Trump’s inauguration ushers in uncertainty and terror for immigrants and advocacy groups as they brace for the massive immigration crackdown he has already initiated since taking office on Monday. His second presidential campaign, like his first, was centered on virulent anti-immigrant demagoguery and lies. Emboldened by victory, the Trump 2.0 team now claims a mandate to fundamentally reshape the immigration landscape—using shock and awe to ratchet up anxiety and overwhelm and disempower not only immigrants but the rights groups and even the faith-based and health care institutions that seek to protect them.

The shock and awe is meant to ratchet up anxiety and disempower not only immigrants but the institutions that protect them.

Few dispute that the U.S. immigration has been irretrievably broken for decades. The last comprehensive immigration reform bill, which included broad amnesty for undocumented migrants, was passed in 1986. Various versions of legislation to protect immigrants brought to the country as children, first proposed in 2001, has repeatedly failed to pass, despite widespread public support for their protection. Meaningful reform has proven elusive, owing in part to congressional paralysis, which leaves presidents to rely on executive actions that often face legal challenges and change with administrations.

On that score, Biden initially rolled back some of the earlier, cruel Trump-era border policies through executive orders and actions, but he lurched to the right when Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric appeared to be swaying public opinion, supporting a harsh border bill last spring that was designed in part to fend off disingenuous criticism of his so-called “open borders” policies. At Trump’s direction, Republicans scuttled the bill, to keep the manufactured border crisis alive as a campaign issue. As Trump took office, monthly unauthorized border crossings were among the lowest during Biden’s tenure.

Biden also ramped up the apparatus of deportation by laying the groundwork to expand immigration jails, curtailed border crossing though a June 2024 order, and though he promised to end family separations, they continued on his watch. On his way out the door, Biden did extend temporary deportation relief for nearly a million people, among several other measures he took to protect migrants from the coming storm, but he failed to rebut Trump’s fearmongering in any meaningful way. And now, despite Biden’s disappointing legacy, some frontline advocates fear Trump will be exponentially worse.


During his first administration, Trump focused on the border and largely ignored interior enforcement. He successfully othered migrants by evoking imagery of invading marauders, aided by mainstream media that indelibly etched images and perceptions of desperate, criminal, and ragged migrants—obscuring their humanity and untethered to reality. Deportation numbers under Trump were comparable to those of Obama’s second term and far below those of Obama’s first term, when advocates angrily denounced Obama as the “deporter in chief.” Yet Trump caused incalculable harm through brutal policies: the Migrant Protection Protocols, dubbed “Remain in Mexico,” which trapped vulnerable migrants over the border in Mexico in squalid and treacherous conditions; a COVID-19 era policy, Title 42, that relied on unsupported public health justifications to block border crossings; the Muslim Ban (as Trump’s own aids called it); the devastating policy of intentional family separation; and a relentless and devastating propaganda campaign to demonize and scapegoat brown and black immigrants.

In his RNC speech last year, Trump doubled down on lies about the criminality of migrants, repeating the claim that that they are “coming from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and terrorists at levels never seen before” and promising “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” His corrosive rhetoric has set the stage for a vast expansion of the carceral state despite the inconvenient fact that immigrants as a group are more law-abiding than native born citizens.

On his way out the door, Biden did extend temporary deportation relief for nearly a million people, but he failed to rebut Trump’s fearmongering in any meaningful way.

On his first day, Trump issued a fusillade of executive orders, though unsurprisingly they did not carefully tailor their impact to the hardened criminals that he repeatedly denounced. Among his policies, Trump rolled back a Biden directive to focus enforcement on people “who are a threat to our national security, public safety, and border security”; directed authorities to ramp up prosecutions of migrants for illegal entry and reentry; declared an end to birthright citizenship (which, although unconstitutional, could result in the grim precarity of stateless children); circumvented legal protections by expanding the application of expedited removal (expulsion without a hearing); canceled longstanding asylum appointments for migrants applying legally from Mexico; suspended refugee admissions; ended parole for Haitians, Venezuelans, Cubans and Nicaraguans; reinstated “Remain in Mexico”; and declared a national state of emergency to justify military deployment to stop the “invasion” the border.

