China Seemingly 'Safer' For A Holiday As Trump Seeks To Get DNA From All Foreign Tourists Entering America

China may feel 'safer' as a holiday destination while the United States pushes to harvest travellers' online footprints.

The Department of Homeland Security has proposed forcing millions of visa-waiver visitors to hand over five years of social-media identifiers, extended contact histories and expanded family details as part of a redesign of the Electronic System for Travel Authorisation (ESTA); the measure, published in the Federal Register on 10 December, is explicitly framed as implementation of President Trump's January executive order on enhanced vetting.

Policy Change And Federal Notice

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) filed a 60-day notice in the Federal Register proposing to add social-media identifiers from the previous five years as a mandatory data element for ESTA applicants, and to expand the I-94 arrival/departure collection fields more broadly.

The notice invites public comment until 9 February 2026 and outlines further fields, including prior e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and increased family-member data, that CBP says are necessary to 'determine whether such travel poses any law enforcement or security risk'.

The regulatory text ties the planned data collection directly to Executive Order 14161, 'Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats', issued by the White House in January 2025.

That executive order directed DHS and partner agencies to tighten vetting measures and improve identity verification for foreign arrivals. The White House publication of the order remains the administration's public legal rationale for the move.

Legal And Civil-Liberties Pushback

Civil-liberties advocates and litigators say the new effort is merely the latest front in an expanding body of intrusive screening at US ports of entry. A federal complaint filed on 10 December 2025 in the US District Court for the District of Columbia (Chavarria v. DHS) details alleged warrantless cellphone and laptop searches and argues CBP and ICE policies permit retention and broad searching of seized device data for extended periods, claims that plaintiffs say make expanded pre-travel digital vetting all the more troubling.

The complaint names DHS, CBP and ICE and seeks declaratory and injunctive relief against the contested practices.

Digital-rights organisations have repeatedly warned that social-media harvesting risks chilling lawful expression and will not reliably identify genuine security threats.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others, has submitted formal comments to DHS arguing that collecting social identifiers 'threatens privacy and chills free speech' and that there is little evidence the practice yields meaningful intelligence. Those submissions, lodged earlier in 2025 and reaffirmed since, press DHS to quantify the purported benefit before expanding data collection.

Lawyers challenging border searches also note the mismatch between pre-travel profiling and the on-the-spot, suspicion-based searches that CBP's own directives currently permit. Plaintiffs in the Chavarria complaint cite CBP's 2018 directive on border searches of electronic devices, which allows some basic device inspections without suspicion at ports of entry, to illustrate how routine and far-reaching digital intrusions already are at border crossings.

Practical Consequences For Tourism And Travel

Industry groups and national partners warn that mandatory social-media disclosure will deter travellers and damage U.S. tourism revenue. Travel-industry advocates told regulators the change could be particularly harmful ahead of major international events hosted by the US, and the Federal Register notice has prompted immediate press briefings and comment-tracking by travel stakeholders.

CBP frames the changes as modernising a largely paper-based arrival system (Form I-94) into a digital, mobile-friendly workflow, but critics say the privacy costs will outweigh administrative gains.

Operationally, the shift would move certain vetting steps from the point of arrival to the pre-travel ESTA screening. That could add new denials or delays before travellers board flights, and may increase pressure on airline check-in and consular systems if vetting flags proliferate. CBP's I-94 web guidance, which the agency has updated this year to reflect digital changes, provides the public face of these shifts, while the Federal Register notice launches a period for comment and inter-agency review.

For many ordinary travellers, the requirement will transform routine holiday planning into a privacy calculus: what accounts to disclose, whether to remove posts, and whether a past political view, joke or private photo might trigger scrutiny.

Plaintiffs and civil-liberties groups frame that hardship as a constitutional and human-rights question; the Government presents it as a security imperative. The coming weeks of public comment and likely lawsuits will determine which framing carries the day in court and in public opinion.