Immigration Actions in First 100 Days of Trump Second Term

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[00:00:01.22] - Doris Meissner

Good morning. My name is Doris Meissner. I'm a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute where I direct our U.S. immigration policy program. Welcome everybody to our briefing this morning on the immigration actions in the first 100 days of President Trump's second term. We all knew from the campaign that immigration, especially border security and mass deportations, would be central to a Trump presidency. Still, the pace and the intensity of immigration events have been far greater than most people would have expected. We're now at 175 major actions. That is more than the 94 in the first 100 days of the Biden administration. It is 6 times as many of actions as were in the first Trump administration, which at that time seemed to be the most immigration activity ever. These actions have run a gamut from halting refugee admissions and resettlement assistance to declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border to deploying 10,000 active military troops to border enforcement and barring asylum claims, as well as many other actions. The breadth and the sweep of what we are seeing are unmatched. We can't, of course, cover them all here, But we do direct you or suggest that you look at our policy beat, which was published this morning, Trump 2.0 at 100 Days.
 

And in this webinar, we will look at the highlights and pick out some of the broader themes. I'm joined by the co-authors of the policy beat, excuse me, who will be speaking this morning, as well as by my colleague, Julia Gelatt, all of us at MPI. And those broader themes involve basically the litigation arena, the significant enforcement actions, as well as impacts on communities and legal immigration. So with that, let me turn first to Muzaffar Chishti.

[00:02:17.06] - Muzaffar Chishti

Thank you so much, Doris. And let me just— Kathleen and I are going to talk about enforcement actions and the litigation that is surrounding that. Julia Gelatt will talk about what impact it's having on on legal immigration. But let me just focus on the court actions. As I think Doris just pointed out, immigration actions are now becoming the tip of the spear through which our adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law in general is being examined. There are about 50 of the 175 actions that have been taken by the administration so far 50 lawsuits have been brought by multiple plaintiffs. These are either class action suits or challenging policy in general. In addition, there are numerous other individual lawsuits challenging the actions of this administration, which frankly are multiplying every day. We obviously don't have time to talk about even the 50 multiple plaintiff lawsuits that have been brought. Let me just focus on 3 which have already made their way to the Supreme Court. That itself is unusual, that in the first 100 days, uh, that 3 have already reached the Supreme Court. And the, the 3, uh, are— let me just first talk about the birthright citizenship issue.
 

Uh, as you know, one of the first executive actions that the administration announced was that it was going to end birthright citizenship to kids born in the United States who don't have at least one parent who is a citizen or a lawful permanent resident. Now, the— there were preliminary injunctions have been issued against that executive order in Maryland, Massachusetts, and State of Washington by federal district courts. And they were brought under challenge to the Supreme Court by the Trump administration. And the Supreme Court only last week in an extraordinary decision allowed that there will be oral arguments on that case on May 15th. The fact these are emergency applications, the fact that you grant oral argument even on, on just on emergency applications is almost unprecedented. The fact that you would do it outside the normal calendar of oral arguments is itself unusual. So we know the Supreme Court is taking this case seriously. Technically, the oral argument will happen only on the, on the whether these injunctions should be paused or limited. The two basic issues there are that can federal district court judges issue nationwide injunctions on orders like this? And do the state attorneys general have the standing to bring these lawsuits?

Because the argument the Trump administration is making is that state attorneys general cannot make the lawsuits on behalf of the citizens of that state. So these are really the arguments to watch.
 

And we'll all be doing I think on May 15th.

The two other high-profile cases that have garnered attention, obviously, is one of the Abrego Garcia case, which involved the removal of a Salvadorian national who had been given withholding of order removal by an immigration judge, and the government admitted that he was wrongfully deported to El Salvador. And the federal district court judge in Maryland, Judge Xinis, said the government should make every effort to facilitate the return that, of that, of Abrego Garcia. The Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that the government should make, facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia, and the, and the, uh, and the administration hasn't brought back Abrego Garcia so far. The district court judge has now scheduled a discovery process and possibly even testimony about whether the government is making any efforts to bring back and comply with the decision of the Supreme Court. The judge only last night paused the discovery process for another week, which some of us speculate may be that there is some movement on the case about government's compliance. But stay tuned. It so happened just this, uh, that last night another case involving, uh, a removal to El Salvador of an unnamed person— I think in the lawsuit he's just called Christian, uh, Christian, uh, who was also removed in violation of a settlement by the federal government not to deport a class of people who had been granted protection when they came here as minors.
 

And this was Judge Stephanie Gallagher, who actually is a Trump-appointed judge, did ask the government to facilitate the return of that person. And the last case I wanna mention, obviously we had a dramatic event took place at the Supreme Court last week at, you know, at 1, you know, 10 minutes after 1:00 AM, is this case involving the Alien Enemies Act. Uh, and the— it started in federal district court in, in DC, where Judge Boasberg, uh, ruled on the case that the, the removal of these people without due process was a violation of our Constitution. And the Supreme Court did 3 things in that case. First, it unanimously said that even people who are arrested under the Alien Enemies Act are entitled to due process and judicial review.. But it said two other things, that those, that that can only be invoked in a habeas corpus, uh, petition. And two, it can only be done in a district where people are being held in custody. And so that limited, obviously, Judge Boasberg's, uh, decision in that case. But following that, uh, there were people arrested under the Alien Enemies Act in Texas. They were first brought to Southern District Court in, uh, in Texas, which people people thought was more hospitable to the administration.
 