Trump has also vowed to renew the Muslim Ban, end temporary protected status for migrants who fled from countries facing armed conflict or natural disasters, and cancel various types of humanitarian parole. For migrants in such programs, the price of temporary relief from deportation is disclosing contact information to the government, making them easier to locate. Despite attempting to justify these policies with specious appeals to protect migrants from trafficking and crime, visas for victims are also on the chopping block. And Trump advisors are also reportedly searching for a public health justification to revive Title 42 as an pretext to close the border, undeterred by the lack of a supportable rationale to do so.

Immigration hardliners Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, and Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” were the architects of many of Trump’s draconian measures from the last administration. Their work was not just inhumane and ill-conceived but hastily rolled out and often slowed by courts or thwarted entirely. This time around, Trump’s closest advisors appear to be better prepared—thanks not least to the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plans on immigration—as well as more disciplined and extreme, buoyed by an administration populated by loyalists and sycophants. Republicans control of both houses of Congress will be a boon to advancing their agenda, though GOP fiscal hawks are unlikely to greenlight endless spending. Advocates successfully mitigated some of the first Trump administration’s more extreme and reckless measures, even in front of Trump-appointed judges, and they now face a reshaped federal judiciary, especially at the highest level. At the same time, they too are better prepared: coalitions of states attorneys general and immigrant rights groups filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the birthright citizenship order shortly after it was issued. In a quick setback for the administration, federal district court judge John Coughenour, appointed by Ronald Reagan, issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s action, calling it “a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

The central showpiece of Trump’s immigration panic is the promise to implement mass deportations—up to a million people a year, which is double the highest number previously deported. Trump and his surrogates have floated various scenarios to make good on the promise, although planning details remain opaque and he faces significant logistical and financial constraints to removing 11 million people who have been consigned to living in the shadows, along with more recent border crossers. Notably, Trump’s promise to deport 20 million people wildly overstates the undocumented population. He also risks overreach in expanding mass deportations beyond those with serious criminal records, as a majority of Americans conditionally support for a pathway to legal status for law-abiding migrants who have been here for years.

There are obstacles that stand in the way of a quick implementation of this program. The administration lacks the current infrastructure for mass deportations, which would require a vast increase in enforcement personnel, detention beds, transportation, a quick remedy to the overwhelmed and backlogged immigration court system, and countries willing to accept deportees. Ramping up to achieve Trump’s stated goals would require significant time and astronomical sums—the American Immigration Council, for one, projects that his deportations would cost an average of $88 billion a year. Nevertheless, with the GOP’s governing trifecta, Trump has the power to bully and cajole lawmakers for appropriations to carry out his plans. Budget discussions will also be influenced by groups poised to cash in; Trump’s reelection sent the stocks of private jail companies skyrocketing. What is certain is that though the task will be enormously complicated and costly, it will be totally unconstrained by empathy, compassion, and respect for human dignity and unmoved by the destruction it wreaks.

To bring on personnel, Trump has signaled his intent to expand capacity with additional hiring for Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). More controversially, Trump has said he will deploy the military, despite the legal impediments to doing so, and rely on local police and sheriffs. Aside from the legalities, there are logistical challenges to using the National Guard, as much of the undocumented population lives in urban centers in blue states whose governments are unlikely to welcome the soldiers of other states. Other military leaders have balked at this domestic role for the nation’s armed forces absent a justification Trump cannot credibly muster in this circumstance. One unnamed former senior military official bristled at the notion of being seen as the “Gestapo.”

Those most vulnerable to deportation are those already caught up in the criminal justice pipeline and with final orders of deportation, as well as up to three million migrants in immigration system based on authorized statuses that some in Trump’s administration have deemed unlawful and threatened to rescind or at least decline to renew. Homan has promised workplace raids, which damage and destabilize local communities long after the initial chaotic aftermath. The threats have already scared migrants from going to work in the food industry, and the fallout has only just begun. Homan has also floated the idea of a hotline to report migrants, although ICE already has one, which would “turn citizens against immigrants, embolden vigilante groups, and serves as a recipe for racial profiling and increased discrimination, according to Tom Wong, director of the University of California, San Diego’s U.S. Immigration Policy Center.

This time Trump’s advisors appear to be better more disciplined and extreme, buoyed by an administration populated by loyalists and sycophants.

Law enforcement cooperation can be dampened through a variety of sanctuary policies, but the perverse incentives of enforcement profitability may pull cash-strapped municipalities in the other direction. As Democratic states and cities prepare to protect their immigrant communities from the coming onslaught, Trump issued an executive order to cut off federal money and threatens to employ other tools to suppress local resistance, including investigating and prosecuting local officials who refuse to cooperate with immigration crackdowns despite the legal limitations of doing so. Some governors have already signaled a willingness to compromise with Trump.

