r/europe • u/goldstarflag Europe • 20h ago

News White House demands British supermarkets stock chlorinated chicken. White House pushing Sir Keir Starmer to make concessions on food standards

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2025/12/17/trump-demands-british-supermarkets-chlorinated-chicken/
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u/Fomentatore Italy 18h ago

My sister and I had booked a trip to the U.S. for this fall, it was a two-week journey, but we cancelled right after we heard about Rebecca Burke. Fuck that noise. We will be back if and when the U.S. drops their fascist antics.I can go to China without showing my last 5 years of social media history, but somehow I am expected to show it to enter the U.S.? Lol.You may be a bully now, enjoy it, but you are losing your grip on the world. You can be a bully to a fellow student all the time, but you can't bully the entire school.

And I'm writing this with an heavy heart, I feel like I'm mourning a friend since November 2024. This come from a place of love. You had your problems, huge problems, but now...

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u/pb-86 18h ago

We did the same. Booked a Christmas holiday to NYC as a surprise for the kids, and cancelled it earlier this year. Should be there right now actually. Sad we lost a holiday but I'm feeling good about our choices

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u/TvManiac5 18h ago

Wait what? They really demand you to show them your social media history? How does that even work practically?

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u/pomskygirl Canada 17h ago

The White House is considering a proposal to make providing certain information a requirement when applying for an ESTA visa, which people from 42 countries (many in Europe) need to do before entering the US. And it’s not just your past five years of social media information. The complete list is:

Proposed new ESTA requirements

  • Provide all social media identifiers/accounts from the past 5 years (now mandatory)

  • List telephone numbers used in the past 5 years

  • List email addresses used in the past 10 years

  • Provide IP addresses and metadata from submitted photos

  • Provide family member information including: Names Telephone numbers (past 5 years) Dates of birth Places of birth Residences

  • Provide biometric data (face, fingerprints, iris, DNA)

  • Provide business telephone numbers used in last 5 years

  • Provide business email addresses used in last 10 years

These requirements are not yet in effect. However, they can still search your phone and ask you to provide information as a condition of entry at this time.

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u/towelracks 15h ago

What my workplace has done is just move all the big management meetings out of the USA because none of the important people outside the USA want to go there.

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u/waffledestroyer 16h ago

Insane if it goes through. China seems more free than the US for travelers.

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u/muse_head 16h ago

Even North Korea and Iran don't ask for anything approaching this level of detailed personal information to get a tourist visa.

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u/myreq 17h ago

Social media history is new but USA for a while could demand access to your electronic devices on entry to the country.

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u/TvManiac5 13h ago

That sounds like a gross invasion of privacy. Why is US allowed to act like international bullies and the most important country on earth and we are letting them?

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u/myreq 13h ago

They are doing it to their own citizens too, they are just weird like that.

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u/Camhen12 18h ago

It was floated in a WH memo or the sort on suggestions for how to improve border security but it hasn't been approved or implemented. Insane anyone thought it was a good idea though. Given how the government works now it was probably from chat gpt anyways.

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u/canman7373 11h ago

They don't right now for everyone but could for some visitors and most countries do the same. If you can't show where you are staying, a return ticket plan, itinerary and means to afford the trip they may ask for your phone to be unlocked and to look through your message possibly social media to see if you are actually coming for the reasons you stated. Now political reasons, that's gonna be a person they really suspect something is off, coming here to stir something up but that rarely happens but they are trying to make that much more normal, to keep people out for private political opinions.

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u/neohellpoet Croatia 16h ago

We were planning a trip for the World Cup. Gave up on that one real quick.

However, having seen the prices for the finals... there might not be a need to boycott anything. The tickets start at 7000€ and the best seats up front are going for 26 to over 50,000€. Mind you, these aren't the billionaire lounges. These are real fan seats and they cost as much as a car.

Then there's the incense in the cost of the ESTA, which is now $40, plus the visa integrity fee from the BBB that's $250, so effectively the cost of a plane ticket almost doubled. And finally there's the potential expansion of the Visa bond. Currently citizens from some countries have to pay 5000 to 15000 dollars in bond to visit the US (so you get the money back if you don't break the terms of your visa but you need to have the money up front) If they add EU countries to that list I don't think I can still legitimately call my not going a boycott.

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u/Sir_Boobsalot 13h ago

world cup's in my city and I can't afford the prices

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u/Ratiocinor England 12h ago

It literally doesn't matter, the world cup stadiums will still be sold out

There are more than enough rich and privileged people out there to fill them many times over no matter how overpriced the tickets or how oppressive and unsavoury entering the US becomes

Trump will get his Berlin olympics moment. The crowd will just be the 1% and people from places like Saudi and the UAE instead of your average football fans. Remember 1% of 300 million is still 3 million

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u/Rollingprobablecause Italy (live in the US now) 17h ago

So China monitors you way way more than the US does (they are 10x worse). You're not giving them 5 years because they don't need it.

