At hotels from Minneapolis to Maine, crowds are gathering to blow whistles, bang pots and pans, and play drums, often late into the night, to protest ICE agents staying there. In New York, activists took over a Hilton Garden Inn’s lobby. At the same time, right-wing influencers have called out hotels that appear to refuse to rent rooms to ICE agents.
Hotels have emerged as a front line in the conflict over President Trump’s immigration crackdown, with federal agents on one side and, on the other, activists who are trying to force hotels to turn away those agents by making noise, organizing boycotts and booking up rooms only to cancel them at the last minute.
The protests have particularly affected budget hotels affiliated with chains like Hilton and Marriott, hitting the owners of these individual properties, who are typically franchisees and, often, immigrants themselves.
Groups like the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led activist organization, aim to “force hotels into understanding that they have more to lose by supporting ICE than they have to gain,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, 27, its executive director. The organization is encouraging people to make and then cancel reservations at the last minute at several Minneapolis-area hotels where activists believe ICE agents are staying.
“Our question was, ‘How do we organize everyday people to basically throw ourselves in the wheels of how authoritarianism operates and be able to actually stop it?’” Ms. Shiney-Ajay said.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said that immigration agents were “facing a coordinated campaign of violence against them” that included their hotels being vandalized and “attacked by rioters.”
The pressure from both sides has put hotel owners in a bind. Brands’ strict standards require franchisees to welcome all guests, including ICE agents and other Department of Homeland Security personnel, even as officers are seeking out undocumented people with increasingly violent tactics.
But when hotels deny service to ICE agents, the consequences have proved to be steep. This month, Hilton dropped a Hampton Inn franchise in Lakeville, Minn., after a right-wing influencer secretly recorded video of a desk clerk appearing to refuse to rent rooms to immigration agents.
“Hilton is — and has always been — a welcoming place for all,” the hotel company wrote in an X post responding to the video. “We are also engaging with all of our franchisees to reinforce the standards we hold them to across our system.”
Owners face a painful dilemma: Rent rooms to ICE agents — which could lead to disruptive protests and lost business — or turn down those reservations and risk being penalized by the chain, as well as losing business.
Many of these hotels are run by immigrants. More than half of the hotels in the United States are franchises run by Asian American small-business owners, according to the Asian American Hotel Owners Association. These franchisees pay chains like Hilton and Marriott for the right to use their brand, marketing, reservation system and more.
Several franchise owners contacted by The New York Times did not respond to requests for comment.
Many of these hotels also depend on immigrants, who perform vital services like cleaning and maintenance, often without authorization to work. The presence of ICE agents at hotels can be “difficult and traumatizing” for them, said Christa Sarrack, the president of UNITE HERE! Local 17, a Minnesota hospitality workers’ union.
The “amount of fear in hotel workers now is unlike anything we have ever seen,” Ms. Sarrack added.
Hotel groups have largely declined to comment on the protests. Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Marriott and Wyndham did not respond to requests for comment.
Ralph Posner, a spokesman for the American Hotel & Lodging Association, a trade group, said the industry was closely monitoring the situation in Minneapolis.
“As places of public accommodation, hotels play a unique role in their communities and are focused on the safety and well-being of their employees, guests and the broader public,” he added.
Bomb threats this month temporarily shut down two hotels in the Twin Cities — the DoubleTree by Hilton St. Paul Downtown and InterContinental St. Paul Riverfront, affiliated with IHG — said Hilton’s chief executive, Christopher Nassetta, at a recent media round table.
Late-night protests at hotels believed to be renting rooms to ICE agents began to ramp up last summer in and around Los Angeles, during the immigration crackdown in California, and have since spread to Minnesota, New York and Maine, where ICE has begun an effort to find undocumented people called Operation Catch of the Day.
Shivani Ishwar, the chair of the New York Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression, one of the groups that participated in the Monday protest at a Hilton Garden Inn in TriBeCa, said the group had chosen the hotel in solidarity with protesters in Minnesota. To her knowledge, no ICE agents were staying at the New York City Hilton, she said.
Additional protests at other hotels could follow, she added.
“We absolutely believe that the purpose of the action was to send a message, and until we see that message was received, it’s not something that we’re going to just drop,” Ms. Ishwar said.
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Christine Chung is a Times reporter covering airlines and consumer travel.
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