Current detention capacity is inadequate to accommodate mass expulsions. There is funding for 41,500 beds, but Homan has said the Trump administration needs at least 100,000 beds. This stunning number fails to convey the bleak conditions of detention, such as the use of solitary confinement and other harsh measures, reprisals against people on hunger strikes, sexual abuse and forced labor, which are likely to deteriorate further under Trump. Advisors have spoken of “camps” to rapidly expand detention capacity, but Trump allies were later instructed to walk back use of the phrase, amid fears it invited ghastly historical comparisons. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has eagerly offered land on which to construct new holding facilities, which reinforce the sweeping anti-immigrant policies of Operation Lone Star.

Deportation also requires the cooperation of countries to receive their nationals—or, in the case of “recalcitrant countries” that impose limits or refuse to accept them entirely, alternative countries willing to take them in. Trump has gloated about his transactional use of coercive diplomacy to force compliance with deportation orders and to support the offshoring and externalization of migration controls, particularly for countries in the Global South. In practice, cooperation from Mexico would be critical, and it is unclear how Trump’s tariff threats, slated to take effect February 1, and imperial designs in Greenland and the Panama Canal, to say nothing of his threat to send the military into Mexico after drug cartels, which he designated as terrorist groups also via executive order, will affect his power to strongarm other countries.

Regardless of the logistical obstacles to a massive crackdown, even relatively minor actions will wreak havoc on the well-being of the 28 million people who are at risk of family separation by virtue of living in mixed status or undocumented households. Homan blithely responded that they will avoid that outcome by deporting entire families; as Adam Serwer has written, “the cruelty is the point.” Beyond this, Trump’s rhetoric itself is already sowing chaos and terrorizing immigrants and the communities that care for and rely on them. In this way, the new administration hopes to avoid both incurring the costs and the potential negative fallout of workplace raids and stricken families by compelling people to leave voluntarily—even those with no memory of or connections to the countries to which they “return.”


Resisting Trump’s immigration regime—to say nothing of the Democrats’ swift acquiescence to it, including through support for the just-passed Laken Riley Act—will require a range of strategies and tactics including legal challenges, labor organizing, mass mobilization, and political pressure, including rapid response teams on the ground to bear witness, document, publicize crackdowns and to provide both humanitarian and legal aid to targeted migrants and their families. (The just-passed law, requiring mandatory detention for migrants charged with or convicted of a range of nonviolent crimes, violates “bedrock constitutional principles” according to the ACLU; critics warn that a little-known provision would essentially allow states to “dictate federal immigration policy.”)

Allies face a tricky but critical balance of motivating resistance to the expansive cruelty of Trump’s policies without risking resignation that pushback is futile.

For advocates determined to protect immigrants’ civil liberties and well-being, working to shape public perception will be critical. Other than at the extremes, attitudes about unauthorized and legal immigration are often both fluid and nuanced, and deceptive framing must be effectively countered. Indeed, Trump risks a backlash in easing restrictions for ICE arrests in sensitive places such as churches, schools, and hospitals. The video of a distraught, weeping child released by ProPublica helped galvanize public opinion against the depraved practice of family separation. Politicians are clearly not going to lead the way on this front; the points of resistance will start at the grassroots level, where diverse leaders can leverage power and outrage to push states and localities to protect their families, neighbors, and co-workers. Allies face a tricky but critical balance of motivating resistance to the expansive cruelty of Trump’s policies without risking despair and resignation that pushback is futile.

This work is not without risk. Trump has prioritized targeting perceived political enemies, and rights groups and immigration advocates understandably fear persecution, as they have faced in the past. In a worrisome harbinger of things to come, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has already targeted El Paso’s Annunciation House border shelter for closure, and Acacia Center for Justice received a stop work order from the Department of Justice. To make matters worse, federal funding for humanitarian services and legal assistance programs for migrants will all but certainly dry up, and grantmakers may balk at supporting immigrant advocacy in this climate of political retribution. But in these fraught times of immeasurably high stakes, as we face an immigration crackdown that is vast in scope and catastrophic in impact, it is imperative to muster the resources, energy, and hope to launch and sustain an effective, mobilized opposition and demand another possible world of equitable and humane policies.

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