That Team Off-Site Could Be a Crisis for Someone on Your Team. Here's How to Change That.
When organizations ask employees to travel to off-sites, conferences, or in-person gatherings, they are making a request that carries weight. For a lot of employees right now, that weight has become something else entirely.
The current political climate has changed what it means to move through an airport. These are federal jurisdiction zones — spaces where Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement operate with broad authority, where surveillance has intensified, and where the experience of moving through security is not the same for everyone on your team. For employees who belong to communities in the crosshairs of this administration's policies, a flight to a team retreat is not a minor logistical inconvenience. It can feel like a genuine threat.
Employers who care about their people have to sit with that. Not with a policy addendum. Not with a liability disclaimer. With actual, equity-informed infrastructure.
The Landscape of Risk: What Employers Must Acknowledge
1. Immigration Status and ICE Enforcement
Federal immigration enforcement has escalated — and airports are where that escalation is most visible. Employees traveling on work visas, DACA recipients, green card holders, people with pending immigration cases, and even naturalized citizens from certain countries of origin have reported increased scrutiny, secondary inspection, and questioning. At domestic checkpoints, not just international ones.
The unpredictability is its own form of harm. There is no set of credentials that guarantees a smooth passage right now, and employees who know that are carrying that knowledge every time they book a flight for work.
Asking someone to fly across the country for a leadership retreat without acknowledging that reality — without any support infrastructure in place — is a failure of duty of care. It also quietly communicates whose experience gets treated as the default.
When a workplace request carries unequal risk across your team, that inequality belongs to the employer to address — not to the individual to quietly absorb.
2. Disability Access and the Physical Toll of Travel
For many people with disabilities, airports are an endurance test before the work even begins. Long lines with nowhere to sit. Unpredictable wait times. Crowded, loud, overstimulating environments. Mobility equipment that gets damaged or lost. No quiet spaces. Cognitive load that doesn't show up in any travel itinerary.
And much of this is invisible. Chronic pain conditions, autoimmune disorders, anxiety, ADHD, trauma responses to high-surveillance environments — none of these are visible at the gate. The assumption that someone who doesn't look disabled will be fine is both common and wrong.
When off-site programming gets planned without proactively accounting for the range of access needs on the team, a portion of the workforce gets quietly excluded — regardless of what the ADA policy says.
Access is a design requirement, not a special accommodation. It belongs in the planning process from the start.
3. The Carceral Nature of the Airport Environment
For employees who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color — for those with immigrant backgrounds, prior contact with the criminal legal system, or gender identities that may not align with their documentation — airports have never been neutral spaces.
They are spaces where authority figures carry weapons and documents get scrutinized. Where movement is controlled and profiling happens openly. Where being flagged carries real consequences. The current administration has explicitly leaned into the use of these spaces as enforcement tools, and employees from targeted communities are not wrong to feel that.
This is not hyperbole. It's a description of a system that was built to sort people unevenly and has never stopped doing that. Employers who minimize or dismiss that perception cause harm — even when they mean well.
We are in a moment of democratic backsliding. The machinery of the state is being used against people based on who they are. That is a workplace issue. Organizations with genuine values have a responsibility to say so plainly and act accordingly.
Intersectionality Matters: Risk Compounds
Organizations that take a checklist approach — "we've addressed disability, we've addressed immigration, we're done" — will miss the employees carrying the highest risk, precisely because their identities intersect. Intersectionality— a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw — describes how overlapping identities like race, gender, disability, and immigration status interact to create compounding and distinct forms of disadvantage. A person isn't simply affected by each identity separately; the combination produces experiences that single-axis frameworks miss entirely. Building policies flexible enough to respond to the full complexity of who is actually on your team is what intersectional support requires.
CONSIDER THIS:
Maya is a project director at a mid-sized nonprofit. Six years in, well-regarded, never raised a workplace concern. When leadership announces a three-day off-site in another state, she doesn't say anything — but she spends the two weeks before the trip quietly managing significant anxiety.
Maya is a DACA recipient. She has a chronic pain condition that makes long periods of standing nearly impossible. She is Afro-Latina and has had prior encounters with law enforcement she has never disclosed at work.
The organization didn't ask if she had concerns. There was no travel support policy. There was an HR contact — but that person had no knowledge of who on the team might need support, no protocol to activate, and no real authority to do anything that mattered when it mattered most.
The off-site was mandatory for all senior staff. Maya went. She got through it. She did not feel cared for — she felt unseen. Six months later she took a job somewhere else, and her organization never knew why.
At DevelopWell, we work with organizations that take their People Operations as seriously as their mission. The teams doing the most important work in this country are often the most exposed to the risks described above and the leaders who care are looking for something concrete to do about it.
We put together five strategies to help you protect your team in today's travel climate. They're designed to be implemented now, without waiting on a perfect policy or a bigger budget.