With “Shock and Awe,” the Second Trump Term Opens with a Bid to Strongly Reshape Immigration
President Donald Trump signs an executive action at the White House. (Photo: White House via Facebook)
President Donald Trump, who has made border security and unauthorized immigration a central pillar of his political career, wasted no time making good on campaign promises upon returning to the presidency this week. In a slew of executive actions signed within hours of taking office, Trump set the tone for the next four years, declaring an “invasion” and a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border that will be met by the deployment of thousands of troops, invoking the Alien Enemies Act last used during World War II, shutting down humanitarian parole programs, dramatically widening interior immigration enforcement, pausing refugee resettlement, and seeking to end birthright citizenship to future U.S.-born babies who do not have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. Many of these actions are unprecedented and intended to mark a sharp break with the Biden administration. They send a loud signal that far-reaching border restrictions and creating an inhospitable environment for unauthorized immigrants are the administration’s highest priorities.
With its orchestrated public campaign, the administration’s aim is to create a sense of “shock and awe” in the words of Trump’s new border “czar,” even if many of the actions end up stalled in court or otherwise challenged. The intended audience is the president’s base of supporters, migrants seeking to arrive at the U.S. border without authorization, and unauthorized immigrants living in the United States.
Though the initial actions were many—more than 21 specific immigration measures as of Thursday morning, according to a Migration Policy Institute (MPI) count, alongside other measures that touch on immigration more indirectly—they were far from the complete list Trump and his team have promised. Whether or when other policies will be announced is unclear. Notably, the president has so far not acted immediately to reshape legal immigration aside from pausing refugee resettlement and ordering consideration of travel bans for some countries. This lack of immediate focus on legal immigration is different from his first term. Touching legal immigration could be politically precarious; a split among the president’s supporters has already emerged over whether high-skilled H-1B immigrant workers are a boon to, or drain on, U.S. workers. In fact, Trump said on Inauguration Day that he was “fine with legal immigration. I like it, we need people and I'm absolutely fine with it.”
Despite the shock and awe, the administration faces formidable hurdles enacting its agenda, including legal challenges, the need to secure substantially larger funding from Congress, resistance from states and localities, pushback from business interests, and noncooperation from other countries. And while the public seems to support many of the president’s goals, including deporting unauthorized immigrants (especially those with criminal records) and finishing the border wall, clear majorities also support legalization for many unauthorized immigrants. At the same time, diverting so much attention and resources to immigration enforcement may reduce focus on other national security concerns.
The Republican-led Congress is eager to advance Trump’s immigration agenda. In the very first act of the 119th Congress, lawmakers sent to the president’s desk the first significant immigration enforcement bill in 19 years, the Laken Riley Act, requiring authorities to detain noncitizens arrested for certain crimes and allowing state attorneys general to sue the federal government over immigration policy. Whether lawmakers support the massive infusion of funds needed to accomplish the broader immigration agenda is less clear. Border czar Tom Homan has estimated that carrying out mass deportations alone could cost $86 billion.
This article provides an overview of Trump’s first-week immigration policies, based on executive actions and statements, and context from the record of the first Trump administration. It also reviews the constraints these policies may face and the impact they are likely to have.
Top Priorities: Mass Deportations and Expanding Enforcement
On Inauguration Day, Trump signed 10 executive orders on immigration, all of them limiting immigration or expanding enforcement (see Box 1). As of this writing, no large-scale immigration enforcement operations had been reported, contrary to public expectations, although threats of a looming operation in Chicago nonetheless prompted community leaders to begin scrambling. And, in an indication of things to come, the Justice Department fired top career immigration staff and announced it will prosecute local officials who do not cooperate on immigration enforcement.
These moves underscored the administration’s focus on arresting, detaining, and deporting as many unauthorized immigrants as possible. While Trump in his campaign promised to deport the entire unauthorized immigrant population, estimated at more than 11 million, Homan has set a goal of 1 million deportations annually and said the focus will be on noncitizens with criminal records as well as the 1.5 million people who already have final deportation orders. Trump officials also expressed hope that the climate of fear they create will cause many people to “self-deport.”
It will not be possible to deport all unauthorized immigrants currently in the United States, and the administration’s initial actions illustrate how a package of measures will be necessary even to replicate deportation levels of prior administrations. The Biden and first Trump administrations each carried out approximately 1.5 million deportations (including noncitizens removed from the interior and those returned at the border). Both recorded significantly lower numbers than the 2.9 million deportations during the four fiscal years of President Barack Obama’s first term (see Figure 1). Numbers declined after Obama’s first term partly because so-called sanctuary policies limited local law enforcement agencies’ cooperation with federal efforts, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) gets most of its arrests through the criminal justice pipeline.
