Immigration Policy under Trump 2.0 (Part I)
Securing the Border; Internal Enforcement
“When I am President, on Day One, instead of fighting Texas, I will work hand in hand with Governor Abbott and other Border States to Stop the Invasion, Seal the Border, and Rapidly Begin the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History. Those Biden has let in should not get comfortable because they will be going home.”
– Donald Trump, Truth Social, Jan. 25, 2024.
President-elect Trump has promised a radical overhaul of U.S. immigration policy to reverse the Biden administration’s open-borders agenda and replace it with sweeping restrictionist alternatives in his second term. To that end, his campaign and allies at outfits like the Heritage Foundation have drawn up a raft of executive orders and policy memoranda that can be put in place in order to secure the border, deport illegals, and tighten up the quantity and quality of legal immigration into the USA.
Some of these initiatives — finishing the border wall, restoring the Remain in Mexico policy for asylum seekers, ending DACA and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for various national groups, curbing refugee numbers, banning immigration from certain terrorism-plagued countries, and prioritizing the deportation of everyone present without lawful status — pick up where his first term left off.
Others will go further still, including a commitment to carrying out “the largest mass deportation in U.S. history”, the use of the military to help secure the border, and a push to end birthright citizenship.
This article was first published on Courage.Media. You can read it on Ayaan’s new platform below:
There are good reasons to think Trump’s opponents will be less successful in curbing this agenda than they were in his first administration. For one thing, the public is on board: 61% of registered voters said that immigration was a priority for them in the election according to the Pew Research Centre, and 55% of them want immigration levels reduced, meaning that action on the issue will be at the top of the next president’s to-do list. For another, Congressional Republicans, who won a trifecta after capturing control of the Senate and keeping the House of Representatives, are far more MAGA-friendly now than they were back in the days of Speaker Paul Ryan and his Chamber of Commerce-led agenda. The make-up of the federal appellate courts and the Supreme Court has also changed radically thanks to Trump’s four years of judicial appointments, with conservatives on the Supreme Court now holding a 6-3 supermajority. This has tilted the legal environment in his favor compared to the first term, when the administration’s immigration policies had a historically low win rate of just 10% when challenged in court.