You May Lose PreCheck and Global Entry If Caught Protesting ICE
You May Lose PreCheck and Global Entry If Caught Protesting ICE
https://www.fodors.com/news/news/you-may-lose-precheck-and-global-entry-if-caught-protesting-ice
A woman's PreCheck was revoked after encounter with ICE.
An American citizen has joined a lawsuit after her PreCheck and Global Entry privileges were revoked. Nicole Cleland, a Minnesota resident, encountered an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent last month; three days afterward, her travel privileges were canceled without explanation.
Cleland, 56, is part of a community watchdog group in Richfield. Volunteers like her have been observing and recording the activities of ICE agents across the state during a massive immigration crackdown that has left many injured and at least two dead. On January 10, she was trailing an agent in her car with another observer when the agent stopped his vehicle, got out, and approached her while she sat inside.
She had never met the agent before, but the agent addressed her by name. He told her that he had facial recognition and his body camera was on. He also informed her that she was impeding their work and that he was issuing a final warning, stating that if she continued, she would be arrested. Accepting the warning, she drove away.
Three days later, she received a notification from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that she had lost access to TSA PreCheck and Global Entry. “The notification did provide some reasons that my status may have changed, and the only one that makes sense was: ‘The applicant has been found in violation of any customs, immigration, or agriculture regulations, procedures, or laws in any country.’”
She was not arrested or detained and does not know how her travel privileges could have been revoked.
Now, she is suing the department for its treatment of observers and demanding answers about what she claims is a retaliatory move.
Cleland is not alone. There have been multiple reports of ICE agents pointing their phones at civilians, recording video, and taking photos.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is using facial recognition technology to identify protesters and community volunteers. Using a mobile app, agents can scan a protester’s face and retrieve information from federal and state databases. This controversial surveillance tactic is becoming more common across the country.
A DHS spokesperson denied to the Independent that her revocation was retaliatory, saying there has been no such directive. “Body worn cameras are utilized to document encounters and are not equipped with CBP’s facial comparison technology,” the spokesperson added.
Surveillance Tools
American citizens participating in community-led monitoring of ICE agents or joining protests should know that federal agents can—without their consent—scan their faces and identify them. Agents are also using personal and government mobile phones to record protests and encounters. These videos are used for social media content or to document confrontations.
Border agents are using a mobile app called Mobile Fortify to pull information from databases in real time. Its existence was first reported by 404 Media in October.
ICE also has access to additional technologies, thanks to the $75 billion it has received from the administration. The New York Times reported that ICE uses tools to hack into people’s phones and track live locations. Agents also monitor the social media of individuals, including U.S. citizens.
DHS says the app is lawful and used under strict guidelines. “Mobile Fortify has not been blocked, restricted, or curtailed by the courts or by legal guidance. It is lawfully used nationwide in accordance with all applicable legal authorities.”
In documented encounters, agents have not asked permission before scanning individuals’ faces. According to DHS, “ICE does not provide the opportunity for individuals to decline or consent to the collection and use of biometric data/photograph collection.” Unlike screening at airports, people cannot opt out.
The federal government is also planning to retaliate against protesters in other ways. Tom Homan, the border czar, said in an interview with Fox News that officials want to create a database to out protesters. “We’re going to put their face on TV. We’re going to let their employers, in their neighborhoods, in their schools, know who these people are.”
Has the Dust Settled in Puerto Vallarta? Is It Safe to Visit?
Casa Kimberly
https://www.fodors.com/world/mexico-and-central-america/mexico/puerto-vallarta/experiences/news/is-it-safe-to-visit-puerto-vallarta-in-2026
After cartel violence, State Department warnings, and flight cancellations, is it safe to visit?
Puerto Vallarta experienced an immediate cessation of tourist arrivals on Feb. 22, when cartel violence rocked the city and several other communities in Jalisco State and other areas of Mexico. The violence subsided quickly, and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico noted that the embassy and all consular offices across the country had resumed normal operations by Feb. 25. The embassy also highlighted that flight schedules had returned to normal and road closures throughout the country had been cleared.