Figure 1. U.S. Returns and Removals, by Administration, FY 1993-2024
Notes: "Deportations" is a nontechnical term usually considered to refer to removals and enforcement returns. For fiscal year (FY) 1993 through FY 2008, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data did not distinguish between enforcement returns, which apply to irregularly arriving migrants, and administrative returns, which apply to migrants who withdraw their applications for admission and foreign crewmembers without visas ordered to stay aboard their ships, among others; for FY 2009 onward, enforcement returns and administrative returns are categorized separately. It is possible that administrative returns comprised only a small share of overall returns in the FY 1993-2007 period. Because enforcement data were not provided publicly by month for earlier administrations, the data here are organized by fiscal year rather than by actual month of each presidential administration, so that similar comparisons can be made across administrations.
Sources: U.S. Border Patrol, “Southwest Border Sectors: Total Encounters by Fiscal Year,” accessed June 24, 2024, available online; DHS, Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), “Immigration Enforcement and Legal Processes Monthly Tables — February 2024,” updated January 16, 2025, available online.
Trump’s deportation plans require unwinding a number of Biden executive actions. On Inauguration Day, the president rescinded a cornerstone of Joe Biden’s approach: the narrowing of immigration enforcement priorities. The Biden administration’s prosecutorial discretion policy memorandum, which the Supreme Court upheld in 2023, required the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to account for mitigating circumstances when deciding whether to arrest and deport someone, as well as focus resources on a certain subset of deportable noncitizens. By executive order, Trump scrapped all such considerations and returned to his earlier policy effectively making every unauthorized immigrant subject to deportation. DHS this week also rescinded longstanding guidelines prohibiting immigration enforcement in “sensitive” locations such as schools, hospitals, and churches. Additionally, Trump has discussed restarting worksite enforcement operations, which the Biden administration had largely halted.
Using State and Local Law Enforcement as Force Multipliers
To recruit state and local law enforcement support for the deportation effort, one executive order signed this week calls for expanding the 287(g) program, which allows ICE to delegate certain immigration duties to trained state and local law enforcement officers. As of December, ICE had 135 287(g) agreements in place, compared to 150 when Trump left office in January 2021.
To further beef up the deportation machinery, the administration this week issued an order that would withhold federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions, to try to force their cooperation with ICE. Such an “impoundment” effort was attempted during the first Trump term and did not pass muster with the courts. The administration on Tuesday also announced its plans to expand use of expedited removal, a fast-track process that allows DHS to arrest and deport certain noncitizens who have been in the country for less than two years, bypassing the highly backlogged immigration courts. This process could be used for migrants who arrived in the latter half of the Biden administration, possibly including those who came through the humanitarian parole process for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which Trump quickly ended. However, migrants put into expedited removal have the right to apply for asylum and cannot be deported until their asylum claim is completed in immigration court—a process that could take years given the backlog of 3.6 million court cases.
Further Curtailing Access to Protections at the Border and in the U.S. Interior
Trump has long pledged to “shut down the border,” and on Inauguration Day he announced a panoply of restrictions—some new, some old—that together have the potential to severely limit access to U.S. territory and cut off access to asylum. Despite the U.S.-Mexico border currently having fewer unauthorized crossings than when he left office, Trump declared an “invasion” and national emergency at the southern border, initiating an unprecedented “suspension of entry” for migrants arriving without authorization. These measures go far beyond the asylum restrictions Biden put in place towards the end of his administration. While the Biden administration conceived of its restrictions as part of a carrot-and-stick approach to funnel humanitarian migrants towards ports of entry for orderly arrival, the Trump administration seeks to altogether halt the ability of migrants to apply for asylum. DHS has reportedly already begun quickly expelling migrants trying to cross, without considering humanitarian claims.
Trump also restarted the Migrant Protection Protocols, commonly known as the Remain in Mexico policy, which requires asylum seekers to wait south of the border for their U.S. immigration court hearings. Over its prior life, from 2019 to 2022, about 81,000 migrants were placed into the program.
Administration officials have also reportedly considered how to revive the Title 42 public-health expulsions order used during the COVID-19 pandemic. Migrants were expelled at the U.S.-Mexico border approximately 3 million times during the March 2020 to May 2023 period when Title 42 was in place.
