Beyond “Shock and Awe”: Immigration Actions in the First Year under Trump 2.0

This transcript was generated using AI and may contain inaccuracies. If you notice an error, feel free to email [email protected].

 

[00:00:02.13] - Doris Meissner

Welcome to our briefing, uh, Beyond Shock and Awe: Immigration Actions in the First Year Under Trump 2.0. This is the first public event for the Migration Policy Institute of 2026. It marks the beginning of our 25th anniversary year. My name is Doris Meissner. I am a senior fellow and the director of the U.S. Policy Program here at the Migration Policy Institute, and I'm joined today by my colleagues and authors of the policy beat that we have released today. They are Muzaffar Chishti, Kathleen Bush-Joseph, and Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh. We are also very pleased to have joining us Nick Miroff, a very experienced journalist in the immigration field who now covers immigration at The Atlantic. You can see their bios and further information about their backgrounds on, uh, uh, that are in the chat, so I won't go any further into those introductions. Let me begin with a quick scene setter, and then we will go to our speakers to talk about the Policy Beat findings in greater detail. The PB, we call it the PB, the Policy Beat that we released this morning signals a new era for immigration for us as a country. We know that immigration has been a top-tier issue in the political campaigns, certainly was critical in the election of President Trump to a second term.

Not only did it carry him through the campaign and into the election, but he has kept it at center stage in his administration. In the process, we see the Trump administration having recharacterized immigration from a phenomenon that is advantageous to the country to seeing immigration as a threat to our national security and to the well-being of average Americans. The scope of the use of administrative authority that we are seeing is unprecedented. Immigration is now being used to test widely held legal norms and constitutional principles. Immigration has become placed at the center of foreign policy goals as never before, particularly in the focus on the Western Hemisphere. And we see how immigration is being used to reshape the missions of the primary immigration agencies, beginning with ICE, and just completely illustrated by what's going on today in Minneapolis and continuing. We see ICE highly visible in communities in ways that has not been the case before. For United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the focus has turned to fraud, not— and away from facilitating legal immigration. We see that our humanitarian immigration streams have all but disappeared. No further refugee admissions of any significant numbers, access to asylum and access to the immigration court system and due process being severely narrowed.

So we then go more broadly to the government overall and see that this administration has mobilized a whole-of-government response on the issues of immigration and furtherance of its mass deportation initiative and agenda. Other federal agency enforcement personnel have been pulled into duty for immigration enforcement. Active duty military are now involved in immigration issues. Databases that have formerly been off-limits, such as our, um, IRS and the Social Security Administration, are involved in immigration. And we have seen an appropriation by the Congress in in what's called the Big Beautiful Bill of a level of funding, $170 billion, that earlier would've been numbers like that only going into the military sector. They're now going into immigration enforcement. So all of that and many more items that you will see in the policy beat and that our speakers will talk about add up to this new era. The real question longer term is whether we're on a detour or whether what's happening is actually a fundamental shift in the future direction of our country. So to hear more about some of these details and others, let me turn first to my colleague Muz Chishti, who will talk about immigration enforcement and related issues to immigration enforcement. Muz.

[00:04:54.10] - Muzaffar Chishti

Thank you so much, Doris, and thank you so much to all of you around the country for joining us this morning or this afternoon. It is obviously Obviously, a very difficult time for the country. It's a very difficult time for immigration debate, and we have the privilege of watching it in as close a quarter as we can. This was a difficult assignment just to track it. It's a dizzying experience just to track the immigration actions of this administration. So I therefore particularly want to thank my co-authors, Kathleen Bush-Joseph and Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, for having done this enormous lift especially over the holidays. Thank you to Colleen and Kathleen. So this, as Doris pointed out, for President Trump, both in Trump One and Trump Two, he has used immigration as a calling card, both for election and for the administration. And that has made immigration enforcement its signature priority. As Doris said, it's listed in all of government in this pursuit. It's like the first paragraph of the job description of every member of the cabinet. About how they can help the president in immigration enforcement. It's enlisted states and localities in a way we haven't done ever before.

We will hear more about it. It's pressured foreign governments to accept attorneys from third countries. It has accessed data to weaponize it in ways we have never done before. And as we've seen in the streets of our cities and states, visibly militarized enforcement and immigration enforcement in the scenes that we just have seen all across. It has done it through executive orders. It has done it through executive actions. Just on executive orders, about 38 executive orders have been issued on immigration alone. That's 17% of the total 225 executive orders issued by this administration. If you're those of you who are in the business of comparing Trump 1 and Trump 2, that was, there were 222 executive orders issued in all of the first Trump administration. If you move from executive orders to executive executive actions. It's just hard to track all of them. We think it's safe to say that we have surpassed 500. That is, if you want to look, compare it to Trump one, in the all 4 years of Trump one, there were 472 executive actions related to immigration. This administration came with 2 goals on immigration. One is to end the invasion as it saw it to the border, and other is to engage in mass deportations.

Now, on the issue of invasion, I think most of us can can, can agree that the border is a very different place than it was a year ago. Uh, there are about 700 per month encounters at the border between February and November of 2025. If you compare that to exactly a year ago, there was 82,000, uh, a month. The high watermark of the Biden administration was December of 2023. That was about 250,000 people a month. So you can see how vastly the border is today. Whether this border is more secure than it was, that is obviously a different question. Now, therefore, the administration has moved towards interior enforcement. I think it's obsessively driven by wanting to reach the 1 million a year mark, which the president set for himself. It is done by not only engaging ICE, but CBP and the Marines and the National Guard across the country. It has ended all the priorities of the old administration for enforcement. It has ended all restrictions on sensitive locations for enforcing immigration law. It has terminated the twilight statuses of large numbers of people who are now therefore subject to removal. And it has expanded the use of expedited removal in a way we didn't think it was legally possible.

