Budget hotels targeted by protests over ICE agents' stays

At hotels from Minneapolis to Maine, crowds have staged "no sleep" protests — blowing whistles, banging pots and playing drums late into the night — to target ICE agents staying at budget hotels, and on Tuesday activists took over the lobby of a Hilton Garden Inn in TriBeCa, The New York Times reported on Jan.

29, 2026. The demonstrations have become a front line in the conflict over President Trump’s immigration crackdown, with federal agents on one side and activists on the other 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 such as Hilton and Marriott, and many individual properties are franchisees run by immigrants, the report says. 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.

Groups like the Sunrise Movement are organizing tactics to disrupt ICE stays. "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?'" Aru Shiney‑Ajay, the group’s executive director, said, and the organization has encouraged people to make and then cancel reservations at several Minneapolis‑area hotels where activists believe ICE agents are staying.

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