President-elect Donald Trump has an array of policy initiatives on immigration he could execute on his first day back in the White House, although the full implementation of his campaign promises would have to come later in the administration and may be constrained under the law.
Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants was a key component of Trump’s vision for reversing the tide on immigration after millions of migrants entered the United States during the Biden administration.
Karoline Leavitt, press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in a Fox News interview that Trump’s win “gives him a mandate to govern as he campaigned, to deliver on the promises that he made, which include, on Day 1, launching the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants that Kamala Harris has allowed into this country.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, predicted Trump after taking the oath of office on Jan. 20 would sign an executive order directing U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement to begin planning deportations, but “there will not be people put on a plane because of Trump related policies on Day 1.”
“That’s just not how the federal removal system works,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “You can’t arrest somebody and put them on a plane in three hours, with some exceptions.”
Large-scale removals would likely have to be ramped up over time. Reichlin-Melnick said increased deportations also likely mean more worksite raids as seen under Trump’s first term, but the raids at that scale “take time to plan.”
Under Trump’s first term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement would send agents to go after a specific target, Reichlin-Melnick said, and detain all other people found with that target before checking their immigration status, rather than the Biden administration policy of arresting only the intended target in the raid.
Other administration actions would be more immediately available to Trump upon taking office.
Eric Ruark, director of research for NumbersUSA, a conservative group that wants to reduce immigration, said Trump could immediately eliminate the CBP One app, which allows migrants to schedule appointments at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry to present their asylum claims. Critics say the app provided a blueprint for migrants to enter the United States illegally.
Ruark also said Trump would discontinue a Biden administration program that allowed as many as 30,000 migrants a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the United States under a mechanism known as parole.
Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, said Trump on his first day would take steps in the form of executive orders directing U.S. agencies to take “sweeping action on immigration.”
“The new Trump administration would likely issue a series of executive orders that would make it far more difficult for immigrants in the United States to live their lives here,” Mukherjee said.
Mukherjee said Trump could quickly end Temporary Protected Status, which grants certain migrants relief from removal based on instability in their home countries.
Trump could also take early action on a travel ban on Muslim-majority countries seen under his first administration, and validated as legal by the Supreme Court, or a policy banning visas for people from certain countries in Africa as seen under Trump’s first term, Mukherjee said.
Reichlin-Melnick said under the new Trump administration, “the biggest immediate changes are going to be to legal immigration,” which he said would include restrictions aimed at lower-income immigrants.
But the most drastic change, Reichlin-Melnick said, would be heavy restrictions if not outright elimination of the number of eligible refugees able to enter the United States.
“Trump has promised to pause refugee resettlement immediately, like he did the first time around, after which we fully expect for it to be slashed to the bone and potentially terminated entirely,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
Reichlin-Melnick said the Obama administration had set that number at 100,000 per fiscal year, but Trump during his first term slashed to 50,000, then further reduced it to 15,000 a year, which is the lowest in U.S. history.
“We know he’s going to suspend it on Day 1, and likely going to slash the numbers either down to 15,000 like last time, or I wouldn’t be surprised this time if they set it at zero,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
Biden, in September, announced his administration’s number as 125,000 refugees in fiscal 2025.
Other actions would be further down the line either because they would require changes in the law, the process of administration rules changes or reinterpretation of the law by the courts.
Ruark put into this category Trump bringing an end to birthright citizenship, which is the concept that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen, even if the child is born to parents who are foreign nationals or immigrants who don’t have legal status.
“You could put certain things into place that would be challenged in court and that would go through the Supreme Court, ultimately,” Ruark said.
Other items for a later time that Ruark identified would be expanded worksite enforcement against employers hiring immigrants illegally, as well as funding restrictions for “sanctuary cities,” which have local policies prohibiting them from cooperating with U.S. agencies in removal of undocumented immigrants. The restrictions on funding, Ruark said, could occur through executive actions or by Congress.
“You could target funding to sanctuary jurisdictions, which I think would be very effective,” Ruark added. “A local sheriff can say on principle he disagrees with the law, but when it comes to whether or not funds are going to be withheld, I think those principles probably fall away pretty quickly in the face of losing necessary funding or needed funding.”
Current restrictions under the law may be a last resort for immigration advocates. For example, Trump has said he would draw on the National Guard — and even the U.S. military — to carry out immigration removals, but that would run afoul of restrictions on the federal uses of the National Guard and posse comitatus, the 1878 law that bars the U.S. military from being used enforce domestic policies within the United States.
And many changes will be challenged in court.
Mukherjee identified several laws on that books that would prevent Trump from implementing his sweeping plans for immigration, many of which she said “are blatantly illegal and at odds with federal constitutional law.”
Among these laws, Mukherjee said, are the Administrative Procedure Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Refugee Act of 1980, in addition to protections under the Constitution.
“These laws prohibit many of the actions that the soon-to-be executive branch leader has been talking about on the campaign for months,” Mukherjee said. “So, I think we can look to federal law as one backstop for the worst abuses of the executive branch.”
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