And the federal district court judge there also granted a temporary restraining order, a Trump-appointed judge. And then it seems a large number of detainees are taken to Northern District, and a judge declined to give a temporary restraining order, but the government made the representation to the judge that no one was going to be removed that night. The plaintiff's lawyers, the ACLU in this case, then then invoked this emergency application power with the Supreme Court. And Supreme Court in an extraordinary past 1 AM ruling, 7 to 2, said that the removals of people that night should be stopped till the court rules. I mean, to me, why that is significant is that normally the courts don't— the Supreme Court doesn't intervene so quickly. In such emergency, which lets the, the courts of appeals and then the courts below to work the process out. It also didn't even let Justice Thomas issue his concurring opinion, which, and then basically said that we're not sure we trust the government in its, in its positions to the court, which is what I increasingly called, is what lawyers call this presumption of regularity in these court proceedings. And government was not giving the presumption of regularity, which is why we are in a different place in the litigation.
 

As it comes to immigration actions. So let me stop there, Doris, and move on to Kathleen, I guess.

[00:10:00.19] - Doris Meissner

Okay. So the litigation is really an indication of a set of very significant changes that arise out of enforcement policies. Kathleen Bush-Joseph is going to talk about some of the significant elements of the enforcement picture at the present time. Kathleen.

[00:10:19.03] - Kathleen Bush-Joseph

Thank you so much, Doris, and thank you everyone for joining. I will encourage you all to please read the policy beat. We have so much in there about the cases that Muz was discussing, as well as what I'm going to cover, which is the border and interior enforcement and deportations. So I'll talk very quickly to try to cover some of the major issue areas here, but I wanted to start out by having us think about where we were at this time last year and where we were focused. We were thinking about the US-Mexico border. And now I think that we've shifted into the interior of the country. And with us, we've brought those border policies, practices, and problems. So to explain what I mean by this, at the border, we have fast deportations. We have a lack of access to legal representation. And under the Biden administration, there had been restrictions on access to asylum put in place. Now what we have is we're seeing some of those same policies actually move into the interior. Before we really get there though, I do wanna highlight that there has been a major shift, and some of the reason that the focus has been able to move into the interior is because border arrivals have really significantly significantly decreased.

That's partly because the Trump administration has stopped the CBP One app appointments that migrants had been using to schedule an appointment and come to the border lawfully. Those appointments had been essentially the way that people could later go on to apply for asylum. A common misconception was that the appointment was an application for asylum. So I wanted to dispel that. But with the ending of those appointments, as well as the invasion declaration that Muz mentioned, there have— has really been a drop in arrivals. So in March, there were about 7,000 encounters between lawful ports of entry, a huge decrease. And monthly reporting started in 2000, and this is at least the lowest number. Since then. So moving into the interior, you know, I want to quickly talk about how we've seen some of these same practices. So fast deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, as Muz was talking about, lack of access to representation for migrants continues to be a major issue as it was under previous administrations. As well. And we've seen the Trump administration really taking a whole-of-government approach. So my colleagues have written about how many agencies have been marshaled to facilitate this increase in interior enforcement and how exceptional that really is.

It's bringing together of agencies in a way that we really haven't seen since at least 9/11 and arguably in a different nature than that. Now, another important aspect of what's happening in the interior is that we have seen an increase in arrests. So ICE is reporting that arrests are actually double what they were under the last administration, or excuse me, the last year of the Biden administration. So they're up to more than 600 arrests per day on average. And the detention capacity of ICE has also gone up as they've tapped the Bureau of Prisons and are trying to quickly scale up there. But what we haven't seen in the official data so far is actually total deportations data. So based on selective information sharing with certain news agencies, it appears that the Trump administration is on track to deport about roughly half a million people this year. But we know that they're trying to ramp up to deport more people. So some of the measures that they're taking to do that, that have really, you know, increased some of the climate of fear that people are feeling, we can say, is they have ended a number of protections that had been extended under previous administrations.
 

And my colleagues and I track the number of these so-called twilight statuses or liminal statuses that people were holding. And we've estimated that there were as many as 4 million people who had Temporary Protected Status, humanitarian parole, and a number of other protections from deportation that importantly also came with eligibility for work authorization. The Trump administration is trying to end those protections. It stopped the parole programs, and I saw the question that I can already address about whether these terminations are being challenged in court, and yes, There are a number of lawsuits challenging each of these terminations, be that the early ending of temporary protected status or the early termination of individuals' parole status as well. So another measure that I want to highlight the administration is taking is trying to ramp up its cooperation with local law enforcement and state law enforcement agencies so that more people can be arrested as they're picked up by these local authorities. So we've seen the number of 287(g) agreements, which essentially deputize local law enforcement to be carrying out immigration functions. The number of those agreements has almost tripled since the Trump administration took office with more than 400 in place currently and another 100 applications pending.
 

With the little bit of time that I have left, I wanna just underscore one of our major takeaways in looking at the Trump administration's actions on the border as well as in interior enforcement. We've seen this huge number, as Doris said, 175 executive actions, but what has not happened is the Trump administration has not been able to change the laws that are on the books because only Congress can do that. And yes, the Trump administration is using military resources to deport people on military planes, But the administration continues to ask for tens of billions of dollars so that it can ramp up all of these numbers— arrest numbers, detention numbers, deportation numbers. And so it's going to take congressional action for the Trump administration to be trying to achieve its aims of these larger numbers. I think with that, I'll pass it back to you, Doris, and look forward to the questions.

[00:18:10.05] - Doris Meissner

Okay, thanks so much, Kathleen. Okay, we're going to now go to Julia Gelatt, who's going to talk about a whole— some of a whole series of other actions that are a little less in the headlines, but still significant that have to do with the impact of changed policies on communities as well as the legal immigration system. But before I ask Julia to actually take the microphone, let me tell you that we will be going to Q&A. When Julia is finished. And so it might be a good time for you to start to put your questions into the Q&A or you email them to [email protected]. And with that, Julia, tell us about some of the rest.