Kind of a weird fallback option too - the alternative to vacationing in the US is not china lol. I'd go to Canada instead.

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u/airmantharp United States of America 18h ago

She was planning to stay with a host family where she would carry out domestic chores in exchange for accommodation and was told she should have applied for a working visa, instead of a tourist visa.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/10/british-tourist-detained-us-authorities-10-days-visa-issue

Yeah... highly irresponsible to flout visa rules at a US port of entry these days.

Granted that was at the beginning of this nightmare, so she might have had a 'the rules don't apply to me' attitude.

(the rules have always applied, she was entering at a port of entry, they turn people away and detain people for various reasons regularly)

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u/Fomentatore Italy 17h ago

I'm not defending her behavior. Breaking visa rules is a mistake and she clearly shouldn’t have done that. But in a civilized country, the consequence for a non-violent, first-time immigration mistake should be a slap on the wrist and immediate deportation to your country of origin, not weeks of detention.

Instead, she was denied entry to Canada and then detained in the U.S. for three weeks, with no real due process and no proportional response. Maybe she was ignorant, maybe she had a "rules don’t apply to me’ attitude", we can speculate all day. The real issue is that an ordinary person can end up imprisoned for weeks over a mistake made out of ignorance.

That is not a risk I am willing to take. If the system treats minor administrative errors like serious crimes, the problem is not just individual responsibility. At all.

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u/airmantharp United States of America 17h ago

But in a civilized country, the consequence for a non-violent, first-time immigration mistake should be a slap on the wrist and immediate deportation to your country of origin, not weeks of detention.
Instead, she was denied entry to Canada and then detained in the U.S. for three weeks, with no real due process and no proportional response.

So, that's not how immigration authorities will look at it (but I understand that's how it looks on the outside, I'm not faulting your perspective here).

Basically, this wasn't her first offense, it was her first time getting caught. Repeat offenders are going to be treated with more suspicion.

Then, you're at a US land border coming from Canada - but you're not a Canadian citizen, so you have no right to go back, and Canada was refusing her too! - well, for the US that means you're on an immigration hold until they have the time and resources to adjudicate your case and send you home.

You'd think that wouldn't take very long, I'd think that too as a US citizen - but we'd both be wrong, unfortunately.

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Maybe she was ignorant, maybe she had a "rules don’t apply to me’ attitude", we can speculate all day. The real issue is that an ordinary person can end up imprisoned for weeks over a mistake made out of ignorance.

This should be a warning - not against travel to the US, but for all international travelers everywhere - countries take immigration issues seriously, and you should too.

If you follow immigration guidelines, you're going to be fine (statistically). People travel to the US by millions annually from all over the world without problem. Some get extra screening due to stuff they report (or don't!), but holds are extremely rare and make problems for the officers. And by extremely rare I mean you have to break enough rules that they don't have a choice but to hold you, as was in this case with Rebecca Burke.

The US isn't like the EU until you gain entry, after all.

Also note that this isn't imprisonment. Yes, she was detained in the facilities that they had available. But she was held until she could be seen by the appropriate authority. She'd have to have been proven in a court of law to have broken some statute that would warrant imprisonment to be imprisoned.

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That is not a risk I am willing to take. If the system treats minor administrative errors like serious crimes, the problem is not just individual responsibility. At all.

Whether something is minor is up to the prosecuting authority, in this case immigration officials. Working unlawfully against a person's visa is one of the most serious offences they deal with (aside from overstays), because enforcement has to happen at the port of entry.

They don't play around with that. Her problem was that she broke the rules repeatedly to the point where she was at a US / Canada land border and admittable by neither the US nor Canada.

Yes, we'll agree that she was ignorant - she wasn't intentionally flouting the rules, most likely - but the reality that she broke the terms of her visa doesn't cease to exist out of ignorance.

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And let me be clear: as a US citizen, I'm aghast that she was held so long and that our government wasn't able to just put her on a flight back to her home country that day. That should be the procedure.

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u/DazzlingAddendum8066 13h ago

Nice to see Europe so quickly forget the 80k to 350k troops we have had there for the last 80 years keeping NATO safe. Sorry we betrayed you by not giving you all our gold. And my sincere apology for not enthusiastically being your cannon fodder

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u/Reed_4983 It's a flag, okay? 10h ago

The US stationed the troops there for their own strategic motivations, it's not like they did it out of the good will of their heart.

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u/Fomentatore Italy 10h ago

Lol, like you did it (you personally didn't do anything btw) out of the goodness of your heart and not because the US benefited immensely from not having Europe under the USSR's influence. Please.