Award-winning Australian comedian Alice Fraser has canceled an upcoming trip to New York to promote her new book, citing concerns that her past jokes about President Donald Trump and Elon Musk — the world’s richest person and a prominent Trump ally — could create problems for her with U.S. border officials.
Fraser outlined several factors behind her decision in a post on Patreon last month, explaining why she’d pulled the plug on a promotional visit for “A Passion for Passion: A Delirious Love Letter To Romance.”
Among the reasons: the collapse and “rebirth” of her publisher, restrictions on doing unpaid promotional work under the U.S. ESTA Visa Waiver Program and the $3,000 cost of applying for a work visa.
But a major concern, Fraser said, came after she sought legal advice from an immigration lawyer about the potential consequences of her satirical, Trump-mocking material.
The lawyer, she wrote, “couldn’t guarantee that having made publicly available jokes that could be considered critical of the administration wouldn’t count in my disfavour in the application” to enter America.
Fraser recalled asking what she thought was a “silly, paranoid question” about whether her jokes about Trump and Musk might cause issues. But the lawyer took it seriously, warning her that border agents will “definitely google you,” and that decisions would ultimately be up to the discretion of the visa officer or the person assessing her at the border.
Speaking to The Guardian in an article published Thursday, Fraser admitted she was surprised by the warning ― which comes amid recent reports of tourists and legal immigrants facing trouble at the border, being denied entry or detained.
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“I thought I was being paranoid,” Fraser said, noting how the lawyer admitted that while “the vast majority of people will be able to travel in and out … they’re definitely doing increased scrutinising.”
Fraser added that she might have been “more open” to taking the risk if she didn’t have two young children. She told The Guardian she still hopes to visit the U.S. in the future — but only “when it’s no longer reasonable for a visa lawyer to say I should purge my social media before I go there because a joke about Elon Musk might be considered hostile to the nation.”
Fraser did not immediately return HuffPost’s request for comment.