[00:19:00.24] - Julia Gelatt

Thanks, Doris, and it's great to be with everyone today. Something that's been quite different about this second Trump administration is that they're not only, as Kathleen described, ramping up immigration enforcement against unauthorized immigrants. But there have also been a number of broad moves that have affected legal immigrants that are shaking up the security that even temporary visa holders and green card holders have felt in the United States. So I'm going to try to quickly cover 3 categories of changes: changes to legal immigration, changes to the treatment of legal immigrants resident in the US, and then changes to the rights and benefits afforded to immigrant families and communities all across the United States. In terms of in-migration, there have been several moves that could slow legal immigration. But in these early days, it's hard to know how all of this will play out. And there are more threats looming to legal immigration looming on the horizon. So perhaps most starkly, refugee resettlement has been indefinitely paused since the early weeks of the Trump administration. It's not clear when or if refugee resettlement will restart broadly, although there is discussion of bringing in some South Africans. A court has mandated that the administration restart resettlement of certain refugees who were vetted and ready to come as of January 20th.
 

However, the government no longer has the capacity to resettle refugees. They've ended funding for some of our international partners and terminated the agreements that the US government had with 10 national refugee resettlement agencies that support refugees during their first 90 days and their first year in the United States. We've also seen a move that could slow legal immigration for people who need interviews at consulates abroad before coming on temporary visas. The Trump administration has really scaled back the availability of visa interview waivers, which the Biden administration relied on heavily to combat long wait times that had built up during the COVID-19 pandemic. There was wide use of waivers of in-person visa interviews for people coming on temporary visas and in fact, half of people coming in recent years on temporary visas benefited from these waivers. There are still waivers for just a much smaller group of immigrants who are coming. Reducing these waivers could lengthen wait times that people face abroad to come as tourists, as students, as temporary workers, and affect U.S. employers' ability to bring in the workers that they need. We've also seen at airports and at land borders that there have been high-profile cases of high scrutiny placed on tourists, on visa holders, on green card holders, as they come back into the United States, and some have even been placed into ICE detention, sometimes for weeks.
 

This has led some countries, including Canada, the UK, and others, to issue travel warnings to their nationals about coming to the United States. And we've seen travel to the United States fall a bit from where it was last year. But there are other changes that could come. In one of the day one executive orders, the Trump administration called for extreme vetting of visa applicants. It's not yet clear how this will play out, but a similar move in the first Trump administration led to higher visa denials and slower processing times. There's been a widely anticipated travel ban that was also called for in a day one executive order that's not yet materialized. Some reporting had suggested that as many as over 40 countries could be affected by the travel ban, but at this point it's not clear when that might materialize or what it might look like. And last week, tens of thousands of staff at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, actually the majority of their workforce, received an email encouraging them to accept early retirement or otherwise face potential layoffs. This comes even though most of USCIS's work is funded by the fees that are paid by immigrants applying for different kinds of benefits.
 

Large staff reductions at USCIS, if they happen, could drastically slow employers' ability to sponsor foreign workers and non-citizens citizens' ability to obtain visas, work authorization, naturalization, and other benefits. So those are the changes to in-migration. A very new trend under the second Trump administration is actions by the administration to strip visa holders of their status and even to try to remove some green card holders based on participation in protests or petitions related to Israel and Gaza, or in some cases, it seems to be based on very old or old arrests for incidents as minor as jaywalking. Many students have had their visas revoked, which affects their ability to travel outside the United States and legally reenter. Additionally, reportedly about 5,000 students have had their status changed in a government database that indicates their status. This effectively has the effect of stripping them of their student visa status, their ability to work legally in the United States, and their ability to get other visas, among other things. The legality of this is very much under question. There are now over 40 lawsuits challenging these moves, and hundreds of students have had their records at least temporarily restored.
 

However, all of these moves have had a huge chilling effect for international students who are now worried about things they've said in student newspapers, on social media, on petitions that they've signed. Many students are worried about their security in the United States, and these moves come at a time when many students abroad are considering whether they want to accept admissions offers to U.S. universities and come to study this fall. So it remains to be seen how much this could affect our billions of dollars student, international student industry in the country. Finally, there's been a large number of sometimes sort of unrelated moves that together send a message that noncitizens and their families may not be fully welcome or supported in the United States. As noted, the organizations that provide support for new refugees have lost their funding. This affects the integration services that are available for the 100,000 refugees who entered in the past year. With an executive order signed in March, President Trump signed a proclamation that English is the official language of the United States, the first time in U.S. history, and in doing so also revoked a Clinton-era executive order that called for language access in federally funded programs and services.
 

This comes along with other moves. DHS cut funding for citizenship grants that it allocates to organizations across the country to help prepare green card holders for citizenship by learning English and civics. It also comes as cuts at the Department of Education have drastically reduced the staff in the Office of English Language Acquisition, which oversees the Title III funds that go to public schools across the country to help English language learners. There have been a number of executive orders that have called for the government, for government agencies to limit public benefits going to unauthorized immigrants. This is largely symbolic. These executive orders don't change the eligibility rules, and unauthorized immigrants are already excluded from most public benefits. But other changes might be coming. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is trying to restrict access to federal housing assistance for mixed status families. And as Congress considers a reconciliation bill in next year's budgets, there could be big cuts to public benefits availability, even for legal noncitizens. And there could be big cuts to programs such as Head Start that serve all American families who are eligible, but also serve a large number of immigrant families.
 

There's a lot more that we could talk about, but I'll leave the rest for the Q&A and turn things back to Doris.

[00:26:36.18] - Doris Meissner

Okay, thanks very much. Covered a lot of material and there's a lot more to cover. You all in the audience have been sending in very good questions, which I'll go to in just a moment, but I will remind the audience that for questions you can enter them into the Q&A or email them to [email protected]. Now I'm going to group some of these, uh, since some of them fit together, uh, or are duplicative. And let me start with a question to you, Muz, that has to do with expedited removal and with 287(g). Please touch on expedited removal processes and how those policies fit into the broader picture along with the Alien Enemies Act, and speak to the implications of 287(g) in light of the fact that as the policy Beat points out, there are now triple the number of 287(g) agreements that there had, that had been in place before the Trump administration came into office.

