the background anywhere,” she told The Guardian. “I am not a dangerous criminal. I didn’t enter the country illegally and I had everything I needed to be there.

“People think it is just criminals that are being deported, but they’re just a lot of people who went there for a better life,” she said while recounting her experience in ICE detention. “Is that really criminal?”

The Newtons’ experience emerges as data shows more travellers are avoiding the US amid US President Donald Trump’s continued violent crackdown on migrants.

According to the US National Travel and Tourism Office, 90,839 Australians arrived in the US in December 2025, down 10.2 per cent on the 101,115 who arrived the previous December.

In the year to November 2025, 867,735 Australians visited the US – down 6.1 per cent the 923,890 arrivals in the prior 12 months.

Despite ordeals such as the Newtons’, British travel numbers remain relatively steady, down just 0.9 per cent in the year to November 2025.

But it is Canadians who are really turning their back on the US. Canadian tourists typically account for a quarter of all foreign visitors to the States – the biggest single source of international visitors, according to the NTTO.

But their visitor numbers to the US’s plunged 21.7 per cent in the 12 months to November 2025 – and the trend doesn’t seem to be easing.

Figures released by Destination Canada last week showed numbers in January 2026 were down a whopping 27 per cent on 2025.

Forbes reports the Canadian boycott cost the American economy $US4.5 billion ($6.3 billion) last year.

The relationship between Canada and the US has been strained by Trump’s hefty tariffs on the country’s goods and repeated threats to make Canada the 51st US state.

A year ago, after Trump announced a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian goods entering the US, outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau urged citizens to reconsider visiting their nearest neighbour.

The impact was immediate. Forbes says Flight Centre, Canada’s largest travel agency, told it a week later that leisure bookings for February 2025 were down 40 per cent on 2024, while there had also been a 20 per cent cancellation rate on prebooked US trips.