The Cost of Staying Quiet
By Rebecca Ruf, Founder & CEO, Center for Responsible Hospitality
There is a cost to staying quiet in hospitality. And it is paid, first, by the people who make this industry run: immigrants.
Roughly one in three workers in the U.S. hospitality industry is foreign-born, making hospitality the fourth most immigrant-reliant of the 50 largest private-sector industries by employment. In roles like housekeeping, food preparation, and maintenance, that share is even higher.
And it doesn’t stop with direct employees. From food and linen suppliers to construction, landscaping, and laundry services, the hospitality supply chain is deeply immigrant-powered.
These are the people who greet guests, clean the rooms, make the beds, prep the food, wash the sheets, fix what breaks, and keep hotels running every day.
When the Industry Speaks, and When It Doesn’t
When tourist visa processing slows or the cost of travelers visas rises, the hotel industry speaks up quickly. Trade associations issue statements. CEOs warn about lost demand. Panels are convened. Lobbying follows.
But when it comes to the people who actually make hospitality possible, the service staff, back- of-house teams, and suppliers, the industry has largely remained silent.
But that silence has become harder to ignore.
During the recent immigration enforcement actions in Minneapolis, which tragically resulted in two deaths, the U.S. travel industry’s public response was notably absent. Even as enforcement actions increasingly relied on hotels as sites for temporary detention, transport, or staging, few major hotel companies or industry associations addressed the issue publicly, despite its direct implications for their workforce and the communities in which they operate.
“When it comes to the people that actually make hospitality possible, the industry has remained silent.”
Hotels as Detention or Civic Spaces?
What makes this moment particularly uncomfortable is where some of these actions are taking place:
Hotels.
In multiple reported cases, immigrant families, including children and U.S. citizens, have been held for days or weeks inside hotel rooms, guarded and isolated, with limited access to legal counsel or communication.
In reporting by The Intercept, a 15-year-old New York City high school student, Roger Iza, was detained with his father and transported through hotels in Louisiana and Texas before being deported to Ecuador. According to the reporting, the family had complied with required immigration check-ins and procedures. During days of confinement, they were unable to contact anyone outside and were not permitted to leave the room.
These were hotels, not detention facilities. The same spaces our industry markets as safe, welcoming, and human.
Hotels are one of the most universal civic spaces we have. Across cultures, they have been places where strangers are meant to be safe, where dignity is presumed, and where crossing the threshold of that lobby carries moral weight.
But when hotels quietly become sites of fear or confinement, it signals that spaces designed for welcome can be repurposed for exclusion without public reckoning. That kind of shift rarely starts with loud declarations. It starts with procedural compliance and silence framed as professionalism.
And that is what worries me most about the industry’s quiet.
“Hotels are one of the most universal civic spaces.”
Minneapolis and the Limits of “Neutrality”
The tension surfaced publicly in Minneapolis when a locally owned Hampton Inn franchise reportedly declined to house ICE agents. According to local reporting, Hilton subsequently removed the property from its reservation system. Another Hilton-branded property later closed temporarily after receiving bomb threats tied to protests.
Recent reporting from across the U.S. also describes “no sleep” protests that target hotels believed to be housing ICE agents, with noise, boycotts, and other tactics aimed at forcing properties to refuse those bookings. At the same time, influencers and political actors have publicly targeted hotels accused of turning agents away. In the middle are franchise owners, often small business operators, and in many cases immigrants themselves, navigating brand standards that require them to accept all guests while their communities and staff absorb the fallout.
And still, the industry has said little about the broader context in which all of this is unfolding.
At a recent industry conference, one hotel CEO responded when asked that it was “a slippery slope when a bunch of dopey hotel people start deciding who is welcome and who isn’t.”
It’s worth asking: who are the “dopey people” here?
The workers whose communities are being disrupted? The hotel owners navigating the tension between brand standards and community impact? The staff members witnessing enforcement actions unfold in their own workplaces?
Hospitality prides itself on welcoming everyone. But an industry built on community and service also has a responsibility to the people who make that service possible.
Neutrality, in this context, is not neutral.
Community, Belonging, and the Silence Gap
What makes the industry’s silence even harder to reconcile is how often hotel companies talk about community.