[[FOR THE Q&A PORTION OF THE TRANSCRIPT, SPEAKERS ARE NOT IDENTIFIED BY NAME. PLEASE SEE THE RECORDING TO IDENTIFY SPEAKERS.]]

[00:27:42.19] - Speaker 2

So the expedited removal is, is, is an extraordinary measure in our immigration law, which allows the DHS to arrest people and remove them who have been in the country for less than a year, and they can be arrested 100 miles off our border, and they don't need to be given an immigration court hearing. And that's sort of the major departure from regular immigration processing. And the administration announced that it was going to use expedited removal aggressively. That I actually, I don't know, Kathleen may know this, how many people actually have been put in expedited removal. The 287(g) agreements are, you know, in our law since 1996, not actually being used only since 9/11. And it basically authorizes state and local law enforcement officials to aid the federal government in enforcement of immigration law. And it's done by contract, by deputizing state and local law enforcement officials. In execution and implementation of immigration laws. They had to be trained, they had to be supervised, uh, and this administration has obviously hugely multiplied the number of jurisdictions, uh, which have signed on to this. Uh, this is typically done in either in jail, uh, where people are being brought in for other, uh, you know, if they arrested on local law enforcement criminal charges and then they're screened for immigration violations.

[00:29:25.15] - Speaker 2

That typically been the, uh, the practice in the past. And this administration is extending that law enforcement officials who are trained under the 287(g) could go out into the communities to do the work of immigration officials. Obviously that's controversial. This is multiplied, and this is using law enforcement officials, state and local level, as force multipliers in the enforcement of immigration laws.

[00:29:55.14] - Speaker 1

Kathleen, the next question I think is one that you can answer well because it has to do with internal immigration enforcement. And the question is, what are the rights of children? Can children be detained? And what are their protections from— what are the protections from detention for children? Not necessarily those apprehended at the border, but also those who are here regardless of their documentation and status. And then I'm going to add to that another question question that has to do with the changes in interior enforcement, and that is the sensitive locations issue. Are we aware of— on the change in sensitive locations, are we aware of any cases that have involved people in hospitals?

[00:30:44.01] - Speaker 3

Thanks so much, Doris. I am not aware of reports of people being arrested at hospitals, but we'll note that certain state states have passed legislation requiring hospitals to report the immigration status of patients coming in. And we can see that have a chilling effect potentially on people trying to access services. On children, I'll say quickly that the US has a system of what it calls shelters for detaining unaccompanied children who come without their parents and are under the care of the U.S. government until they're released to sponsors. And an important development under the Trump administration was the stopping of legal representation for these children. So we're now seeing children actually having to go into immigration court without representation or assistance. And so very young children are having to try to navigate this really complex immigration court process alone. I'll actually use that as a segue to quickly build on Muz's answer about expedited removal and interior enforcement. And I just want to emphasize that the Trump administration is trying to avoid the immigration court backlogs because there are almost 4 million cases pending there. So expedited removal had typically only been used at the border, and now it's been expanded into the interior.

[00:32:29.03] - Speaker 3

And so that's a way to try to quickly remove people who've been in the country for 2 years or less who don't have a lawful status, one of these twilight statuses that we've talked about or who don't have a claim for asylum. And then I'll just quickly say that we had a question about the twilight statuses and how we break that down. My brilliant colleague Julia has crunched the numbers on the unauthorized population in the United States, which we estimate at 13.7 million people. And in that piece, we have a breakdown of those twilight statuses and how many people have each category. So highly recommend everyone check that one out too.

[00:33:14.21] - Speaker 1

Okay, since Julia is cited in doing the numbers estimates, I'm going to take Julia, the next question to you, and that has to do with USCIS and the actions that you're seeing. Do, from what you're seeing and from what we can tell about the actions that deal with benefits. Is there an expectation that administrative processing of these applications is being slowed down? Is there any evidence for that?

[00:33:44.08] - Speaker 4

We don't yet know. That's partly because the quarterly data that USCIS usually puts out are delayed, and the quarterly data for the first few months of the Trump administration wouldn't have come out by now anyway. So it's going to take some time for us to see how this all shakes out. I think that the— if there are moves towards so-called extreme vetting, that could slow processing times. What that meant in the last Trump administration was people repeatedly needing to have in-person interviews, submit fingerprints, and more requests for additional evidence on applications, as well as sometimes higher denial rates. But if we see big staffing cuts at USCIS, that could be a whole new picture of how processing would be affected and how wait times could be affected as well. So So it's a little bit too early to tell, but a lot to watch for.

[00:34:32.24] - Speaker 1

Okay, I'm going to go back to Kathleen on changes that have to do with USCIS, but obviously in a slightly different arena of its work. Can we see any changes, or would you talk about the changes that we may have seen in the handling of asylum applications, the affirmative asylum caseload?

[00:34:59.23] - Speaker 3

Thanks so much, Doris. Yes, and so this is actually also being litigated. I think we could say that for many of the issues that we've discussed today, but the Trump administration has announced a pause on adjudication of asylum applications for some of these parolees we've been talking about, and there are immigrant advocate groups challenging that pause. You know, I also wanna stress what Julia mentioned before about the staff cuts affecting asylum applications. Under the Biden administration, there was a struggle, honestly, to process as many applications as were coming in, and the backlog of asylum applications grew to be almost 1.5 million applications. So if, you know, staff are leaving or are fired, that's going to slow even more the processing of the applications that they do have. But one key difference here is that the Biden administration had been using asylum officers to be interviewing people who were coming to the border and claiming asylum. Now, under Trump, people who come to the border are only able to access what's called Convention Against Torture protection. There are screenings of people happening for this protection, but it's a subsidiary one. It doesn't come with the ability to eventually apply for what's known as a green card or lawful permanent residence.