Therefore, that is subject to litigation. And it has expanded 287(g) programs, which you'll hear more about today. About 1,300 287(g) agreements have been signed, which is compared to about 135 when the administration began. So what's the scorecard from all this? ICE arrests are today about 1,200 a day. We believe that ICE has arrested about 595,000 people until the middle of December. Uh, the, the average detained population today is about 70,000, which is compared to 39,000 at the beginning of the administration. If you look at the profile of people detained, it's obviously not the worst of the worst. About 26% of the people detained today, only 26%, have a criminal conviction. If you look at the removals, We think the administration's best guess today is about 622,000 people have been removed in the first year. But that does not compare well with the 778,000 people that were removed at the end of the Biden administration. And it's nowhere near the aspirational mark of 1 million people a year. So obviously that is still, I think, a frustrating element for this administration. We don't know how many people have actually chosen to leave on their down. But we do believe that fear is an important element of this administration, both in terms of the muscular arm of the enforcement regime and also sending people to third countries, just reminding them, you may not come to— we may not return you back to your country of origin.

You're going back to South Sudan. And we have cut benefits of people in the— both in important school benefits, important healthcare benefits, which is also creating anxiety about people. Let me just spend one minute on legal challenges. So there have been obviously legal challenges to this, and there are literally thousands of lawsuits brought. We can't keep even a count of them. We know about 10,000 have been brought only to challenge the mandatory detention of people. And the federal government is losing most of them. Of the federal, the district courts who have ruled in these cases, about 308 or best estimate have ruled against the government. In only 14 cases have they upheld. So to our viewers, the difference between a quick arrest and a removal is the presence of a lawyer. That's why single, still individual defense in cases is critical in the defense against the tyranny of this administration. Now, when you go to the higher courts, when it issues issues of policy, it's a different story. It starts getting more and more in favor of the administration the higher you go. At the Supreme Court, using the emergency docket is where they've had the most success.

Just to remind our viewers, about 10 of the 28 emergency docket cases decided by the Supreme Court last year related to immigration. So it has taken a lot of real estate at the Supreme Court. But I will say that the Supreme Court rulings on this fall in two buckets. When it comes to giving deference to the administration's actions, how much authority it has, it has shown a lot of deference to this administration. And I would say that's been also true for prior administrations. It showed similar deference to the Biden administration. But when it comes to constitutional rights or due process, judicial review, it's a different story. The Supreme Court has been less willing to give the to give the administration what it wants. It started with the Alien Enemies Act. It has now gone to the deployment of National Guard. And the final issue on this, which we'll all watch with a lot of interest, is the birthright citizenship. These are all fundamental constitutional rights, and we'll finally see how the Supreme Court falls on that. With that, I'll turn over to my colleague Kathleen Bush-Joseph.

[00:13:20.22] - Kathleen Bush-Joseph

Thank you so much, Muz, and hello to everyone. I will add to the thanks. Thank you to everyone who has been doing incredible reporting and research on all of this. We really drew on that in putting together our research and analysis for this piece. I encourage you all to read the actual article. There's so much in there that we can't cover it all right now. But what I'm going to try to tackle are 3 of the main tools or tactics that I think are fueling the mass deportation campaign that Muz was just talking about. So the first of those moves is gonna be stripping protections from people that were extended or afforded during the previous administration. Number two is gonna be speeding up deportations. And number three is gonna be cooperation with state and local law enforcement. So now to break that down, the Trump administration has really widened the pool of people eligible for deportation. And we have conservatively estimated about 1.5 million people, I should say more than that, have lost what we've called twilight statuses, humanitarian parole, temporary protected status. And as of today, that includes terminations for nationals of 13 different countries that had received temporary protected status.

Now, some of these terminations are not taking effect right away. Many of these are being challenged in the courts. So we'll have to see how all of that plays out, but more and more people are losing the protections that they had from deportation, and I'll add they're also losing their work authorization. So this has big economic impacts for the country as well. To talk about the tactic number two, or tactic number two, um, of speeding deportations at the immigration courts, the Trump administration sees this huge backlog of 4 million pending deportation cases. And of, within that backlog, there's some 2.4 million that actually have an asylum claim. So in response, the administration has been closing out thousands of those cases without affording people a hearing, which goes back to what Moose was saying about how important it is for people to have an attorney. And to get around the backlog, because, you know, some people, they do have to be put through that immigration court proceeding, but for as many people as they can, the Trump administration is actually trying to avoid the courts, and they're trying to issue deportations through an administrative process called expedited removal that allows for removing people without ordering people removed without a hearing.

And the Trump administration has tried to expand this practice, which was historically used at the border, into the interior of the United States, but that has actually been blocked by litigation thus far. If it is actually allowed to go into effect though, we could see expanded expedited removal lead to more fast deportations. So I think that that's something to watch out for moving forward. Turning to that third tool that I was identifying of cooperation with state and local law enforcement, I think we've really seen the divide widen between states and local officials who are willing to cooperate with the Trump administration on this mass deportation campaign versus states and cities that are trying to resist and have faced the deployments of the National Guard and surges of Border Patrol. So Muz was talking about the really unprecedented level of cooperation that this administration has been ramping up with state and local law enforcement agencies through what are called 287 agreements. There are now more than 1,300 of these in place across the country. That's up from 135 agreements that were in place at the end of fiscal year 2024. So that's a really big jump.

