Once seen as low-risk, short-term travel to the US has become a regulatory minefield that’s catching record numbers of ESTA/B-1 visa holders off guard. Here’s why enforcement is rising – and how companies can keep staff safe and compliant.
31 October 2025 | By Alex Schulte
More people are being refused entry to the US than ever before.
In FY2024, over 1.25 million travellers to US entry ports were found inadmissible for entry by customs officials – nine times as many as in 2019.
The rise in asylum seekers crossing the US border explains some, but not all, of this swell of rejections. Even before Trump’s 2025 inauguration, college freshmen, touring musicians and journalists all found themselves turned away.
Figures for border control activity under the new administration are not yet publicly available, though data shows a record number of electronic device searches in Q2 2025. However, a wealth of anecdotal evidence suggests that enforcement has only risen further.
When even US citizens are being detained at the airport, it’s clear that business travel managers face a precarious task in fulfilling their duty of care.
But how did this come about – and how can cross-border professionals mitigate these risks?
A lost golden era of business travel
It wasn’t always like this.
Not so long ago, the B-1 Visa and ESTA – the two authorisations used by the vast majority of business travellers – were perceived as low-risk, low-stakes ways to enter the USA.
The Visa Waiver Program, which underpins the ESTA, was created with a specific mandate ‘to facilitate international travel’ and ‘boost international business and tourism’.
The B-1 visa wasn’t quite so soft-touch. Travellers always needed to submit a higher bar of documentation to support their application and pass an interview. But between 2012 and 2023, the interview requirement was actually waived for many renewals.
This relatively light-touch experience gave rise to a blasé attitude in some quarters towards short-term business travel to the US. With repeat travellers largely spared the burden of an interview, the administrative diktats governing business travel came to be perceived by many companies as just a formality.
All the while, the number of travellers deemed inadmissible ran at a low and steady annual rate of between 200,000 and 280,000 per year between 2014 and 2019.
So what changed?
The grey areas emerge
Travellers’ breezy approach to bureaucracy morphed into fairly widespread abuse of the system.
The non-immigrant entry framework operates on a set of fuzzy definitions. The B-1 visa allows holders to enter the US ‘for business activities of a commercial or professional nature’, such as contract negotiations, consulting and attending conventions.
The crucial caveat is that these activities must be non-productive, with the holder “not receiving compensation from a US employer”. But even this qualifier creates its own ambiguities.
For instance, a foreign engineer giving a talk to US employees on installing a new system would be permitted to enter with a B-1 visa. But say the engineer started giving a practical demonstration of the installation process herself. At that moment, a legal grey area would emerge.
This is because a hands-on demonstration could be construed as performing the installation task for the US employer, thereby substituting for the work of a US national.
As you might expect, this is difficult to enforce. Some high-profile cases, such as the $34 million settlement Infosys paid in 2013 after allegations of systemic B-1 visa fraud, suggest that deliberate exploitation of these gaps was reasonably common.
But the majority of instances are almost certainly accidental. Melissa Johnson, Senior Business Travel Manager at Hilton, told me:
“routine client meetings, humanitarian trips, religious pursuits, any work involving hands-on delivery, or participation in events may inadvertently breach immigration rules”.
Once enforcement cottons on, companies are left “scrambling to support employees caught in legal limbo”.
Against this backdrop, US officials have taken a harder line.
The enforcement surge begins
The straw that broke the camel’s back came in 2021, when the interview waiver programme was broadened yet further to clear post-Covid processing backlogs. Without in-person vetting, the system became even more reliant on trust.
By 2024, this honesty box strategy began to break down. The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that millions of visas had been processed without interviews or fingerprints, and line officers had no idea who exactly had been waived. A year later, a fuller report placed the number of unvetted visas at “more than 12 million”.
The state had lost confidence in the integrity of its own visa system and moved to tighten it. Successive moves throughout 2025 narrowed interview waivers to a small sliver.
Meanwhile, enforcement action ramped up, most spectacularly in ICE’s raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia in September. Hundreds of largely Korean workers were detained and deported for allegedly carrying out productive work on non-immigrant visas.
An uneasy atmosphere
According to specialists, this harsher administrative atmosphere is feeding through into a ‘vibe shift’, even for frequent flyers.
A Global Mobility specialist at a large American engineering firm described a more anxious mood:
US-bound travellers “feel like they need to carry additional paperwork to justify their visit. [They’re also] nervous about the Government’s ability to review their personal devices and accounts”.
Stefan Remhof, managing partner of the People Mobility Alliance, told me of a growing ambivalence and uncertainty among corporates towards the entire prospect of US travel.
Staff are increasingly nervous about being turned away at the border – or worse, detained. Why risk it in the first place, many ask?
How to keep your staff compliant and safe
While these jitters may depress volumes, America’s scale and primacy mean a collapse in business travel is unlikely. What’s clear is that the old laissez-faire approach is completely unsuitable to the new realities of border enforcement.
Smooth and seamless business travel to the US is still eminently possible. But companies will have to follow a more robust playbook, built on four practical pillars.
Treat travel as a business priority
Travelling with the correct visa is not a formality; it’s a strategic imperative and should be treated as such. Instead of treating compliance as an afterthought, companies should integrate it into their operational DNA.
Melissa advises “tighter collaboration between corporate travel, mobility, HR, and compliance teams” in order to build ‘unified oversight models’.
Thoroughly brief your travellers
The biggest pitfall comes at the last mile. When a passenger on a B-1 visa or ESTA reaches border control, they will almost certainly be asked some probing questions about the nature and duration of their stay.
In the first instance, managers must ensure that travellers are aware of what they can and can’t do. Internal communication could make or break your travel plans.
You should then prepare them with a script that they can reel off to the border officer.
The conversation at customs is the compliance pinch point. Make sure staff know not to get caught.
Centralise tracking and pattern monitoring
While individual border crossings are the focal point for enforcement, your company’s travel patterns can be the trigger.
A string of short visits by the same employee? Repeat entries for “client meetings” from a small core of staff members? All red flags to a border agency on the hunt for scalps.
But in big companies with high global travel volumes, it’s easy to lose track of these cumulative movements. That’s why you need a single source of truth that records all entries, their purpose and duration.
And if that database can crunch the numbers by itself to reveal potential alarm bells, all the better.
Escalate grey areas before they become violations
Not every trip fits neatly into meeting or work. It’s the grey areas, like technical demos, after-sales support, or hands-on training, where most companies stumble.
That’s why you need a clear escalation process. If an activity even touches on service delivery, check it with legal long before travel. It’s far easier to change a visa type than to mop up the mess from a compliance breach.
Centuro Global co-founder Asma Bashir has some advice for companies wary of straying into the grey zone:
“When in doubt, don’t decide alone. Escalate early, document your reasoning, and protect the business.”
The last word on US business travel compliance
Melissa has one overriding principle to pass on to other travel managers: “entry is a privilege, not a guarantee”,
Fail to respect the obligations that accompany that privilege, and in the best-case scenario, your staff will be turned away and your travel objective will go unfulfilled. In the worst case, a lengthy spell of detention is not inconceivable.
As border scrutiny intensifies and the line between business and work blurs, your compliance infrastructure is your greatest defence.
In our webinar on 13 November, our co-founder Asma Bashir will host a panel of senior Global Mobility leaders to shed some light on the compliance dangers of US business travel – and how companies can mitigate them.