[00:36:37.13] - Speaker 3

And people who are granted Convention Against Torture protection can actually be deported to third countries. So this all really ties in together in that we're seeing a shift towards more enforcement in each of these component agencies.

[00:36:57.09] - Speaker 1

Okay. Moving a little further into these issues of processing, I'm going to come back to you, Julia, because the answer to the question about USCIS raised another question of digging a little bit deeper. Are you seeing any changes in Do we see any changes in the numbers applying for naturalization? And what can we say about the visa processes at the State Department? Are those in any way slowing? Are they being affected by other changes that might be being made by the Trump administration? What insight do we have into naturalization and visa issuances?

[00:37:41.15] - Speaker 4

Yeah, unfortunately, my answer on the State Department is the same, that it's a little bit early for us to know at MPI. Maybe some individuals individual lawyers are starting to see some examples that we could learn from, but the data on visa processing are always at a bit of a lag. And so it takes some time before we're able to see the trends. Right now, we see visa data through February. On naturalizations, we also— I don't think we know yet if the number of applications has gone up or gone down since President Trump took office. There have been some anecdotal reports of longer naturalization interviews. Views, more questions being asked, maybe a shift in tone, but also some anecdotal reports of everything operating completely as it had been. So I think it's also a little bit early to know how that's shaking out. In the last Trump administration, President Trump, um, or the administration changed the naturalization test to require people to answer more questions and to have a broader pool of questions that adjudicators could ask. So we might see something like that this time, but nothing has happened on that front as of yet.

[00:38:44.24] - Speaker 1

Hey, Muz, I'm coming around to you now on a question that has to do with detention. Is the Trump administration's movement of deportees from South Texas to North Texas, or as we have seen in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, to rural Louisiana, is that— in other words, the idea question is to shop for more favorable judges. Is that a violation of the Sixth Amendment? Is there any precedent for this behavior to be classified as illegal?

[00:39:23.04] - Speaker 2

Well, we haven't— there's no ruling whether this is illegal or no. It's expected that this will be challenged, but no, there's no Supreme Court decision on that issue as yet. There's speculation, obviously, that the administration is going to do forum shopping and Generally, the advocates of immigrants are accused of doing forum shopping, but in this case, the shoe is on the other foot. And that definitely happened in Texas. Soon after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that you can only bring challenges to the Alien Enemies Act in the district where people are being detained, large number of people were sent to Texas. A large number of people were sent to Southern District of Texas. And then when the ruling showed in some of the transactions that Southern District may not be as hospitable as the administration thought it would be, people were quickly dispatched to the Northern District. So obviously there is speculation that forum shopping is happening. I think the thing to note here is that in the process of this late night, early morning drama of last week, since this is now so much focused on individual jurisdictions or district courts that the ACLU actually told the judges that they're prepared to go and move in every single district court in the country if these become so district-specific.

[00:40:51.15] - Speaker 2

So they may be forum shopping, but there's also a lot of pressure on the other side to contest this on, on, on wherever people are being held. So can I just add one small thing on the asylum sort of determinations that Kathleen referred to? I mean, one of the guidelines that is likely to come down is that the immigration judges will be told that they can dispose of many immigration cases without a hearing if they do, that people are not, they don't meet the basic legal test for eligibility. And on the sensitive location stuff, though, there have been actually no arrests at hospitals that we know of. One of the early arrests was at a church. And there's also been speculation that ICE has been seen around a lot of schools, which are considered sensitive locations, which is also leading to anxiety in those communities about schools.

[00:41:52.20] - Speaker 1

Yes, I'm going to stick with you, Muz, because of these issues of broader interior enforcement than we've been accustomed to in the past. This has to do now with students and the revocation of student visas. What timeframe do students have once their visa is revoked, particularly those revoked for minor offenses such as jaywalking, speeding tickets, and so forth? What are they facing in the short term, as far as we know?

[00:42:27.14] - Speaker 2

Well, there was actually a quick Supreme Court decision on this last week. And generally, when you revoke, you have 60 days to leave. And that also applies to voluntary departures. When the Supreme Court basically said last week that when you count the days, the weekends don't count. So we really— the final word on the on the revocation of student visas is not written because the Mahmoud Khalil case, which is the first most prominent, has not reached its conclusion. We— the, the provision of the Immigration Act that was used to revoke Mr. Khalil's visa is a provision which allows the Secretary of State to revoke a visa for foreign policy considerations. And the issue in that case is that Does that just the determination by a Secretary of State conclusive? That is the person entitled to challenge that determination. And fundamentally, even is that provision constitutional? That particular provision has been invoked only once since it was written in 1952. It was done during the Clinton administration, and the case was actually never resolved. It was actually held unconstitutional by President Trump's sister as a federal district court judge. That went to court of appeals, and the, and the court of appeals never finally resolved that issue because the administration decided to charge that person under a different provision involving violation on a criminal conviction.

[00:44:04.21] - Speaker 2

And even that could not finally be resolved because the person in that question committed suicide while in detention. Mentioned. So the final word on the constitutionality of that provision, how and if you remove a person under that provision, what kind of process they are entitled to, is unresolved in our legal system. And all these cases will answer that question.

[00:44:28.22] - Speaker 1

Okay, um, I'm going to go to Kathleen now, but this is a question where, uh, others may want to chime in. So I'm going to give you a chance to start, Kathleen. And And this does have to do again with Interior enforcement and the mass deportations initiative. Are we seeing any impacts so far on industries and labor markets that are dependent on immigrants, particularly agriculture, for instance? And, and what are we hearing, if anything, from local workforces and employers on how they may be— how they are being or might be expected to be affected.