Juanita Gutierrez, general manager at the Puerto Vallarta boutique hotel Casa Kimberly, said that the hotel received many calls from booked guests in the days after Feb. 22, and some of those guests did cancel their reservations. “However, our guest base is very loyal and very well-traveled so we have retained the majority of our bookings, I’m happy to say,” she told Fodor’s.
On Feb. 22, cartel members set cars on fire and blocked roads while clashing with security forces. In Puerto Vallarta, there were reports of army helicopters and troop transports patrolling the city after several vehicles and convenience stores were set on fire by cartel members. Much of the disturbance was in the city’s Romantic Zone, an area popular with U.S. and Canadian visitors. It was later revealed that some of the social posts purporting to document the violence in the city were false, although many of the events were independently verified and U.S. consular officials warned against travel to the city.
Most major cruise lines suspended their planned port calls at Puerto Vallarta on Feb. 22, but some have returned, and most will be back by the middle of March. Norwegian Bliss returned to Puerto Vallarta on Mar. 4, while Princess Cruises ships are expected to return to the city by mid-month. Some cruise lines had rerouted ships to other ports, like Mazatlán, or extended sea days instead of calling at Puerto Vallarta.
The city has returned to normal and is ready for visitors, notes Gutierrez. “I would say at this point there is no more cause for concern than before the incidents. People have resumed life as normal; businesses are fully operational—[it’s] peaceful. Our guests have been out and about, enjoying the town.”
Casa Kimberly itself has a storied past. When Richard Burton was filming Night of the Iguana in Puerto Vallarta in the 1960s, he bought Elizabeth Taylor the house across the street from his and built a skybridge between them so they could visit each other without having to cross the street full of paparazzi, who were aware of the scandalous affair (both Burton and Taylor were married to other people at the time). Taylor continued to visit the home long after her two marriages to Burton ended. She sold the home in the 1990s and it converted to its current use as a boutique hotel and popular local eatery, The Iguana Restaurant & Tequila Bar.
Since the 1960s, tourism activity in the region has spread far beyond the Romantic Zone. Puerto Vallarta itself has several resort areas, spreading up the beaches north and south of the city and into the neighboring state of Nayarit, where the resort communities of Punta Mita and Sayulita are also popular with tourists.
Flights at the city’s Licenciado Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport, suspended during the violence (including some flights that turned back to the U.S. or Canada midflight) have resumed. Although the city is largely back to normal, passenger demand appears soft, and some airlines, including Alaska and Delta, have reduced capacity into the city in the upcoming months by suspending previously scheduled flights.
When asked if visitors should be hesitant about returning, Gutierrez offers some advice: “Certainly visitors should employ the same caution they would in any foreign country but Puerto Vallarta is the same friendly, warm, and welcoming city it has always been.”
Private credit has come under the gun. Is it still enviable for hotel investment?
https://hotelsmag.com/news/private-credit-has-come-under-the-gun-is-it-still-enviable-for-hotel-investment/
by David Eisen
The Ides of March came a bit early for private-credit funds this year. Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, managing over $1 trillion in assets as of early 2026, said in early March that redemption requests from its $82-billion Blackstone private credit fund, known as Bcred, rose to 7.9% of its assets in the first quarter.
It’s not the only one in reclamation worry. In February, Blue Owl Capital, an asset manager that specializes in private credit with over $307 billion in assets under management as of late 2025, restricted withdrawals from one of its private-credit funds after spooked individual investors began asking for their money back.
Shares of private-credit lenders, including Apollo, Blackstone, Ares and KKR, have fallen more than 25% so far this year.
Much of the concern in the nearly $2-trillion private credit market is around loans these funds have made to the software sector, where valuations have plunged in public markets on the threat of artificial intelligence. This is exacerbated by the illiquidity of private-credit loans that are not publicly traded on exchanges and often held to maturity of around five years. Investors in this space accept this lack of liquidity in exchange for an “illiquidity premium,” which provides higher yields and returns compared to public, tradeable debt.
