So, it's been a big week for immigration. Could you give us a very brief overview of what’s happened over the past few days?
We've been anticipating a slew of executive orders from Donald Trump on his first day in office, and he definitely delivered.
Just to give you a quick overview, we got:
- The mechanism he's going to use for mass deportations
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An effort to keep immigrants out via extreme vetting
- An end to refugee admissions
- An order for the military to secure the border
- The “end” of birthright citizenship
- The closure of the border
- A declaration that cartels and other international criminal gangs are terrorist organizations
Really, the list goes on.
There's a lot of stuff in there that we can recall from his first administration, like the remain in Mexico policy, where asylum seekers have to wait in Mexico for their immigration hearings in the US. But there's also a lot of new stuff, and I think there's a lot of big questions, particularly around how exactly he's going to implement mass deportations. We've also seen litigation about the birthright citizenship order, which many legal experts say is unconstitutional.
On top of all this, we also had action in Congress with the passage of the Laken Riley Act in the Senate.
That bill has two key prongs: one is to require the detention of all immigrants accused of crimes related to theft, and the other is to allow state attorneys general to sue the federal government over visa and detention policies that they disagree with. That's passed now with bipartisan support from Democrats, but has a lot of questionable outcomes potentially.
That’s a lot. Taken together, how do all these various executive orders and this legislation shift the immigration picture in the US?
It's worth remembering that Biden pursued many Trumpian immigration policies that were designed to keep people out at the border.
That said, this is still a big moment, and Trump is really articulating a vision of America that is not as welcoming as it once was — even to legal immigrants. It’s a vision that looks to reshape the way that immigrants assimilate in this country, and also one that engenders fear among the population of 11 million undocumented immigrants who are currently living here.
I think we'll learn more in the coming days exactly how Trump is going to practically enact his vision. A lot of his proposals are super expensive, super resource intensive, and a lot of the experts I've been talking to have doubts about whether he can actually implement it on the scale he's proposing (and to what extent a lot of these proposals will survive in court).
Basically, there are still a lot of unanswered questions here, but for now, Trump is at least providing this impression of sweeping changes to immigration.
Are sweeping changes something Americans are clamoring for?
After we had record high border apprehensions under Biden, a lot of Americans felt like the situation on the border was untenable. When you look at Gallup polling, anti-immigrant sentiment is at highs it hasn’t reached since the post-9/11 era.
Americans — especially Republicans, but also some Democrats — have been demanding harsher action on immigration all throughout the 2024 campaign.
And that’s created the environment for Trump’s orders. And an environment where Democrats are increasingly willing to entertain policies exclusively focused on border enforcement, like the Laken Riley Act.
So yes, broadly speaking, immigration policies like those we’ve seen this week are something broad swaths of Americans want. But it’s important to keep in mind that there are potentially a lot of negative downstream consequences, particularly to Trump's attempts to remake the immigration system, that could have huge human and economic impact.
You've covered immigration for a long time. In your professional opinion, what’s next on immigration?
I think this isn’t the last we've seen on executive orders, and certainly we’ll see lots of court battles.
I was just on a call with some legal experts who think that with this initial batch of orders, Trump is trying to be a little bit more savvy than he was during his first term, just in terms of seeking the necessary justification and agency approvals for some of his policies. It'll be interesting to see how he really rolls this out and seeks justification for this in the courts.
I'd say that there does seem to be a resistance mobilizing, though perhaps less vocal than it was during his first administration. On Tuesday we saw not just the ACLU, but also 18 state attorneys general challenging the birthright citizenship executive order. I think there's more of that to come.