And what that means is that in the course of their policing duties, state and local law enforcement agencies are assisting the Department of Homeland Security in some cases by stopping and arresting immigrants as they're encountering them out in communities or at detention facilities. And this is really assisting the Department of Homeland Security because we already know that some 8,500 state and local law enforcement officials had been trained to be assisting. And And maybe in the questions we can talk more about how different that is with what we're seeing in Chicago, what we saw in LA, in Washington, DC. But I wanna kind of try to bring all of this together and talk about what these tools mean for immigration enforcement. Based on what we're in, what we're seeing, I think it's really important to emphasize that this is the beginning. It's taken the Trump administration time to be ramping up enforcement, to be shifting that enforcement into the interior of the country, because before the focus was really on the border when there were high arrivals. Another thing that's really charging what's happening right now is the money and that $170 billion that Congress allocated to this immigration enforcement effort is actually flowing into these tactics that we're seeing.

So already, for example, Florida has received almost $39 million to be cooperating and assisting the Department of Homeland Security with immigration enforcement, and that's just one example. So as we see more people's protections expire, as more people are ordered removed without hearings, we could see these efforts really ramp up and we could see that state and local law enforcement become a sort of pipeline into the deportation system. So we'll be keeping an eye on all of this as the administration moves forward. I'll hand it over to my colleague Colleen.

[00:20:12.06] - Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh

Thank you so much. Good afternoon. Thank you all for being here today. Thank you to my co-authors and colleagues. My colleagues have discussed many of the vast and highly visible changes to the immigration system over the last year, and I'm hoping to use my few minutes here to discuss with you some of the more under-the-radar changes that have occurred and what their future implications might be. And we know that this is a tactic of the administration to sort of have a lot of concurring and differing immigration enforcement operations going on all at once. And so I'm hoping to use this time to bring you to three seemingly different, though somewhat connected topics. I'm gonna talk about the use of the military at the border. I'm gonna talk about ICE technology, and I'm gonna talk about legal immigration changes. And while of course these are all very different, the common ground here is that these are all seeing small cumulative changes that over time could add up to something much bigger. So we'll start at the border. The, the border gets very little attention these days, but during his first days in office, President Trump instructed the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to find ways to use the US military in immigration enforcement.

And one such result of that has been the creation of national defense areas. These are vast swaths of borderlands that are taken over by the military territory, and if someone crosses irregularly into this territory, they can now face criminal charges for entering a military base in addition to illegal entry or illegal reentry. In this, in an effort that has cost about $1.3 billion, there have been the deployment of over 7,000 troops as of December, and as of June, this has yielded about 1,400 migrants who have been arrested for trespassing. Though most of these cases have been thrown out due to a lack of clear signage as to where the national defense areas begin and end. And this use of military resources is not only costly, but its actual impact is hard to measure based on the data that we have. However, what we're seeing here is a testing for the waters for military use in immigration enforcement and begs consideration of how the military may be used further, an unprecedented departure from its normal use. I'll move you now to the interior. My colleagues have discussed the increased ICE enforcement operations and their changing tactics, along with the proliferation of data sourced from the U.S. government agencies, states, and private companies.

But one area of technology that I want to discuss with you is what the ICE agents or other agents who have been deployed for immigration enforcement have been given in the field and have access to. So field agents have been equipped with facial recognition technologies, iris, iris scanners, excuse me, and even mechanisms to track people's phones. And these are all on their mobile devices that they're carrying along with them in the field. The agency has also invested $280 million in contracts to hire private investigators and bounty hunters to confirm addresses, workplaces, and travel patterns of potential targets for arrest. So to be sure, these technical advances did not necessarily start, nor will they end with this administration, but we're seeing a rapid-fire advancement in technology and AI especially, and they're occurring alongside an increased enforcement environment. Moreover, these advances are occurring in such a fast-moving way that there is little oversight for their use. So how data is stored, the privacy concerns for data access, the protections and guardrails against nefarious actors to access this information, and the already reported use of this type of technology on US US citizens are serious questions and concerns for the future as we see this sort of technology ground grow.

And then finally, we'll stay in the interior here talking about our legal immigration system. Uh, the Trump administration has posed profound questions about who is welcome and who belongs in the U.S. Today. And as an agency, USCIS has been repointed from a mostly benefits-granting agency to one focused on enforcement and fraud prevention. The agency now has its own police force. Arrests are carried out at USCIS interviews. They're vetting for anti-Americanism, and immigration officers have been rebranded as Homeland Defenders. The administration has demanded an increase in denaturalizations. There's heightened social media vetting for a variety of visa applicants, mandatory in-person interviews, and visas are being granted for shorter durations. There's also now a $100,000 fee for new H-1B applicants and a change in the lottery system, changes that will, will deter many employers from sponsoring individuals for such visas. One of the first actions by the president was to suspend refugee resettlement, and only 506 refugees were resettled from February to October of last year. The ceiling for refugee resettlement has now been set to a record low for the coming year, the current year, actually, 7,500. And funding for refugee resettlement, $250 million, was reallocated to the Department of State to be used for self-deportations.

In the spring, we saw thousands of international students lose their visas due to their political speech or past police encounters, even if they never faced charges. And many of these visas were eventually restored after litigation. We've also seen the placement of a travel ban akin to the first Trump administration, though taken a step further. The first ban was put in place in June for 19 countries, and after the tragic November shooting of National Guard members in D.C., an additional 20 countries were added to the list, bringing the total to 39. The administration has paused all applications for immigrants from these countries. They've added to their workload by pledging to re-vet refugees who arrived under the Biden administration, and the administration plans plans to make changes to different types of humanitarian visas, specifically for victims of crime, trafficking, or domestic violence. These changes include using abuser-provided evidence in some cases and allowing adjudicators to have more discretion on the evidence that, that is accepted for their cases. Changes from the norm and changes that go against the very nature of what these visas were intended for. And at the same time as implementing all of these restrictions, the administration has proved it is not adverse to all types of, of immigration in launching the Trump Gold Card, which promises a quick grant of legal residence for foreigners paying $1 million.

