Donald Trump’s allies have promised a “shock and awe” plan for mass deportations within his first days back in the White House.
Now, Trump’s transition team is outlining a series of executive actions on immigration within hours of his return, what one campaign official told NBC News will be “like nothing you’ve seen in history.”
Trump is expected to sign up to five executive actions targeting immigration shortly after he is sworn into office on January 20, according to NBC News.
The incoming president also intends to swiftly gut policies put in place by President Joe Biden, including cutting off travel reimbursements for service members seeking abortion care and restricting transgender service members’ access to gender-affirming healthcare.
“There will without question be a lot of movement quickly, likely Day One, on the immigration front,” one Trump ally told NBC News. “There will be a push to make a huge early show and assert himself to show his campaign promises were not hollow.”
Among Trump’s first appointments for his administration was “border czar” Tom Homan, his former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Trump also has picked anti-immigration hardliner Kristi Noem for the Department of Homeland Security, which is expected to oversee the federal law enforcement agencies implementing Trump’s agenda.
They are among more than two dozen people Trump has publicly announced for his Cabinet and in other key senior roles across the administration, signaling his readiness for a blitzkrieg of actions after spending years preparing to dismantle Biden’s agenda and pick up where he left off.
Compared to this point in the post-election period in 2016, Trump had only announced three people for administration. In the two weeks following his victory against Kamala Harris, Trump has announced 32.
Several right-wing think tanks and legal groups that have shaped his agenda — including the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and America First Policy Institute, both of which are made up of his current and former appointees — have already prepared policy briefs and executive orders.
Trump has also pledged to immediately end birthright citizenship, in which people born in the US are bestowed citizenship regardless of their parents’ status.
“As part of my plan to secure the border,” Trump said in a campaign video, “I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship.”
He argued that his actions will “choke off a major incentive for continued illegal immigration.”
Trump also will have to work quickly to see his agenda through; bound by the constraints of the 22nd Amendment, Trump will only have one four-year term. In 2026, Republicans in Congress will be focused on midterm elections that could tip the balance of power in the House and Senate, where the GOP has clinched narrow majorities that can more easily push through Trump’s legislative agenda.
The president-elect has said his mass deportation ambitions have “no price tag” – he wants to declare a national emergency upon entering office and then deploy the military into communities across the country.
But upending potentially millions of families will face significant legal and logistical challenges that will likely take years to carry out. Civil rights groups are prepared to fight his orders in court, and the anticipated costs of using federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to identify, detain and deport millions of people living in the US without legal permission could reach nearly $1 trillion over 10 years, according to the American Immigration Council.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy said Trump’s plans would eliminate 22 percent of American farmworkers, 15 percent of construction workers, eight percent of service workers, eight percent of manufacturing workers and six percent of transportation workers.
“I don’t think there is any question Trump won and won big on the idea that cracking down on illegal immigration is not just a priority, but the priority,” a Trump donor told NBC News.
Campaign officials are still hashing out what that plan could look like, but “it will be swift,” one of Trump’s allies told the outlet.
Homan has also said that law enforcement will perform workplace raids, and that agencies will have to detain people for potentially long periods of time in facilities big enough to hold them.
“There’s a process we have to go through,” Homan recently said. “You have to contact the country, they have to agree to accept them, then they got to send you travel documents. And that takes several days to several weeks. So we need detention assets.”
