The U.S. tourism industry is taking sustained damage from a series of Trump administration policies, according to figures cited in a Washington Post opinion column.

“This summer was a dismal one for international tourism in the U.S. According to the National Travel and Tourism Office, overseas visits were down by 1.8 percent in June (when the World Cup began and most teams were involved) compared with the same month in 2025,” the Post reported. “In July, when the soccer final was held, the numbers were down 7 percent, and in August, 11.8 percent. Provisional figures show that overseas visits were also down 4.3 percent in September, year over year.”

The declines spanned the summer even as the United States hosted World Cup matches, including the final in July. That the slide deepened month after month — even with soccer’s biggest tournament on home soil — shows a level of softening that a marquee sporting event did not offset.

President Donald Trump’s unilateral attacks on Iran have pushed up prices around the world, not only in the United States. Fuel costs have climbed even more sharply in Europe and other places whose residents have the disposable income to fly across an ocean, and planes appear to be carrying fewer passengers into U.S. airports as a result.

“Overseas travel has become more expensive since the Iran war pushed up the price of jet fuel,” the newspaper wrote. “But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that America’s previously robust tourism industry has become collateral damage in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.”

The United States is one of the only major countries in the world losing tourism as global travel continues to rebound from COVID-19 shutdowns. That divergence matters for interpretation: with travel recovering worldwide, the U.S. declines track conditions specific to trips into the country — the column cites fuel-driven fares and border enforcement — rather than a broader global travel downturn. Joining prohibitive prices is heightened scrutiny at the border, where federal agents pick through tourists’ belongings and scrutinize valuables and identification when travelers touch down. New Trump-era rules allow agents to “undertake basic searches without any reasonable suspicion,” the Post reported, a practice it argued “undercuts America’s standing as a bastion of personal liberties.”

Accounts of U.S. agents “rummaging through the smartphones, laptops and other electronic devices of visitors” are on the rise, according to the report. Tourists are now required to surrender passwords or risk being refused entry and having their devices seized.

The scale of the searches is expanding quickly. In fiscal 2025, U.S. Customs conducted 55,000 searches of international travelers’ devices — an 18 percent increase from the year before, the Post reported. The pace has accelerated sharply: in the first quarter of fiscal 2024, agents conducted 10,937 device searches, and by the third quarter of the most recent fiscal year that number had nearly doubled to 19,732. Those quarterly counts give the clearest running measure of how fast the practice is scaling, and forthcoming fiscal-year figures will show whether the acceleration continues.

“For law-abiding travelers planning a vacation, the prospect of a U.S. … official sifting through their emails and social media might make a week in Antigua or Barcelona [less] appealing,” the Post wrote, adding that “overzealous” border enforcement is compromising an industry of enormous value to the U.S. economy.

The financial stakes are substantial. “The World Travel and Tourism Council found that international visitor spending in the U.S. in 2025 was $176 billion, a 4.6 percent drop from the year before,” the newspaper said. September’s tally is still provisional, so upcoming monthly readings from the National Travel and Tourism Office will show whether the declines persist beyond the World Cup window. “Add another entry to the list of the Trump administration’s unforced errors, as with its tariff regime, that have hindered the free market.”