In small but cumulatively critical changes to legal immigration, there will be surely a flow, a slow to the inflow of foreign-born workers, students, family members, and tourists. So as I said at the, at the top, these 3 different buckets, um, may not necessarily be related, but are part of some of the smaller, maybe under-the-radar changes that taken together and cumulatively create real changes to the immigration system and beg a lot of questions for the future challenges that could be faced. I'll pass it back to Doris now to introduce our special speaker.

[00:27:14.20] - Doris Meissner

We've put a lot of information before you, but we're going to ask Nick now to try to react. Nick, for people that don't know, has been covering immigration for a very long time. He's deeply sourced. And he has real context and understanding over time of how this has all looked. How does this all sound to you? What is a journalist's reaction to what we've been seeing and what we've written about?

[00:27:46.01] - Nick Miroff

Wow. Well, thank you, Doris. Thanks to everyone at MPI for inviting me to join you today. This is a really great Great overview of all the just incredibly dizzying and disorienting changes that we've seen over the course of the past year. You guys are so, so good at this, at distilling, you know, a year's worth of earth-shattering transformations in the immigration space into a policy briefing. So congratulations on that. You know, I normally think of MPI as pretty restrained and sober in its language, and some of the adjectives in this report are appropriately dramatic. I mean, if you had handed me this paper in 2020 at the end of the last Trump administration, I would not have believed that these things are possible. And yet here we are. Um, I mean, you know, I think, I think the most, you, you know, you do a great job really nailing the, you know, the big sweeping thing, which is that the entire federal government has been reoriented toward, uh, a single overarching goal of, um, you know, carrying out this mass deportation campaign and really, um, rolling back, uh, you know, not just the changes of the last, you know, few years, but really challenging the broader American, you know, view of immigration that was enacted by the Immigration and Nationality Act and the country's really, you know, just approach and regard for immigrants and their role in the country.

And I'm not just talking about illegal immigrants, as you know, this report lays out well. You know, you asked me, Doris, to think about, you know, what you guys might have missed. And of course, this is such a short and concise summary, so it would be impossible to include everything. But, you know, the thing that just, you know, that I keep tracking closely, and because I'm partly so sensitive to communications and messaging and the politics of, of what the administration is trying to do. You know, I would say that just the magnitude of the propaganda that we see from the department and its agencies is just absolutely, you know, stunning. Obviously, you know, a kind of trolling social media strategy is a big part of what the White House and the administration want to do. But I mean, just to summarize some of that, you know, you see Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol commander, out there on the streets of these cities with his own, you know, personal film crew, you know, making, making rap videos. You know, who would have thought with, you know, when the Department of Homeland Security was founded after 9/11 that you would see its resources being employed in this kind of way.

You know, just, you know, the department on social media fantasizing about deporting a third of the American population. You know, I mean, that kind of thing. You know, embracing far-right terms like remigration. So, you know, just, you know, I think that the shock and awe period of what the administration wants to do has ended. And now what we're seeing is a broader challenge to, you know, what has been a fairly bipartisan consensus in this country about the value of immigration, the role of immigrants in our economy and our society, in American patriotism and all of those things. And I think going forward, that's going to be, you know, increasingly contested space. And so, you know, this report is a good summary of everything that's happened up till now. But I think, you know, just the events of this week in Minneapolis, the kind of intense confrontations that we're seeing on the streets of Minneapolis, as we have seen in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities, is an indication of how hot this issue is burning and how how large it's going to continue to loom over the Trump presidency and over the, you know, just the future of this country.

So I'm glad, I'm grateful for, you know, that MPI is there to bring some sobriety and some perspective. You guys have been a great resource for journalists and reporters for such a long time, and you're rising to the occasion with work like this.

[00:32:42.04] - Doris Meissner

Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Nick. I'm going to tell our audiences tell our audience that this is a time to type in any questions that you might have into the Q&A or email them to [email protected]. We have quite a long list of questions that I'm going to launch into, but before I do that, I want to just do one quick follow-up with you, Nick. What's it like to be in the press today and covering this? How do you assess how the press is doing? With this as a story?

[00:33:13.24] - Nick Miroff

That's a great question, Doris. I mean, it's very challenging. You know, this administration that prides itself on transparency has ceased to release the basic information that we all need in order to assess what's really going on. The Department of Homeland Security, you know, the Office of Immigration Statistics hasn't published a new report really since the administration, you know, took office. You know, there are other, you know, the regular flow of information has been either choked off or filtered or excessively politicized, making it so difficult to know what's really going on. So much of the information that does get released comes out through social media accounts, you know, and that has made it more challenging. The administration's general regard for reporters in the press and the role of of the press and informing the public is, you know, appears to be very low. And, you know, I would just say one of the things that's been heartening about the, you know, the department's kind of, you know, rolling crackdown on all of these cities is that I've seen in Chicago, in Minneapolis, in Charlotte, that local, you know, reporters, the daily newspaper reporters have really risen to the occasion and done crucial work about what's really going on in their cities, you know, on the streets, learning immigration law and how the Border Patrol and ICE operate.

And so it's a reminder that that kind of journalism is so essential to our country, to our democracy. And it's been nice. It's been great to see that, you know, its value reaffirmed I would say what's been probably most disturbing is that so much of these changes are all filtered through X, you know, through Twitter, and that, you know, whose content is manipulated and, you know, and full of, you know, lies and full of fake videos. And it has just made a difficult challenging time all that more disorienting. And so, you know, the need for clear, factual, fair reporting is greater than ever. And I hope that, you know, reporters— I hope that, you know, I hope the readers and the public will continue to support journalists who are out there around the country doing this essential work.

