On a January afternoon in New Orleans' historic French Quarter, purple, green and gold wreaths on balconies mark the advent of Carnival, the season leading up to Mardi Gras.
The streets are relatively quiet on this weekday, though the usual cacophony of music spills from bars and storefronts. A melancholy tune wafts through the air near where Freddi Szilagi is selling his folk art behind St. Louis Cathedral.
Szilagi said he usually sells art to people from all over the world — from as far away as India, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Lately, things have looked a little different.
"The whole climate in general is making a difference whether people travel at all," he said. "I would say that when talking to other people and artists, we're seeing a lot less international travelers."
That climate includes souped-up immigration enforcement, like the recent "Catahoula Crunch" surge that threw Louisiana into the national spotlight, and National Guard deployments in U.S. cities, including New Orleans.
The law enforcement spectacles and a fraught political climate reshaping travel raise a question in this famously footloose city: will people still come to Mardi Gras?
Historically, Mardi Gras has been "very much impacted by political events [and] crisis," said Bridget Bordelon, an endowed chair at the Lester E. Kabacoff School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Administration at the University of New Orleans.
She gave the example of the COVID-19 pandemic, which scuttled most Mardi Gras events in 2021.
"Even a modest decline in global tourism can weigh heavily on a big event, especially one that really benefits the hospitality and tourism industry," she added.
Tourism is a moneymaker for a lot of cities, but it's a keystone industry for New Orleans, especially during Carnival. One review of 2023 receipts found that Mardi Gras and its antecedents made up more than 3% of the city's gross domestic product.
It is a piece of a greater tourism and hospitality economy that supports thousands of incomes, from servers and musicians to street performers and tour guides. For many, Carnival is a part of a busy season that runs roughly from late fall through the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
That means Mardi Gras could serve as a bellwether for how New Orleans tourism is holding up at this contentious time.
Nationally, data from the U.S. Travel Association shows softening demand for hotel rooms and domestic flights. International arrivals to the U.S. are down somewhere between 2% and 8%, Bordelon said.
New Orleans could focus on recruiting domestic visitors, she said, but U.S. travelers may have followed the "Catahoula Crunch" as news media spread the word about immigration agents in Louisiana.
"That could potentially put some fear in people, and maybe have them second-guess selecting New Orleans as a destination," Bordelon said.
Some cultural figures have already raised the alarm about a drag on the tourism economy from the presence of federal agents. In December, hundreds of them signed on to an open letter decrying immigration raids and warning of their potential impact.
"Masked agents terrorizing our workplaces, schools, churches and homes will chill the tourism economy, one of the state’s largest employers, during one of the busiest times of year," they wrote last month.
Szilagi, the artist, said the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement could steer visitors away.
"Any city that has that presence is, it's, why would you come? You know? It's a deterrent."
Tracking attendance
The success of Mardi Gras is tracked by indicators like hotel occupancy and inbound flights. Just after last year's holiday, boosters celebrated a Mardi Gras they said was bigger than 2024, averaging 87% hotel occupancy across the event's final stretch.
It was not immediately clear what projections on attendance are looking like for this year. Marketing organization New Orleans & Company, the Greater New Orleans Hotel & Lodging Association, and a few different hotel groups did not respond to interview requests for this story.
Spokespeople for the City of New Orleans also did not return an inquiry.
A spokesperson for the New Orleans Police Department said the agency does not track Carnival attendance or use those numbers to staff events. Rather, they rely on factors like parade routes, road closures and district-level needs to scale up or down police presence as necessary.
The spokesperson did not directly answer a question about whether police chief Anne Kirkpatrick had been in conversation with ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Protection about their planned activities during the highly-attended main events of Carnival, instead referring questions to those federal agencies. (They didn't respond to a request for comment.)
Bordelon said it'll be a few months before data show how travel dips are affecting New Orleans, and a similar delay applies to Mardi Gras turnout estimates. But one tourism weak spot that has already emerged is visitors from Canada.
Last fall, Louisiana Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser implored President Donald Trump to apologize after hearing on a promotional tour that Canadian visitors were avoiding the U.S. and Louisiana, which typically has a friendly relationship with the country, due to political tensions.
Trump, however, has continued to needle Canada, recently threatening new tariffs.
‘It does something viscerally to see that’
Speaking just for herself and not the full cultural community, gig musician Hannah Kreiger-Benson said she isn't sure how the current moment might impact this year's Carnival attendance.
She pointed to other factors in play, like the fact that this year's Mardi Gras is on the earlier side, making for a shorter season. The weather is more likely to be cold when Mardi Gras comes early.
But she said the law enforcement presence, from ICE to the National Guard, does have an impact that changes "sort of the feel of the landscape, the streets," posing a chilling effect on the general and cultural economies.
"Just the presence of people in military-looking uniforms with enormous weapons in their hands in the streets that people walk or work in or go grocery shopping in every day ... it does something viscerally to see that," Kreiger-Benson — who also works on programs and research for the Music & Culture Coalition of New Orleans, better known as MACCNO — said.
A Louisiana National Guard spokesperson didn't provide a comment for this story.
Kreiger-Benson feels current events could compound changes that have buffeted cultural workers in the years since the pandemic, which sidelined many people who work in the industry for more than a year.
"Everything that's happened now feels very much part of a larger web of happenings," she said, adding that remedies like moratoriums on utility bill shutoffs are part of strategies that could blunt that pain.
Some support for increased security
Not everyone is displeased by the tenor of the moment. As a group of men in military fatigues rolled past in a golf cart-like vehicle, longtime card-reader Dinos shuffled a deck of red-and-gold-backed cards in Jackson Square.
He said he feels like the Mardi Gras attendance he sees has fallen off in recent years.
Years ago, "being out here in Mardi Gras, it was fun. People were having a great time, and we used to have a real big police presence out here. That presence started dropping off," Dinos said.
Today, he believes that people don't feel safe coming to the city, citing issues like open drug use, pickpockets and scams. His view is that local police are not focused on enforcement against those problems.
For that reason, he welcomes the National Guard's presence, saying they are cleaning up the square. Perhaps "[Mardi Gras] will be better this year" with their attendance, he said.
"Maybe with the National Guard, people feel safer."
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