Does commercial real estate face a similar danger in the private-credit sphere? Not according to those who work squarely in it; in fact, they say, it will only get bigger.
“Absolutely—you’re seeing private credit play a bigger role,” said Leeny Oberg, the outgoing CFO and EVP of development for Marriott International.
Private credit is one of a handful of debt instruments borrowers can turn to. It has key distinctions compared to traditional bank lending, including faster execution (private credit deals can close in 30–60 days) and broader flexibility in loan structuring. It’s not the wild west, but, in short, private credit has the pluck to step in and fill gaps left by stricter bank regulations brought about by protection acts like Dodd-Frank and Basel III.
Private credit is not new, but found more opportunity, Oberg noted, in the past few years as the appetite by traditional banks to originate new loans became more restrained over regulatory concerns and the way they’re charged for capital structures. There is one caveat: “Private credit is very expensive,” Oberg said.
Going Private
Private-credit loans often contain a floating interest rate and are structured with customized terms unique to the borrower and lender. It’s an attractive debt vehicle for the hospitality industry, especially for transitional hotel assets, including acquisitions, intensive PIPs, brand conversions and repositionings, said Jay Morrow, senior managing director of hospitality for Walker & Dunlop, one of the largest providers of capital to the commercial real estate industry, in particular because hotels aren’t like any other commercial asset class, where rates can be reset daily and occupancy and sales are so tied to consumer discretionary spend and corporate travel.
“Hotels are operationally intensive and subject to seasonality, demand volatility and CapEx requirements,” Morrow said. “Traditional lenders struggle to underwrite these risks.”
Walker & Dunlop has arranged private credit across senior, stretch senior and structured capital solutions for hotel acquisitions, refinancings and recapitalizations, including, in January, the $112-million refinancing of Ace Hotel Brooklyn, where, as Morrow put it, speed, structure and underwriting to a transitional business plan were critical.
Peachtree Group, a direct lender, deployed $3 billion in credit transactions across an array of asset classes in 2025, representing an 86.8% increase from 2024. It entered private credit in 2010. “With banks pulling back and refinancing risk rising across the market, demand for experienced private lenders has accelerated,” said Daniel Siegel, president and principal, CRE at Peachtree Group.
A few examples of its work include a $130-million construction loan for the VOCE Hotel & Residences in Nashville; a $72.5-million bridge loan for the 346-room Westin Atlanta Gwinnett; and a $53-million refinancing for the 203-room Morrow Hotel in Washington D.C.
Peachtree manages multiple vehicles. One of those targets debt opportunities, explained Jared Schlosser, who is head of credit originations and commercial PACE at Peachtree Group. Hotels are a space Peachtree knows: It launched in 2007 as a family office to invest in premium-branded, select-service hotels. “Our original thesis was, ‘We know hotels, where we’re comfortable being 100 cents, which is the equity. Why not be 70 cents, which is the debt?” Schlosser said.
In 2023, the U.S. banking sector experienced its largest tumult since 2008 driven by high-volume bank runs in quick succession at several regional banks. These collapses were largely triggered by unrealized losses from rising interest rates and high uninsured deposit levels. The upshot was banks pulling back in their lending activity. It presented opportunity for groups like Peachtree, which had been raising equity vehicles. Interest rates were high, cap rates were high, “We can’t put those dollars into equity deals,” Schlosser said.
Private credit up to that time had been the smaller percentage of the pie chart of debt, which, for the hotel industry was overshadowed by CMBS and traditional bank loans. “Private credit is going to be massively bigger than it was in 2023,” Schlosser said.
Rising Up
JLL is no stranger to the debt markets. It’s one of the largest commercial real estate brokerages in the world. Kevin Davis, Americas CEO for the hotels and hospitality division, displays tennis paraphernalia in his office as a subtle reminder or messaging to clients. JLL wants to hold serve. “We want to sell an asset to you. We expect to finance it for you. We expect to sell it for you,” Davis said.