[00:45:14.20] - Speaker 3

Thanks very much, Doris. I think that, you know, I should start out by answering this question by saying that there's a lot of confusion and the number of policies has really overwhelmed many who are trying to keep track of all of these developments. And we're, you know, fluent in a lot of these technical terms, people who are not as familiar with all of them are struggling to keep up with which statuses have ended, how that affects employers' liability for having people who no longer have valid work authorization on their books. So the litigation back and forth on all of this, as well as the number of policies, is making it really difficult. Difficult for employers and their employees, of course. You know, one of the aspects of our Twilight Status tracking is showing how much overlap there could be, and a lot of people who are losing status, whether that be parole or temporary protected status, if the courts allow that to go ahead, a lot of those people might have also applied for asylum, which could be another basis for work authorization. So we'll have to see, uh, how some of this plays out and how many people, uh, had applied for each of these categories is not clear from, uh, the data that we have.

[00:46:44.09] - Speaker 3

Uh, on the, um, workforce question, I also just wanna quickly add that we're hearing that the education that community-based organizations are doing is having an effect. And Tom Homan actually talked about how people who've been to what's called know your rights presentation about how someone can choose to remain silent when interacting with ICE is affecting ICE's operations in the interior of the country. So ICE needs to have a warrant from a federal judge if they're that's going to go into a workplace in a private area or into a home, for example. And we're hearing that a lot of people have been exercising those rights, and that's made interior enforcement more difficult.

[00:47:40.09] - Speaker 1

Would either of Muzaffar or Julia want to comment any further on that?

[00:47:48.11] - Speaker 4

I could just jump in quickly to say that we're keeping our eyes out to see whether there are worksite enforcement operations that ICE conducts. In the last Trump administration, we saw an increase in such operations where a large number of workers at one worksite were arrested. We haven't yet seen that as far as I'm aware. These operations do take some time to plan and carry out, so there could be some in the works, but I think we haven't seen it yet. Looking at the last Trump administration, a lot of those worksite enforcement efforts were at places like meatpacking plants. There were some operations at 7-Eleven stores. They didn't tend to happen in agricultural locations. It sometimes seems as if worksite enforcement and immigration enforcement in agricultural industries is a little bit lighter. President Trump said something about this in the Oval Office actually about going light on growers and also on hotels. But that remains to be seen. But I think Kathleen was indicating that there are kind of a number of different actions that are affecting employers all at once. Some of them are losing their workers because their workers had work authorization through humanitarian parole programs or maybe have work authorization through TPS grants that may be ending at the same time some of their employees may be subjected to immigration enforcement efforts.

[00:49:00.15] - Speaker 4

And so there's a number of ways that employers might be seeing challenges to their workforce at the moment, especially if they are employing people who don't have work authorization and aren't in the country legally.

[00:49:11.19] - Speaker 1

Okay, we have a number of questions that have to do with the refugee program and refugee status, uh, so let me, uh, go to a couple of those. Uh, the first one I think perhaps you can answer, Muz, because it's asking the question about whether there's anything that can be done through— it's observing that there were a large number of people vetted and ready to come to the United States I think the number is actually close to 100,000 that have been stopped in their tracks. Is there anything that can be done through court action that would mitigate that?

[00:49:52.22] - Speaker 2

Yeah, that particular— there was actually a ruling issued, and that's final, that the government has to bring those people in who were vetted. And the administration so far has not directly said it is going to disobey that court order. It's basically saying it's lacking capacity to comply with it. So that's obviously going to be monitored. So that's with respect to the people who are already, who are already vetted in for admission to the United States. On this, on the refugee admissions, the only two other developments, one is that though they have decided to completely halt the refugee resettlement program, which, you know, the administration has broad discretion. I mean, it's one area where the executive has a lot more jurisdiction in setting up the number of refugees a little bit, but it has also decided that it will admit some refugees who are certain minorities from South Africa. So there are both these trends happening and we should acknowledge both of them. One, but on the direct answer to this, that there was actually a court order asking the administration to comply, bringing people in who've already been vetted.

[00:51:05.23] - Speaker 1

Well, I'm going to keep you on for a connect— a related question to that, which is the statement that you cited about the explanation being that the U.S. does not have the capacity. What do we understand that to mean?

[00:51:25.03] - Speaker 2

Kathleen, you followed this a little more than I did. Do you know what they have actually said in the court filings as to what capacity they're referring to?

[00:51:35.08] - Speaker 3

I'm actually going to pass this off to Julia.

[00:51:40.12] - Speaker 4

The non-lawyer who hasn't—

[00:51:42.15] - Speaker 1

This is clearly a good question because—

[00:51:47.12] - Speaker 4

One challenge is that some of the funding that the US provides to international partners, including IOM, which facilitates the travel for refugees, was cut. And so some of that global capacity has been reduced. But also, as I mentioned, the domestic resettlement capacity has been eliminated by the Trump administration's own actions. So the reduction in capacity is, is a choice that the Trump administration made. But it still stands that that capacity doesn't exist at the moment and would have to be rebuilt for them to resettle large numbers of refugees. They do seem to be indicating that they're searching for a new resettlement partner within the United States and maybe a new type of organization. It's not clear what that would look like, but I think that's what we can say for now.

[00:52:36.03] - Speaker 4

But more to come.

[00:52:40.24] - Speaker 1

Let's—

[00:52:42.03] - Speaker 1

there's another whole area here. In the Trump actions that have to do with registration and reinstituting a registration requirement that has been in the statutes for a long time but has not been actively used. So what do we know? And I'm going to ask— I think I'm going to ask Muz to start to speak to this. What do we know about the registration requirement, how it'll be used, and how it might affect the unauthorized community. In what way do the government's current actions and the consequences of those actions perhaps connect with the registration requirement?