Nearly every major hospitality brand speaks about belonging, community resilience, and creating places where people can thrive. These ideas appear in brand statements, sustainability reports, and purpose narratives. Hotels position themselves as anchors in their neighborhoods.
And yet, in this moment, the response has largely been silence.
What’s striking in the case of Minneapolis is that the people who did show up weren’t large corporations. They were local businesses. Small, community-rooted establishments stepped in with what they had, speaking up publicly, handing out food, raising meaningful funds, and openly questioning whether staying neutral was even possible when their community was hurting.
My Own Immigration Story
Thirty years ago, I immigrated to the United States from Ecuador.
I chose to come here to study hospitality, at what was considered one of the top programs in the world. I obtained a student visa after long lines, extensive paperwork, and interviews at the U.S. embassy. After graduation, most of my international student friends, like me, wanted to stay and applied for work permits through every mechanism we could find, but the process was so cumbersome and complicated that few of us succeeded.
My own path to permanent residency ultimately came through a family application my mother had filed 13 years earlier. We had lawyers. We had documentation. We had time and resources. And still, it took more than a decade.
I was privileged in ways many are not.
That’s why the story of the 15-year-old student who tried to legally come to the US but was detained and deported after being moved through hotels in Louisiana and Texas has stayed with me. To this day, every time I return to the U.S. and stand in an immigration line, I feel nervous. My American husband and my American kids, including my own 15-year-old, tell me I’m being silly. Everything is legal. Everything is in order. But it’s hard to explain to someone who has never lived with that uncertainty what it feels like to know that status is never fully abstract.
Sometimes the agent smiles and says, “Welcome back home.” And I glow.
Other times, the questioning is aggressive. Why did you travel so often? Why were your children abroad without your husband? Questions my husband is never asked, and ones that linger long after you leave the booth.
And I know this is still far far gentler than what most immigrants experience.
Hospitality, Citizenship, and Shared Principles
The reason I chose hospitality, and the reason I chose this country, is rooted in the same idea.
The United States was founded on a radical concept for its time: that citizenship could be based not on race or origin, but on shared principles. Belonging was meant to come from participation, from contributing to a collective project larger than oneself.
Hospitality was built on the same premise.
Every morning as I entered the hospitality building to go the class, I passed E.M. Statler’s words: “Life is service, the one who progresses is the one who gives, a little more, a little better service.”
Statler wasn’t talking about deference. He was talking about responsibility, the idea that progress, personal or societal, comes from what we give to others.
At its best, hospitality is a civic act. It’s where abstract values like dignity, fairness, and welcome become real through daily service. And like the American experiment itself, it only works when those values are actively practiced, not just claimed.
And right now, those values are under strain.
“Hospitality only works when values are actively practiced, not just claimed.”
The Business Reality We’re Ignoring
There is also a practical dimension the industry cannot afford to ignore.
The U.S. hospitality sector is already facing significant labor shortages. In a recent survey, nearly two thirds of hotels reported ongoing staffing gaps, and 71% said they had open roles they could not fill despite active recruiting.
And the roles that are hardest to fill? Housekeeping, front desk, food and beverage, and maintenance. Meanwhile, immigration enforcement actions disproportionately affect the labor pool that fills many of these roles.
We cannot publicly lament labor shortages while remaining silent as the workforce itself is destabilized.
Silence Is a Choice
This is not an argument about the legality of enforcement actions, nor is it a call for hotels to refuse lawful bookings or violate contractual obligations. It is a call for an industry built on service, community, and people to acknowledge reality and to act with integrity.
Silence is not neutral. It protects no one. And it increasingly contradicts the values hospitality claims to stand for.
I keep coming back to something my father, a Holocaust survivor, taught me: moral regression rarely begins with loud declarations. It begins when people decide it is “not their place” to speak.
That is the danger of silence at scale. Hospitality sits at the intersection of human mobility, livelihoods, and dignity. It touches millions of lives daily across borders, classes, and cultures.
And that is exactly why silence costs us more. Hospitality was built by immigrants, and it still runs on their skill, care, and endurance. We know what welcome looks like when it is real, because we practice it every day.
We do not have to solve immigration policy to lead with integrity. We can start by naming what is happening, showing up for our teams and our communities, and drawing clear ethical lines for how our spaces are used.
If we want “welcome” to mean something, we have to practice it when it is hardest.