[00:35:48.18] - Doris Meissner

Fascinating. Yes. Well, okay. So let me go into some of the questions we have We have a lot of wonderful questions. First one, Muz, I'm going to ask to you, and this is a question about context. To what extent do the enforcement policies of the current Trump administration build on previous policies and developments? In other words, what's the longer history of getting here?

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

[00:36:15.00] - Speaker 2

I think it's a good question. I mean, none of this happens in a vacuum. And, you know, obviously 9/11 was a significant turning point. Significant development in our country. A lot of these policies that we had in place, a lot of the instruments that are in place, the ability to fund agencies at the level that we have, obviously have their history in 9/11. The 287(g) program, which was like 2, there was none at 9/11, is today 13 and 13 because 287(g) program got new life after 9/11. So some of this is not new. What is new about— totally different about this administration is the end of priorities. Like, we all know that in all branches of law enforcement, whether it's federal, state, or local, the law enforcement agencies just do not have enough resources to go after all these potential targets. That's not different about this administration also, and it knows So what's different about it is it's made everyone a priority. When no one is a priority, everyone is a priority. So the lowest hanging fruit out there in the shopping malls, in the fields, in the hospitals, in the schools is now becoming a priority.

[00:37:30.24] - Speaker 2

If you can go to churches and schools and courtrooms without any check on you, that is a very different kind of a regime that we had come to accept in the past. So if you ask me, What is fundamentally different about this administration? I would say the end of priorities, which then I think makes a lot of people anxious, a lot of people vulnerable, and gets the kind of profile of people in detention that we have seen, is that only a fraction of them have criminal background. And that's, I think, finally getting to where I think the administration is beginning to lose the country. Is now seeing that these people being arrested are not the worst of the worst that had been publicized in the beginning of this administration. And I think that is sort of beginning, I think, to turn the tide on this.

[00:38:29.04] - Speaker 1

Okay, Kathleen, I'm going to turn to you for the next question. And this is one that has to do with the courts and pre-termination orders. Could you explain a little bit more what is a pre-termination order? and does that relate in any way to asylum seekers that are through expedited removal being sent to third countries such as Uganda, Honduras, uh, uh, in, in seeming avoidance of immigration court access?

[00:39:00.08] - Speaker 3

Thanks very much for this question. Uh, the pre-terminations issue I think is one that, um, like Colleen was talking about, has kind of flown under the radar, but that's what I was talking about when I was describing the administration closing cases without hearings. And so the immigration officials in court, their ICE attorneys, are saying, okay, well, this person didn't fill out all of the questions on their asylum application, or they didn't present enough information to show a case for asylum. Or the ICE attorneys are saying, "We can actually send this person to a third country that has agreed to take some people." I will say that the numbers are pretty small based on what we've seen. For that reason, we're not going to let this person have a hearing in court. That's different than expedited removal. That's the process where It had previously been used at the border, and we would see Customs and Border Protection officers arresting someone and then maybe deporting them within just a matter of hours, actually, without even putting them into the court process. Now, I'll flag that we actually did a much fuller report on the challenges at the immigration court system, and we talked about how there had been arrests at the immigration court courts and attempts to put people into expedited removal even though a removal case had already been started at the immigration courts.

[00:40:37.11] - Speaker 3

But I know that attorneys have pushed back on that, so I don't think we should conflate the processes.

[00:40:43.17] - Speaker 1

Okay, Colleen, oh, you talked about legal immigration and things that we're seeing that are likely to add up to a real slowing of legal immigration. This is a question about about international students and how the administration's actions may be impacting the ability of the US as a country to attract foreign students. Can you provide any more information about what we're seeing there?

[00:41:09.16] - Speaker 4

Absolutely. Um, so a study that was done did show that there was a 17% drop in new enrollment for international students. So we already have seen, you this school year be affected by the actions that happened last spring. And I think that we'll sort of continue to see how that may impact students coming in the future and some of the other changes. When we think about the H-1B program, that could impact certain students who are on a certain type of student visa, like a J visa or an F visa, wanting to then transition to an H-1B H-1B with the new fees that are in place. And so, um, what we're seeing is that the international students were not only impacted by some of that, some of the targeting based on their political speech, but also some of these visa changes that are happening, um, throughout the legal immigration system.

[00:42:04.15] - Speaker 1

Okay, Muz, this question, uh, I'm going to direct to you, and it has to do with Venezuela. Obviously Venezuela has also been very much in the news. And the issue and question here is whether you would expect that Venezuelans would in any way be exempted from deportation. Let's broaden that to how do you expect that the Venezuelan situation overall will affect the circumstances of Venezuelans in the United States?

[00:42:33.21] - Speaker 2

Yeah, I mean, we obviously don't know. The Venezuelan situation is fast developing. And we don't know how it will pan out. But let me say that obviously, not only for our country but for the hemisphere in general, the migration component of the Venezuelan question was really affecting foreign policy already. I mean, there are 8 million Venezuelans all across Central and South America. So you could strangely expect those countries which would have normally been opposed to an action that US did, uh, in, in Caracas this, uh, you know, 10 days ago, that they would have been criticized. But a lot of those countries actually are quite eager to see if the Venezuelans there could go back to Venezuela if there is stability in that country. So it may affect their attitude towards the, uh, towards the, the developments in, in, uh, in Venezuela. From our— from the U.S. policy point of view, I, I think there are Actually, two prongs to this potential, how this will evolve. One, there clearly is right now no bar from removing people to Venezuela. In fact, Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end the Venezuelan TPS. So the administration is free to remove people.