[00:53:26.16] - Speaker 2

Well, registration requirement is obviously controversial because during 9/11, one of the most controversial policies of the Bush administration was the special registration program, which asked at that time only men from certain, about 26 countries, which are predominantly Muslim-majority countries, to come and register. Now, this goes beyond that in many ways because it just doesn't apply to specific countries. It applies universally. And it basically says that we want to capture biometric data and information on people on whom we don't have it. So therefore, people whose records they have, it doesn't apply to them. It doesn't apply to lawful permanent residents. It doesn't apply to people who have had their work authorization and their biometric information has been captured. It doesn't apply to people who are admitted under parole. It doesn't, it seems, even apply to people who have been issued a non-immigrant visa where that information was captured. So the concern obviously is about be unauthorized. And, you know, it's a very difficult— therefore, anyone who's in the country who is unauthorized, whose information has not been captured, is subject to registration. So the consequences of this is a difficult thing for many individual lawyers to have the Solomonic choice on.

[00:54:51.03] - Speaker 2

If people don't register, and they're supposed— it's now a criminal offense. If it's a criminal offense, it could affect your future immigration possibilities in the United States. So someone who is, you know, who could potentially be married to a US citizen in the future and didn't register, which is now a criminal offense, this could come in the way. So there is therefore some incentive for people to register. On the other hand, you're also, by registering, providing information to the government that could then be used for enforcement purposes that we just finished talking about. That's why I think it's a very difficult choice for individual lawyers to make in advising their clients. I strongly urge that they should make this choice in direct conversations with their clients and making both the pluses and the minuses of the— of complying with it, as I just outlined.

[00:55:48.18] - Speaker 1

Okay, um, Kathleen, I think this one might be a good one for you because it has to do with work authorization and with employers. If someone loses their work authorization, it is up to the employer to identify this, right? But what is the employer's responsibility and what is the person who's working for the employer? What is the person's responsibility? And before you go ahead and answer, Let me just say that we are pretty much at our end time, but we have a lot of questions and good questions on a range of issues that are important. So we will try to stay on for maybe up to 10 minutes longer, assuming that we still have good questions coming in. So back to employers, Kathleen.

[00:56:44.05] - Speaker 3

Thanks, Doris. I will welcome my colleagues weighing in on this one too, but we'll just quickly say that employers face liability. If they have people who are not authorized to be working on their books. And so that's why this confusion about the multiple bases that people might have for work authorization is really confusing and worrisome for attorneys representing employers and for employers themselves. Muz, do you want to jump in here quickly?

[00:57:17.24] - Speaker 2

Not much more. I mean, you know, the employer sanctions provision, we know what it is. You cannot— you can be sanctioned if you're hiring someone who doesn't have authorization to work. The issue in this, which is, I think, getting a lot of attention, is that how do employers know that someone is no longer authorized to work? And I think the general advice on this is that till a government actually tells you something is not— someone someone is not authorized to work, which means they don't have a valid work authorization document, employers are, have, you know, have certainly can hire those people till they have reason to believe they're no longer authorized to work. I think that's the quickest answer for the time being.

[00:58:04.15] - Speaker 1

Okay, I'm going to come back now to the issues of mass deportations and the assertion the administration makes that its focus is on criminals and on removing criminals from the country. What do our data show on the idea that the administration is going after immigrants who have committed crimes? To what degree is that true? And what do we know from the data and what can we not tell from the data? I think Kathleen, you can handle this.

[00:58:44.24] - Speaker 3

Thanks, Doris. I'll just quickly say that, you know, this is an open question, again, because of the lack of data coming out officially on deportations. So there have been various news reports about how many people who do not have criminal records have been arrested and deported. But some of this we, you know, expect to get from the Department of Homeland Security eventually. And, you know, we'll just add that what Muz was referencing to with registration, you know, there has been an increase in who might face criminal penalties. And then, you know, some of the student issues that we're seeing as well. Are involving people having just minor infractions. So reminding that issues such as driving without a license can sometimes arise to be a criminal issue that could lead to someone's deportation.

[00:59:51.10] - Speaker 2

Doris, can I just add very quickly something on this? I think we don't— they're not issuing the breakdown on criminality. And to the extent that the argument is that a lot of people with criminal histories are being deported. A lot of the criminal history, by a lot of speculation, is just that they have made an illegal entry or illegal reentry, which technically is a criminal offense. But that may be the only criminal offense. The only thing I want to add is that we in our, in our beat said that how the president's standing on immigration is very high. It's softening. And I think it's softening just because of this issue. Issue that is becoming more and more clear to Americans that this is not targeted at high criminals. And that people, when you see images of students being picked up on the streets whose only violation is an allegation that they made some incendiary remarks, that's where the country is beginning to doubt the real aim of this administration's policies. When judges' orders are seen as not being being respected by the administration. That's where the country is beginning to soften its support for this administration's immigration actions, which I think will have a long-term impact on what they're going to do in the future, and increasingly how the courts are looking at the immigration actions of this administration.

[01:01:12.10] - Speaker 1

Well, okay, somewhat possibly related to that, so let's stick with you, is this very specific question. How worried should legal permanent residents be, especially if they need to leave and reenter the country in the coming months?

