I miss PyCon US a lot and I'm sad I can't go. As a Canadian, recent USA ICE government actions have made it really hard for me to attend.
No conference is worth getting thrown in an ICE detention camp. This actually has happened to people from my country. [1] [2]
A big part of this conference is the non-USA residents who show up.
> We attribute this largely to the sad but understandable decline in willingness of international attendees, as well as some vulnerable domestic attendees
It seems like part of the hotel problem is the lack of international attendees that are stopping travel to the USA travel due to recent government actions.
In general USA-Canada Travel has been down all year. [3]
Hoping for a future PyCon that is as big, but I don't have to take risks around my freedom to attend!
The cases you link relate to someone with previous convictions that could affect their legal status and someone potentially filing faulty documents and overstaying their legal status. They were not just visitors, so not sure why you are comparing these cases to you simply going to a conference unless you are being deliberately dishonest to make a point
I concede that [3] is not the best case of this reading more into it. My point still stands though.
If visitors are one immigration mistake away from weeks in a detention camp, or any other unjust punishment it's reasonable that visitors would not want to visit.
A quick search suggests 25k Canadians enter the US daily for multi-day trips. If ICE was any real concern here for Canadians we'd hear a lot more about it I think.
It wasnt clear from the blog so I'll ask here. Where does the money go? The post refers to providing tickets to underprivileged attendees, but is that 100% or ony some part of it? Where does the rest of the money go?
> Once your event outgrows academic spaces, donated conference rooms, or theatre spaces, working with the hotels is the industry’s standard way to pay for a professional convention center space. You commit to a certain number of hotel nights blocked off at nearby hotels, based on your event’s numbers from previous years, and in return, you get a reduced rental charge at the convention center. If you sell enough rooms, you additionally earn a small percentage of the revenue from those rooms, i.e. a commission. If, on the other hand, you don’t sell enough rooms, you owe damages to the hotels–essentially paying the full rate for the rooms they reserved for your event but didn’t sell.
Attendees pay the Hotel directly for their rooms. If the event does not book enough rooms to cover expenses then the organizer (PyCon) owes a minimum amount to the Hotel. If there are more rooms booked than expected the Organizer gets a check. This is a normal Hotel industry arrangement.
PyCon itself is run by the Python Software Foundation; according to publicly-available records they spent approximately US$2,491,000 on PyCon US expenses in 2024, including supporting 552 travel grant recipients: https://www.python.org/psf/records/
Conferences are a long-lead-time project. The contract described here was signed in July 2023 - 2 years 9 months before the event date. Even if it was possible to setup a new event, the current contract would not be nullified.
Additionally, the Python Software Foundation is a US Based Nonprofit - spending money outside of the Country is generally more difficult than in-country. PyCon was held in Canada in 2014/2015; and there are apparently many smaller local PyCon events.
I miss PyCon US a lot and I'm sad I can't go. As a Canadian, recent USA ICE government actions have made it really hard for me to attend.
No conference is worth getting thrown in an ICE detention camp. This actually has happened to people from my country. [1] [2]
A big part of this conference is the non-USA residents who show up.
> We attribute this largely to the sad but understandable decline in willingness of international attendees, as well as some vulnerable domestic attendees
It seems like part of the hotel problem is the lack of international attendees that are stopping travel to the USA travel due to recent government actions.
In general USA-Canada Travel has been down all year. [3]
Hoping for a future PyCon that is as big, but I don't have to take risks around my freedom to attend!
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/10/ice-canadian...
[2] https://ca.news.yahoo.com/canadian-man-detained-ice-dies-200...
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2026/03/19/canada...
The cases you link relate to someone with previous convictions that could affect their legal status and someone potentially filing faulty documents and overstaying their legal status. They were not just visitors, so not sure why you are comparing these cases to you simply going to a conference unless you are being deliberately dishonest to make a point
Yea, I've seen this a few times now on here where people are acting like ICE is going to arrest them for being here legally for a conference.
I concede that [3] is not the best case of this reading more into it. My point still stands though.
If visitors are one immigration mistake away from weeks in a detention camp, or any other unjust punishment it's reasonable that visitors would not want to visit.
A quick search suggests 25k Canadians enter the US daily for multi-day trips. If ICE was any real concern here for Canadians we'd hear a lot more about it I think.
It wasnt clear from the blog so I'll ask here. Where does the money go? The post refers to providing tickets to underprivileged attendees, but is that 100% or ony some part of it? Where does the rest of the money go?
> Once your event outgrows academic spaces, donated conference rooms, or theatre spaces, working with the hotels is the industry’s standard way to pay for a professional convention center space. You commit to a certain number of hotel nights blocked off at nearby hotels, based on your event’s numbers from previous years, and in return, you get a reduced rental charge at the convention center. If you sell enough rooms, you additionally earn a small percentage of the revenue from those rooms, i.e. a commission. If, on the other hand, you don’t sell enough rooms, you owe damages to the hotels–essentially paying the full rate for the rooms they reserved for your event but didn’t sell.
Attendees pay the Hotel directly for their rooms. If the event does not book enough rooms to cover expenses then the organizer (PyCon) owes a minimum amount to the Hotel. If there are more rooms booked than expected the Organizer gets a check. This is a normal Hotel industry arrangement.
PyCon itself is run by the Python Software Foundation; according to publicly-available records they spent approximately US$2,491,000 on PyCon US expenses in 2024, including supporting 552 travel grant recipients: https://www.python.org/psf/records/
Why not move the conference to a friendly country? Like Canada maybe?
Conferences are a long-lead-time project. The contract described here was signed in July 2023 - 2 years 9 months before the event date. Even if it was possible to setup a new event, the current contract would not be nullified.
Additionally, the Python Software Foundation is a US Based Nonprofit - spending money outside of the Country is generally more difficult than in-country. PyCon was held in Canada in 2014/2015; and there are apparently many smaller local PyCon events.