Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration is damaging Las Vegas’s famous tourist industry and spooking the workers who keep it running, according to union and industry leaders.
An estimated 25 percent of all Nevada workers were born abroad, compared to 17 percent in America as a whole. Immigrant workers are particularly dominant in the tourism and hospitality industries, with 74 percent of hotel housekeepers born overseas, and 51 percent of restaurant line cooks.
But now local activists say that Immigration and Custom Enforcement officers are detaining around 40 percent more people per day in South Nevada than it did last year, despite 69 percent of them having no criminal convictions.
Ted Pappageorge, secretary treasurer of the local chapter of the Culinary Workers Union, told Fox 5 Vegas that the surge in detentions has sown fear throughout the city’s hospitality sector.
“This industry cannot function without immigrant workers,” he warned.
Michael Kagan, director of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Immigration Clinic, likewise said calls to his group had “more than tripled” and that staff “can’t keep up”.
“This kind of fear is just so incredibly destructive to our neighbors to our community, to our economy,” he told Fox 5.
A case in point is Broadacres Marketplace, a popular open-air market in north Las Vegas, which has been closed since June 21 in order to protect its vendors and customers from immigration raids.
Meanwhile, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority reported that visitors to Las Vegas dropped by 6.5 percent in May compared to the same month in 2024, with hotels making 5.7 percent less money.
That is a mirror of the situation across the USA, where foreign tourist spending is projected to fall by 7 percent this year due in part to travelers’ fears about being detained or turned away at the border.
The Convention and Visitors Authority did not attribute Sin City’s shortfall to immigration fears specifically, instead citing overall economic gloom due to Trump’s tariffs. “At the core of what we think is happening right now is that consumer confidence is down pretty significantly,” said Authority CEO Steve Hill in May.
Nevertheless, Pappageorge said visits from Canadian and Mexican customers specifically had “fallen off a cliff”, while Latino visitors are “fearful and nervous”.
“When that happens, that means that our visitation is down and companies are looking at potential layoffs. Our members are quite nervous about that” he said.
The Trump administration has specifically targeted hotels, restaurants, and farms for immigration raids as it seeks to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise of “mass deportations”.