Both Title 42 and Remain in Mexico are only possible if Mexico continues to accept asylum seekers and expelled nationals from other countries. It remains to be seen what Mexico may demand in exchange for its cooperation. Importantly, these policies were notoriously ineffective at lowering border arrivals. Neither policy brought about lasting decreases in arrivals, and in fact, the number of repeat crossers and “gotaways”—migrants who evade detection—soared during their use.
In other border-hardening efforts, Trump took steps this week to authorize moving resources from the Defense Department to the Southwest border, as his first administration did to secure funds for border wall construction. Trump’s order appears to allow the use of military planes and bases for housing and transporting arrested migrants, though details remain unclear. While Trump has not repeated his first-term pledge to make Mexico pay for the border wall—of which his administration built about 458 miles, including 373 miles that replaced pre-existing barriers in need of repair—he has stated that he will restart construction, which the Biden administration largely paused. Additionally, Trump laid out a procedure for designating international cartels and transnational organizations such as Tren de Aragua and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) as foreign terrorist organizations, and instructed officials to prepare for expedited removal of individuals designated under an order pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act.
Trump also announced plans to end what critics call “catch and release:” the practice of releasing irregularly arriving migrants into the United States at times of high arrivals, sometimes with ankle monitors or a smartphone tracking app, while they await hearings in immigration court. To do so, the administration would need to expand ICE’s detention capacity from the 41,500 beds currently funded by Congress, which would require major additional appropriations. In fiscal year (FY) 2024, ICE received almost $3 billion for detention, plus another $500 million for the Alternatives to Detention program. Under the first Trump administration, ICE increased its average detained population to 55,000, although numbers subsequently shrank during the pandemic.
The administration’s decision to terminate the CHNV humanitarian parole process and deactivate the CBP One app used by migrants to approach a port of entry in an orderly fashion could possibly push more migrants to try to cross without authorization. Together, the processes had facilitated the orderly arrival of more than 1.5 million migrants from October 2022 to December 2024, and were a major factor in the declining numbers of irregular crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. U.S. Customs and Border Protection Encounters at the U.S.-Mexico Border, by Place of Entry, FY 2004-24
Sources: DHS, OHSS, “CBP Encounters - OFO - November 2024,” updated January 16, 2025, available online; DHS, OHSS, “CBP Encounters - USBP - November 2024,” updated January 16, 2025, available online.
Treatment of People with Liminal Status
The administration indicated it will end parole programs the Biden administration used to allow large numbers of migrants into the country. In addition, the executive order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” asks DHS to review Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations, a protection from deportation created by Congress in 1990. TPS and parole are among the categories of liminal (or “twilight”) statuses that Biden expanded dramatically. Approximately 3.7 million immigrants had received parole or other statuses such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) by December 2024. Among its final actions in office, the Biden administration extended TPS until late 2026 for about 937,000 migrants from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela; designations for a number of other countries are set to end in 2025.
Perhaps the most controversial is Trump’s order to end birthright citizenship, a constitutionally protected right guaranteeing citizenship to everyone born in the United States (with limited exceptions for the children of foreign diplomats). While the vast majority of legal scholars believe that a constitutional amendment—requiring a two-thirds majority in Congress and ratification from three-fourths of state legislatures—is required to end that guarantee, a minority has asserted that congressional action or an executive order could restrict access.
Trump directed federal agencies to withhold citizenship documents from children of mothers who are unauthorized immigrants or are on temporary visas, unless the father is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident (also known as a green-card holder). This order operates prospectively, effective on February 19. It calls for halting issuance of passports, Social Security cards, and other documents to these children. Twenty-two states sued to block the order within a day of its release, and advocacy groups also filed two additional lawsuits. As of 2019, there were approximately 5 million U.S.-born children living with one or more unauthorized parents, according to MPI estimates.
Legal Immigration—Yet to Be Determined
Interestingly, the only immediate policy changes on legal immigration announced so far were the pause of refugee resettlement indefinitely, “until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States,” and a directive to federal agencies to identify countries that do not meet vetting requirements. Potentially, the nationals of such countries could be barred from entry and immigrants already in the country ordered deported. During the first Trump term, the number of resettled refugees hit a record low of 11,400 in FY 2021, before the Biden administration rebuilt resettlement to more than 100,000 in FY 2024.
Although part of Trump’s base has advocated for a moratorium on new immigration, no executive action so far suggests the administration intends on doing that. And an intra-MAGA spat over the H-1B visa for high skilled workers may suggest legal immigration is a politically sensitive issue within Trump’s base of supporters.