[00:43:51.00] - Speaker 1

Whether it will remove them right now or no, we don't know. One could argue actually that there is a significant argument that you could, with that, that nationals of Venezuela today deserve TPS, that the conditions in Venezuela are so unstable right now that we should not send people back to Venezuela. That's sort of the basic reason for having TPS. So I would say that the reason for extending TPS for Venezuela has gone up. That may be different a year from today about Venezuelans who have applied for asylum in the United States. I think if the conditions in Venezuela somewhat stabilize, then the argument for granting people asylum, I think, will go down. So short term, maybe good reason to extend TPS. Long term, how it may affect asylum, I think, will be determined by how the conditions pan out.

[00:44:55.06] - Speaker 1

Okay, Nick, I have a question for you that builds on the comment you made about journalism and reporters at the local level really rising to the occasion given the blizzard of things that are taking place. This question about federal, state, local relations overall. In your reporting and in your knowledge of how immigration has traditionally worked. What kinds of changes are you seeing? What sorts of challenges? What kinds of implications of federal, state, local relations are now in play with the policies that this administration is pursuing in immigration?

[00:45:38.08] - Speaker 5

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, and obviously it varies dramatically by state and, you know, what that left state and its elected leaders' relationship is to this administration, to the White House, even to Trump personally. Um, you know, think about the fact that, um, I think many of us, if you, if you told us that Trump was gonna send the Border Patrol and ICE on this kind of rolling crackdown across the country and you were to guess which cities they would target first, New York and San Francisco would be pretty high on on that list, right, as, as, you know, two of the deepest blue bastions of pro-immigrant local policy. Well, Trump hasn't sent the troops in to those places yet. Right. I mean, and that speaks to the fact that, you know, for entirely personal reasons, the business leaders of San Francisco told him to hold off, to wait. And so he stood down. And And, you know, we had— we've all— we all expected that DHS would go into New York City once Mamdani took office. But he came here to D.C. and went to the White House and had a friendly photo shoot with the president.

[00:46:57.05] - Speaker 5

And right now, you know, DHS is targeting Minneapolis. And so it comes in some ways that, you know, it comes down to these very idiosyncratic reasons. Um, you know, there, but it's been a long time since we've seen this kind of, um, effort by the federal government to impose, uh, its policies on state and local jurisdictions at the, you know, with, with force like we're seeing, you know, and think about Minneapolis, which has, I think, 600 police officers. And right now it's got 3,000 federal officers and agents, 5 times as many. You know, so I mean, all of our— the arguments in this country about states' rights appear to be out the window for now. And it's really coming down to the president's whims and personal preferences.

[00:47:47.02] - Speaker 1

Okay. Let me— Kathleen, Kathleen, let me turn to you on asylum issues. Question is, are asylum applications being decided or not? If they are, what are the factors that affect that? And in addition to that, Do we have any sense, any information of what the impact of ICE arrests are on asylum applicants showing up for their interviews? And are there arrests that are taking place at asylum offices in the way that they are taking place in courthouses?

[00:48:26.20] - Speaker 3

That was a lot of questions, so I'll try to move through them, but thank you. But after the awful shooting of National Guard members in Washington, D.C., asylum processing has apparently continued, but the issuance of decisions has been paused at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Now, I actually haven't heard what the latest is at the immigration courts, whether decisions are still being issued on asylum cases. There. But this question of arrests and affecting people's attendance is unfortunately another area where we're lacking the data that we used to have. So what Nick was talking about with data not being released, uh, the Department of Homeland Security used to put out reports showing how many people came to the different asylum offices for their hearings, and now we don't have that. So it's very hard to know But based on some of the great local and anecdotal reporting that we're seeing, unfortunately, people really are saying that they're afraid and they're missing their hearings, which at the immigration court can lead to people actually getting removal orders issued in their absence. Those orders were the majority of removal orders issued in the last fiscal year. And just, you know, to say too that the arrests of people, you know, I think this is one of those moves that could have implications that go beyond just this administration.

[00:50:10.08] - Speaker 3

And I think that's one of the larger themes is that this enforcement is affecting people's trust in system and their directions, you know, to be trying to follow the process.

[00:50:23.11] - Speaker 1

Okay, so Colleen, do we know on 287(g) agreements, can you describe the financial incentives for states and locals to get involved or to agree to a 287(g) agreement?

[00:50:44.14] - Speaker 4

So previously, the, you know, there's always been some financial incentive with the 287(g), and sometimes it also can come with additional training, etc. And Kathleen pointed out that there was, and Kathleen, please come in with the correct number here, but there was several million dollars allocated to Florida recently. And so what we're seeing is sort of an increased incentive for states to be a part of this. And then I think I think another avenue to look at the 287(g) agreements is also looking at sort of where they're popping up and what those incentives might mean for the state that they're in. So does that mean, you know, increased resources for the officers where the state might not be able to do that? So is that incentive larger? Will they then decide to take that agreement and go forward with it? And so I think we'll see a continuance of larger and larger amounts of money, particularly with the influx of money that was just given to, um, to the agency through the appropriation bill last summer.

[00:51:48.22] - Speaker 1

Okay, Muz, uh, talk— we want to talk about denaturalization and US deportation of US citizens. Um, the administration has talked now, and particularly in, uh, response to the, um, uh, Minneapolis issues, uh, and earlier to the National Guard shooting— actually, they that's where it really set in with regard to the Afghan population in the United States. What do you think are the prospects for denaturalization? What really is involved in denaturalization and deportation of U.S. citizens in 2026? Is this more of a scare tactic than a reality? What would it take for that reality to actually set in in a meaningful way?