The private credit space, he and others argue, became more ubiquitous after the Great Financial Crisis. Until then, CMBS dominated the landscape, but that primacy came to a halt post-GFC as lenders, saddled with bad debt, winded down and segued into selloff mode.
“A lot of those guys never got back into the market,” Davis said, allowing for a gap in the financing markets that began to be filled by private credit.
Traditionally, a large portion of commercial real estate debt was originated and held by banks. “Following the Great Recession, banking institutions largely withdrew,” said Alex Horn, managing partner and founder of BridgeInvest. With less capital being allocated toward real estate, a gap emerged. “This presented an opportunity for debt funds to step in and capture deal flow,” he added.
The GFC was hard; COVID was existential. Overnight, hotels went to zero occupancy and zero cash flow—covering debt service became impractical. Hotels were arguably hit harder by COVID than any other asset class. In December 2020, the overall CMBS lodging delinquency rate soared to a staggering 19.8%, compared to just 1.5% at the end of 2019, according to Trepp. Past headwinds have showed how financing from traditional platforms and banks can prove challenging, making room for optionality. “The flexibility of the private-lending platform can pose a meaningful solution to hotel owners and investors facing distressed situations,” Horn said.
On Structure
One of the big distinctions between private credit and CMBS is that while most CMBS lenders are cash-flow lenders, private credit is generally willing to underwrite more transitional loans that have either little to no cash flow and will provide up to 65% leverage. (CMBS loans also have strict prepayment penalties designed to protect investors from losing interest income if a loan is paid off early. This convention discourages owners from selling an asset early.) “They’ve carved out a niche relative to the CMBS lenders relative to the bank lenders and relative to the life company lenders,” Davis said. “Their pricing tends to be more expensive, but they’re also offering loans on assets that frequently have a higher risk profile relative to the traditional risk profile of banks.”
In essence, it allows these debt funds to be much more entrepreneurial since they have flexibility in their risk profile about what they’re willing to do and not do. One of these is Atlanta-based Access Point Financial, which has carved out a $3-billion space in the private-credit landscape and focuses exclusively on hospitality. In August, it completed the refinancing of $1.1 billion of floating rate mortgage loans backed by 67 properties with ATLAS SP Partners. In January of last year, it provided $195 million refinancing for The Beekman, A Thompson Hotel in New York.
Direct lenders like Access Point fill a breach since their risk tolerance is typically higher than a traditional bank lender; it often means their money is more expensive. Consider a $10-million loan where a bank might provide up to 60% leverage. “But that requires some very real credit metrics,” said James Reivitis, chief development officer and managing director at Access Point Financial. War in Iran and its attendant ramifications have clouded the economic environment and when things get a little bumpy, traditional banks may reconsider its credit box. “If they pull back, somebody like us would say, ‘I still think we’re good at 65 cents on the dollar,’” Reivitis said.
It doesn’t mean banks are totally out of the game. Many non-bank lenders tap banks to fulfill private-credit lending through what is knows as “back leverage,” a financing method where a lender, often a private-credit fund, borrows money from a third-party bank, using their existing portfolio of loans as collateral. This strategy allows funds to increase their lending capacity and improve investor returns. It also allows banks to put money to work without the mechanics of managing the loan and dealing directly with the borrower.
This symbiosis allows deal structures to benefit the bank and private-credit lender. In a typical example, private-credit loans are SOFR-based, floating-rate, five-year loans. In this scenario, a bank provides a credit facility that the fund will price at SOFR-plus a certain spread above what the bank priced the debt—maybe 200 basis points. “If my back leverage is charging me SOFR plus 300, I’m going to try to go out and charge a lender SOFR plus 500. I’m making a 200-basis-point spread on the loan, but I’m also dealing with servicing it,” Reivitis said. Accordingly, should the loan go upside down, Access Point, in this example, is on the hook. “If they miss a payment, I still owe a payment,” he said.
As Reivitis put it, private credit acts ostensibly like mezzanine debt, where, in an alternative scenario, a borrower might have two loans to pay back—one to the bank and one to the alternative lender. Now, it’s one product, one loan. “Instead of having to deal with a bank and a mezz lender, they’re just dealing with us,” he said.