[01:01:28.00] - Speaker 2

Well, again, you know, these are hard questions to answer because there's nothing in the official policymaking or executive actions which would suggest that lawful permanent residents have anything to worry. I think, again, Anyone who has concerns about it should really have a conversation with a lawyer. If they have any concern that they have made statements like the one that the students that have been picked up, including Mr. Khalil, they may want to rethink whether they should take the chance about going abroad and re-enter because they have no idea what's in there in the immigration databases about their history. So not taking the chances, I think, is probably the right advice. And if they have concerns, they really should talk. But we also don't want to paralyze people that there's, there's a police state, that everyone is being targeted. Uh, you know, millions of people are still coming in every week and admitted to the country. It's not that all have to be concerned that they may not be admitted, but if people have for any reason that the kind of things they have seen the enforcement ratcheting upon, that they may be, uh, sort of in some, uh, on the radar of this administration, they should have a conversation with their lawyer.

[01:02:54.20] - Speaker 1

Hey, Kathleen, I'm going to go to you on a pretty specific question as well. Uh, this is asking a clarification. Um, can expedited removal be used to legally remove people who had TPS and humanitarian parole when those statuses expire.

[01:03:15.17] - Speaker 3

Thanks, Doris. This is also being litigated, and, uh, someone had asked before about the data on expedited removals. We have historic data going back to 2014, again from, uh, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Homeland Security statistics, but we don't have current data on how expedited removal is being used in the interior. And just want to underscore that while people have TPS or a valid parole status, they're not supposed to be deported. So, you know, I think the question becomes at which point do these statuses expire if the courts allow those early terminations to go ahead.

[01:04:04.11] - Speaker 1

Okay, Julia, question for you. Do you see any evidence that there's an effort to speed up the admission to the— to legal admissions for people with highly desirable skills or wishing to reunite with family?

[01:04:26.19] - Speaker 4

I think just like the other questions, unfortunately, we don't know yet. I mean, we saw some moves under the Biden administration to facilitate available pathways under current law, which Congress controls, to make it easier for highly skilled STEM professionals to come to the United States, to advertise the options available to them, to make it clear some of the faster pathways available to them. But the status of those those changes, officially, they're still on the books and still in their current form. But how those are playing out in practice, unfortunately, we don't know. I mean, it is important to note Congress controls our immigration laws. Congress hasn't updated our immigration laws by and large since 1990. It would be hard to imagine that they'd find the will to drastically revise them in the coming months and years, although, you know, things can change. But as of now, how processing is happening, it's a little bit too early to tell.

[01:05:21.21] - Speaker 1

I think we're getting to the point where we can see what an educated audience we have, because more and more of the questions are ones that are prospective, uh, and that really, uh, reflect the implications of some of the actions that have been taken. But we don't know, and we make a real effort here at MPI not to speculate, uh, without evidence and not to, um, uh, cause alarm, but at the same time to assess analytically what the possibilities might be. And many questions are in fact doing that for us. I'm going to go to what I think is perhaps a good final question here as we're winding down, and I will ask either all three of my colleagues to comment on this to the extent that you can. Pick up things. Uh, are there geographic patterns that we're seeing to interior enforcement? In other words, uh, are small towns with lots of undocumented immigrants less likely to see enforcement actions than cities? Is the deputizing of law enforcement to ICE roles and arrests and deportations disproportionate between red and blue states? Are there data on the cost of 287(g) agreements and what those costs might be for local municipalities that cooperate in federal immigration enforcement?

[01:06:57.00] - Speaker 1

So who would like to go to first? Pick your question and provide what answer you can. Kathleen, your light is on.

[01:07:07.24] - Speaker 3

I'll start out, but I'm happy to pass it off to Julia and Muz. And, you know, I want to emphasize with the geographic distribution question that most people deported from the interior are deported after being arrested by state and local authorities and then handed over to ICE for deportation. So Julia and I wrote an explainer about ICE ICE arrests and deportations that has some of the data on that. And when local authorities are cooperating, that facilitates that, what you call criminal justice to deportation pipeline in the interior.

[01:07:53.04] - Speaker 4

I can jump from there just to say that when you look at the trends in the data, because of exactly what Kathleen just described, we see that a larger share— we have seen in the past that a larger share of ICE arrests and deportations are happening in places where local law enforcement is cooperative with ICE, holds people extra time for ICE, transfers people in custody to ICE, and a declining share of arrests and deportations are happening from places like California where there are really strict limitations on local law enforcement's cooperation with ICE. On the cost, there are certainly costs to states and localities of participating in the 287(g) program. There are also costs for holding migrants additional time in their local jails for ICE. And there are also costs because some local jurisdictions have been sued by civil rights groups for holding people past their criminal sentence on a civil violation. That can be very costly for some communities. So communities that are thinking about about these 287(g) agreements or other forms of cooperation with ICE are weighing their concerns about local safety, trust with immigrant community, and also some of the costs that are involved.

[01:09:04.23] - Speaker 2

Let me conclude on this one. I mean, I think on 287(g) agreements, we don't really— we have studied at MPI 287(g) agreements extensively, but the numbers have so much multiplied recent times any assessment of costs, I think, would be, I think, premature. But there are enormous costs to, to local jurisdiction. I think on the geographic distribution, this is really where the political dilemma of this administration comes. I mean, it really would like to make a big impact in blue jurisdictions because that's sort of where it sort of wants to make a big splash. But those blue jurisdictions also have these have these, you know, sanctuary policies which limit the cooperation. So, but therefore it's getting, it's getting more yield in, in states which are more cooperative, but it actually would like to make a bigger impact in blue states where the resistance is still intact and in many cases mounting.

[01:10:06.08] - Speaker 1

Okay, well, Thank you very much to my colleagues. We've covered so much ground. There is a lot more in the policy beat, so I encourage all of you to read it and use that as a resource. But I also want to compliment our audience today. Thank you so much for being interested. Thank you for tuning in. We've had a very large participation and we're very pleased to meet— to provide information to you, and we will continue to do so. The questions have been excellent. The ones we haven't been able to get to are basically ones that have to do with individual circumstances and cases. We will try to follow up individually with those. Uh, and with that, um, thank you very much for joining us, and all the best going forward.