[00:52:37.07] - Speaker 2

Again, just to solve the earlier question you asked, how did we get here? Other administrations have also done denaturalization campaigns. This is not the first administration. Trump one did it. Obama administration did it in a big way when there was a lot of concern that a lot of people had acquired naturalization who were not eligible. There were some people who had ordered removed, never left, and then got naturalize. So it's, it's, it's, it's a fair game for all administration. What is different about this is how much resources you put to that effort, is that it takes— it still is a, is a, is a, is a process you have to go before a federal district court judge. Now that's a much more time-consuming process. So whether they will, how, how far the reach will be, will I think be determined by the resources that are allotted to this. Every administration has the right to have its own priorities about this. What is particularly troubling about this administration's denaturalization campaign is how it's going to depend on information it gathers from the community. That's a different kind of inroads into the communities that now the communities can, can, can rat on on you, that people would have the power to say things about you in the course of this investigation on naturalization.

[00:54:02.22] - Speaker 2

That's a different kind of level of fear and intrusion that we haven't seen. That's the part that I'm most concerned about.

[00:54:11.16] - Speaker 1

Okay, Nick, I'm going to ask you a question that builds on what you were talking about with the exceptionalism of New York and San Francisco. In general, Resistance overall. Where do you see— do you have any sense of what it takes for the resistance to build in particular circumstances? Does it take something as absolutely severe and tragic as a death as in Minneapolis? What are the seeds of resistance that we might be seen burbling?

[00:54:48.03] - Speaker 5

Yeah, it's a great question, Doris, and I've been thinking about it a lot since the shooting of Renée Good. You know, I went to LA and Chicago for The Atlantic and have been observing, you know, the protest tactics now for a few months as they've also evolved. And I've, you know, I've been thinking like, this is— there's something almost, you know, uniquely American about this form of protest and uniquely dangerous. And it's part of the, you know, the way that the administration is out in the streets in these cities and the way it's conducting these operations in with, you know, masked agents and officers and unmarked vehicles on this kind of rolling basis. Has, you know, has made these cities both like the front lines to the kind of effort to resist what the White House is trying to do around the country. But it's also brought together vehicles and guns and cell phones and anger in this incredibly combustible and dangerous kind of snarl right in the streets of these these cities and neighborhoods. It's what we saw in the incident in, in Minneapolis. And, um, you know, the, the, the way that, that people have found that they can effectively slow things down— I think Chicago proved this— is that, you know, they, they're out in the street, they're blowing whistles, they're honking their horns, they're, they're in their vehicles, but they're in, they're, you know, interacting with ICE officers and agents in this very direct way.

[00:56:34.21] - Speaker 5

That, that is, that is really dangerous. And I, and I think it's, you know, on some level I'm surprised that there haven't been more, you know, shooting incidents of this kind. I think that if these, you know, if the, if the Department of Homeland Security continues to conduct the enforcement crackdown this way, I think we will see more. But I can't think of another time when, you know, protesters and police, and, you know, who are all on edge have been, you know, brought together like this in the streets.

[00:57:07.16] - Speaker 1

Okay. I'm cognizant that we are close to our end time, but we have a lot of ongoing questions. So I'm going to suggest that we stay on for another 10 minutes. But I also know that Nick has a hard stop at 2, 2 o'clock, at least Eastern time. So I'm going to thank him in advance and he can click off when he needs to. And let me then, uh, go ahead, launch into another few questions, uh, in order for us to cover as many as we can. Um, Muz, the next one I'm going to ask to you, it's a sweeping question. Given all the immigration changes under this administration so far, uh, are there any surprises about what has not been introduced? Are there any campaign promises on immigration that have been adopted? What do you think we might still see or would be waiting for?

[00:58:01.14] - Speaker 2

I don't know. I mean, I think this is a difficult one. I think my sense is that the administration is on its way to fulfilling most of its promises. I think the administration probably wants to go after the point that Nick made, I think, is, was an important one. That in terms of penalizing states and localities for what it perceives as the sanctuary policies of these, of those cities, I think it probably has not reached the, the kind of reach that it would. I think it has met some political resistance. I think the stopping of funds, I think we'll see more of that. I think it wants to, but again, it is faced with, uh, with with litigation, uh, in, I think, on many of those fronts. So I cannot say that we— what to expect. Strangely, what we may expect is that there may be some movement on, on, on reform on legal immigration, uh, that we have— we must notice that the president, despite all the enforcement activities that we just finished talking not, has said things about DACA recipients in very good terms, that they deserve some protection, has said things about agricultural workers that they're needed for the economy.

[00:59:28.15] - Speaker 2

So I would not be surprised actually that there may be some move in this administration to do something on various aspects of the legal administration. And, you know, that may land up to be a pleasant surprise.

[00:59:43.05] - Speaker 1

Okay, a very specific question, Kathleen, that I think you can answer, and that has to do with, uh, how are the current policies, uh, affecting children, uh, released from our Office of Refugee Resettlement care?

[00:59:58.07] - Speaker 3

Yep, thanks. So we had seen record high numbers of unaccompanied children come during the previous administration. Obviously arrivals have gone much lower now with the lower total border arrivals under the Trump administration. But one of the things that the administration promised to do and has followed up on is conducting so-called welfare checks on unaccompanied children who had come in and been released to sponsors. This has resulted in some kids and some parents being arrested, and it's also become much, much harder for children who are being held in federal custody to actually be released to their sponsors. There are a lot more barriers in place, and that means that unfortunately some kids are languishing in detention, and that includes in stepped-up detention in higher levels of facilities. So I think, you know, we'll have to keep an eye out on what happens with all of these children. And some of these issues, like so many of these other policies that we've been talking about, are being litigated, such as turning kids over to ICE when they turn 18.