It’s not easy being private credit right now. A Morningstar piece called it “crunch time” for private credit. There is a distinction, however: commercial real estate private credit is a separate part of the broader private-credit market. Cracks in the latter don’t necessarily correlate to any distress in private credit earmarked for hotels.
Brian Klinksiek, global head of research for LaSalle Investment Management, recently said that the collateral behind real estate private credit is so different. It’s that distinction that keeps it going unabated.
Stranded in the Middle East, Travelers Resort to GoFundMe to Return Home
wangbin6007/Shutterstock
https://www.fodors.com/news/news/stranded-in-the-middle-east-travelers-resort-to-gofundme-to-return-home
They are crowdfunding to sponsor their return home after unexpected financial strains.
The tremors of the war in the Middle East are being felt globally. As the conflict continues, fuel prices are skyrocketing, financial markets are destabilized, and international travel is crippled. Meanwhile, thousands of travelers are stranded in the Middle East as airspace closes, and travel dwindles to a trickle. Many have started crowdfunding to sponsor their return home after unexpected extensions caused financial strain.
The U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, and Iran retaliated with strikes across the Middle East. More than 1,700 people have died in Iran, and at least seven American soldiers have been killed. Thousands of flights have been canceled since the war began, disrupting the plans of hundreds of thousands of people.
Travelers are waiting out the airspace closures, and these unplanned stays are costing them money. They have accumulated food, hotel, and medication bills while awaiting help from their governments and airlines. Some have started GoFundMe campaigns for themselves or for friends and family to help cover the cost of their extended stay and return.
One traveler is Remy Thomas from Texas, who has raised $9,978 of an $11,000 target. Remy and friend Shanice managed to reach the U.S. after flying from Dubai to Sydney. Clifford Heard and his wife Bri’Ana were also stuck in Dubai and reached out to their community to raise $10,000. After flying from Dubai to Greece, they made it to Newark, then Cincinnati. “Your generosity helped us cover lodging, while we figured out how to get home. Your love offering enabled us to book multiple flights home as we endured 7 cancelled flight(s) and rent a car to drive from New Jersey once we hit the states,” their update said.
A group of church members from Calvary Chapel Summerville in South Carolina was stranded in Israel on the day they were supposed to fly home, and they started a GoFundMe for $100,000—$2,500 per person for the 40 of them. The fund has reached its target, and their Facebook page confirmed they have all returned safely.
Business Insider reported that it has identified at least 28 active fundraisers on the website, with many far from their goals.
Travelers Still Stuck
Earlier this month, the U.S. issued travel warnings for several countries in the Middle East, advising Americans to shelter in place and leave if they could. A DEPART NOW message was sent to people in 14 countries, but without commercial flights, the task was nearly impossible. Other countries responded to the crisis more quickly with repatriation flights.
The State Department faced criticism from travelers and diplomats for asking people to find their own way home. It offered little clarity on repatriation flights, and the agency’s recorded message until Tuesday last week said, “Please do not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation at this time.”
The State Department said it has assisted thousands of people, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio assured Americans that the government would be able to assist every citizen with military and chartered flights, but closed airspaces were a limitation. The U.S. eventually started recovery flights, and more than 27,000 Americans have returned to the U.S. as of Friday, though most used their own means.
Stranded travelers also include those who had connecting flights canceled due to the war and are now in limbo. The UAE and Qatar both announced that they would pay for accommodation and meals for stranded travelers, and asked hotels to extend their stays. But travelers do not know how they may be reimbursed for these costs.
Airlines, which have also helped passengers, are prioritizing those with existing bookings. Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways are running limited flights, mostly for the repatriation of tourists and foreign nationals. Travelers who manage to find seats on limited commercial planes are paying outrageous prices due to demand. Meanwhile, wealthy travelers are chartering private jets—spending $200,000—to leave the war-torn region, and others are paying large sums to drive to safer airports in Oman, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt.
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