An Agenda Has Been Set, But Constraints Loom Large
While Trump’s second term kicked off meeting its promise of shock and awe, his administration faces the same constraints that limited the Biden administration amid high arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border. Indeed, the U.S. immigration system remains outdated across all its components—from the border through the adjudications process—under-resourced, and overwhelmed, in large part because Congress has not updated major immigration laws in 30 years.
The critical constraint for Trump is funding. It could be months before the House and Senate agree on a budget package, which could include major increases to the DHS budgets. In the meantime, immigration agencies are already operating with insufficient funds. As of December, ICE faced a $230 million shortfall. And the agency estimated that meeting the detention mandates of the Laken Riley Act could cost it nearly $27 billion—a vast stretch for an agency whose entire budget last year was $9.1 billion.
Moreover, carrying out large numbers of deportations is contingent on the speedy conclusion of court hearings, but in FY 2024, the immigration courts’ budget was cut by $16 million, despite receiving a record 1.8 million new deportation cases.
Hiring is another constraint. DHS has offered bonuses of up to $30,000 to try to fill positions at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in particular, which has long had issues with hiring and retention in the Border Patrol. New staff need extensive training to carry out their functions, which takes time to complete.
Moreover, large-scale, speedy deportations require cooperation from other countries to accept deportees. DHS has historically had an easier time deporting Mexicans and northern Central Americans because their origin countries accept them and removals can occur quickly. Cuba, Venezuela, and other countries, meanwhile, have been uncooperative, earning them the government label “recalcitrant.” Long deemed a recalcitrant country, China restarted accepting removals under Biden, but only a handful of flights occurred. Trump has threatened to use tariffs to compel countries to accept their nationals.
Two other major factors could limit the Trump administration’s plans: litigation and public backlash. Groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) succeeded in blocking or delaying numerous policies in the first Trump administration, in several instances bringing cases all the way to the Supreme Court. This time around, litigators face a changed federal court landscape after the Supreme Court set a precedent in 2022 limiting states’ standing to sue and lower courts’ ability to issue nationwide orders.
There also could be pushback from business groups that may have some sway with the administration. Employers in sectors such as agriculture and hospitality have already expressed concerns about the impact on their immigrant workforces if there are large-scale enforcement actions or limits to legal immigration. Cost increases across the economy could lead to mounting pressure to provide lawful pathways for entry. And enforcement efforts that inevitably will ensnare sympathetic cases and make clear the loss of cherished members of the community could turn the public against mass deportations or other policies.
It remains unclear how the Trump administration will handle a number of other important immigration issues, such as Dreamers. In a December interview, Trump seemed to express support for the group of unauthorized immigrants who arrived as children, saying “we have to do something about the Dreamers, because these are people that have been brought here at a very young age. And many of these are middle-aged people now. They don’t even speak the language of their country.” This group includes beneficiaries of DACA, which provides deportation relief and work authorization, and who numbered 537,700 as of September. The Trump administration sought to end DACA in 2017; the program has been preserved by the courts.
Trump’s decision to make an early and loud splash on immigration was fully expected. He has placed a priority on being seen as tough, in order to keep faith with his base and send a message both to would-be migrants and unauthorized immigrants already in the United States. And the pressure is on for his administration to deliver.
After the record arrivals witnessed at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021 and 2022, driven by complex and diversifying trends in the Western hemisphere and beyond as well as the destabilizing effects of a global pandemic, Trump has now inherited from Biden a border that is quieter than it has been in the past five years.
Creating deterrence to halt new irregular migration and chilling effects to chip away at the size of the long-term unauthorized immigrant population are goals in and of themselves for the new Trump team. “While we're out prioritizing the public safety threats and national security threats, if you want to self-deport, you should self-deport because, again, we know who you are, and we're going to come and find you," Homan warned recently.
Thus, a concerted and multi-platform messaging operation across media and social media is key. Messaging is a critical part of achieving Trump’s desired outcomes. Administration officials are already tempering expectations for Congress and the public on issues such as mass deportations, knowing that they have limited time and funds, and face many constraints. Yet the first Trump term was a case study in the power of rhetoric to advance goals, even when critical policies were struck down in court or never fully implemented. Even if more extreme Trump 2.0 orders such as halting birthright citizenship never take effect, they could still create wide ripple effects.
The authors thank Alejandro Urbina-Bernal for his research assistance.
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