[01:01:16.02] - Speaker 1

Okay. Let me turn next to you, Muz, a little— elaborate a little further on what you said earlier. The question has to do with labor markets. What are we seeing in labor markets? Can we determine whether there are real shortages? And of course, shortages is always a question, has always got to be in quotation marks in labor market terms. But what can we see that's taking place in labor markets and how might that be connecting to some possible changes more broadly in policy?

[01:01:58.05] - Speaker 2

Thanks, Doris. I think that's sort of where the rubber is beginning to hit is that the consequences of the enforcement actions are beginning to be felt in the labor market. And we know that there are certain parts of the economy, certain occupations which are much more reliant on foreign workers, which are much more reliant on unauthorized foreign workers, which is agriculture, which is hospitality, which is elder care, care across generations. And I think those sectors are beginning now to speak, is that if you have the action that was taken at the— in Los Angeles and the— in the parking lots, and that affected the daily approach that affected people who are being recruited for the construction industry, as in the construction industry has now begun to speak. And I think this is certainly true of also of agriculture. The president himself, after the LA raids, said that maybe we should pause the raids on agriculture just because we believe he was hearing from members of his, of his party and the constituency. Uh, I think the Hyundai, uh, the workplace attack in Georgia was very significant, that people realize that a lot of these, uh, parts of the labor market you rely rely on foreign workers who are, who really have some of the expertise.

[01:03:26.21] - Speaker 2

So I think it's, it's those pockets of, of the labor market that are feeling the crunch and are now beginning, uh, to speak. Whether that will have an immediate impact on the policies of the administration remains to be seen, but I think there is a backlash that is growing.

[01:03:47.16] - Speaker 1

Kathleen, let me turn to you, uh, On also backlash and what it is that people can do in response. This is a question that says, what recourse do people have in seeking justice or redress for harm committed under the color of law by agents that cover their face and refuse to identify themselves?

[01:04:11.20] - Speaker 3

Thanks. This is a hard one. And, you know, I think there are a couple of of different ways to answer it, but I'll start out by saying that if you are an attorney, you can volunteer to be representing immigrants. You can be volunteering to support people protesting. So there's a huge need for people with legal skills. You can look up the organizations that are close to you, and a lot of them have volunteer forms that you can fill out to sign up. But as a general matter, it can be very hard and it can be a really lengthy process to try to seek redress in the courts when federal officials are committing violations. So that, you know, can be a long journey. But I also want to talk just quickly about what people can be doing. And one of this, you know, one of the options goes back to how people can always talk to their local officials about how they want their tax dollars spent and how they want them to be interacting with state and local and federal officials. So if you support 287(g) agreements, you can tell your local officials that. If you do not agree with that, then you can tell them.

[01:05:30.04] - Speaker 3

And one of the things that I'm hearing is that some of these local sheriffs are signing up for 287(g) agreements, not realizing what all of that cooperation entails. That there have been settlements for millions of dollars that end up coming out of local coffers when people are held past the timeframes that they're allowed to. And then likewise, you can talk to your state officials about wanting to see protections enacted about not disclosing information to ICE. And then with federal officials, you can tell them whether or not you want your tax dollars put towards immigration enforcement.

[01:06:09.10] - Speaker 1

Okay, I think we are really, uh, nearing the end of our time, so I'm going to ask a final question. There are others that have been posed, but we're not going to be able to get to them all. This final question, Muz, is for you, uh, and it says, um, have legal institutions like the ABA, state ethics boards, state bar organizations sufficiently reconvened to protect the systems they stand for? And I think in answering that, if you could touch on some of the things that have in fact coalesced and come together in terms of institutional responses, you know, feel free to comment in any way.

[01:06:55.09] - Speaker 2

Yeah, I mean, thanks for the question. I mean, I do think that, you know, this is an unprecedented time in our country, is unprecedented time, particularly about the immigration system and our constitutional democracy. And I think in that we have seen how the world has reacted to the administration. We have seen how lawmakers have reacted with remarkable passivity. I would say institutionally, if there's one institution that has held up most strongly against him, that's judiciary. And so hats off to the members of our judiciary, especially the federal district courts. They have, I think, shown the strongest response. And that's, I think, what we saw, the difference between high arrests and low removals, is that due process still matters if people reach a federal district court, whether it is in the context of habeas, which has, I think, become becoming more and more a popular remedy that people are seeking. Those are young lawyers doing one case at a time around the country. I do think that other institutions are, are measuring up to what their need is. I think American Bar Association was named here, is getting a lot of people trained in these kind of different kind of work that lawyers now have to I think NGOs around the country who provide legal defense, hats off to them for how much they have risen to the occasion and providing the remedies.

[01:08:26.18] - Speaker 2

Young lawyers who are doing it all the time. I think that we probably will see a little more of the last question that we faced about more and more institutions bringing lawsuits about the tactics of ICE. We'll see probably more and more more local officials doing that. And then in that context, I think we may— we, you know, we'll see, I think, a different level of resistance about the nature of these operations, not just about the individual, uh, about individuals in their cases. And finally, I think institutionally, the employers are going to begin to speak. It hurts them more than anyone else as a group. And I think they have been so far a little shy because they think they may meet with retaliation. But I think that as it begins to affect them, I think we may see more and more employers asserting their voice in this important debate.

[01:09:28.05] - Speaker 1

Well, okay, with that as a closing comment, let me thank you all for joining us. We apologize if we didn't get to your questions. Question because we had many, but we certainly had excellent questions, so thank you very much for that. I do encourage you to check out the policy beat. The policy beat on Trump's first year is on our website, migration— www.migrationpolicy.org. The link is on the screen and it's in the chat. And for any reporters who are on the call, thanks very much for joining us. You can reach out to Michelle Mittelstadt, whose contact information is also on the screen. With that, thank you again for joining.