Trump's Immigration Overhaul

0:04In the first hours of his presidency, Donald Trump acted swiftly on immigration. All illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. Trump signed numerous executive orders restricting legal immigration into the U.S. and giving him more authority to crack down on illegal immigration. At a high level, what is the goal of this new Trump administration vis-a-vis immigration? I would say the goal is several fold. It really stems from Trump's really central campaign promise to do a mass deportation.

0:53That's our colleague Michelle Hackman. During the campaign, you saw Trump almost use immigration as a catch-all. You know, immigration is the source of all of your problems. That's economic and nationalist. It's, you know, your house price is going up because there's so many more immigrants in the country. Crime is going up because of immigrants. You know, we're having problem in school because these immigrants are coming and they're not learning English. So it's a whole range of economic and cultural complaints that Trump, I would argue, pretty successfully connected to immigration. And we are in the very, very early days of this new Trump administration.

1:35What's most interesting to you in what we've seen so far? They have issued a startlingly large number of executive orders, even smaller sort of memos at the agency level, changes that to me suggest this has been an administration in waiting. for the last four years that has been really ready to go. I mean, changes that would normally take weeks, months, even a couple of years to implement, they've all done in the first day. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbaugh. It's Wednesday, January 22nd.

2:22Coming up on the show, President Trump acts fast on immigration.

2:42When I called up Michelle to talk about Trump's immigration policies, I had a little quiz for her. This is a test of you as an immigration reporter. Do you think you could name each of the immigration-related executive orders that he's signed? Oh, that's a really good question. I could try. Yeah, let's try. Okay. There is the birthright citizenship order. There is an order halting the refugee program. That's the program that resettles refugees here legally. There is the order declaring an invasion. So that's the order banning asylum. There is—I'm ticking these off on my fingers, by the way. Okay.

3:21You've got three so far. Let's keep going. Yeah. There's the national emergency. So that is unlocking the ability to send military to the border and use other military assets like money, planes, places to detain immigrants. That's four. Okay, four. There is what I would call the extreme vetting order that says everyone being issued a visa needs to be vetted much more extremely than they are now. There is an order declaring that cartels south of the border are foreign terrorist organizations. The orders also included provisions like resume construction of the border wall, restore the remain in Mexico policy, stop the practice of so-called catch and release, and increase military presence at the border.

4:17How would you characterize the overall impact of all of these executive orders taken together? I would say that if you were to put it all in one category, it is an extreme hardening of our immigration laws to basically say all of these channels that were open to people are now closed shut and reinforced shut. And taken as a whole, what kind of power and funding do these executive orders give the Trump administration to crack down on immigration? They've unlocked a huge store of money, of assets from the military. So we're talking troops sent to the southern border. We're talking military planes to assist with deportations.

5:11We're talking using potentially some military spaces for detention. Does this essentially close the southern border? That is what the Trump administration would argue and lead you to believe. I think it's hard to have a counterfactual because, in fact, the last year of the Biden administration, illegal crossings fell and there were very few asylum claims being made. And so, you know, they're inheriting a quiet border right now. It's really hard to take that and say, these policies are working because I don't think we're going to see that much of a change. There's also this executive order that you already brought up regarding birthright citizenship.

5:54That's right. Can Trump actually get rid of birthright citizenship? Kate, I think that's a question no one knows the answer to. I think before this, we would have said, no, you know, you can't, by executive order, change a constitutional amendment. you know, generally speaking, you have to change a constitutional amendment with another constitutional amendment. I think the court has shifted to the right sufficiently such that it's an open question how courts will look at this case. You know, if they look at the plain text, it's a pretty easy decision. It says all persons born in the United States are citizens of the United States.

6:32But it depends on how they interpret sort of the history or the intent of the collage. And I don't think anyone can say with certainty what the courts are going to do. The executive order would take away citizenship rights to children born in the U.S. if their parents are either undocumented or are in the country on a temporary visa. I would say the classical use case is children of immigrants in the country illegally, that a lot of people believe it's really unfair for these people to cross into the country illegally, live here for, you know, a couple of years and sometimes much less. Sometimes people come here and they're pregnant, have a baby and that baby is a U.S.

7:13citizen. And maybe, you know, 20 some odd years down the line, that child could then sponsor their parents for green cards. More than 20 states have sued Trump to block this executive order. They said it violates the 14th Amendment and asked for a preliminary injunction. A White House spokesperson said that the Trump administration is ready for these legal challenges. The administration must have expected challenges. Have you asked them about it? I have. I mean, this is a fight that they're picking purposefully. I don't think anyone in or around the Trump administration believes that what they are doing, they are 100 percent going to get away with.

7:54I think they've always thought about it as a this is a fight we should take up because if we don't, the status quo will remain. And so we need to try. Even if we fail, we can tell our supporters that we tried. One of Trump's major promises around immigration that hasn't started in full yet is mass deportations. We will begin the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. That's coming up after the break.

8:45Ahead of the inauguration, Michelle reported that the incoming Trump administration was poised to start mass deportations within its first 24 hours, starting with raids in Chicago. But within about 24 hours of us reporting that, the administration seemingly actually called it off. Why? Because they don't like to telegraph to people that they're going to come and arrest them, you know, or else people are going to learn their rights, not open the door to an immigration agent, et cetera. And so I think what's going on is they're now actually regrouping. We've seen officials go on TV and say that they've performed, you know, several hundred arrests yesterday of serious criminals.

9:27But as far as I can tell, that's sort of in keeping with what ICE normally does. The Trump administration also cited officer safety concerns. If mass deportations do start ramping up as promised, how do you think that will play out? It's hard to predict. I think that they are sort of gathering their troops and are going to target several major cities. They're really interested in cities where the sort of largest concentrations of immigrants go. And so those are places like New York, Chicago, L.A., Boston, Denver. And they have the added benefit that those cities tend to be blue. And the leaders of those cities tend to sort of want to stick their finger in the eye of the Trump administration and say, we're not going to help you.

10:20In fact, we're going to block you. Who is Trump targeting in these raids? When we've asked that question, the Trump administration says that they want to go after criminals. It's an interesting answer because the Biden administration's deportation policy was also that they targeted criminals. So I've asked repeatedly, you know, what's the difference between your policy and theirs? and they say that they're looking at a much broader set of criminals than the Biden administration did. You know, Biden would argue that if someone committed a really minor offense, let's say a traffic violation or even a DUI, that maybe they shouldn't be targeted, that there are some mitigating circumstances if that person has lived here for 20 years, has U.S.

11:13citizen children. So suddenly, all those people who have really minor offenses are on the table. The other thing, and this is the way the Trump folks talk about this, is that they'll say, you know, if we come to arrest you, criminal, and your family is there and they're here illegally, we're taking them too. They literally call those people collaterals. And I think the collaterals are going to be the sort of big difference between what we've seen before and what we're going to see now. That's going to drive up the numbers of people they're deporting. But what about people who don't have criminal records?

11:54It's a really hard question to answer because there are so many scenarios. You know, a lot of people in the country, when we think of someone in the country illegally, we're thinking of the old school, you cross the border illegally and undetected, and you're living here with sort of no documentation whatsoever. That really was the case up and through about the 2000s. But now the vast majority of people, it's almost a misnomer to call them undocumented because they're in a government system in some way. If they've asked for asylum, that means they're in the system. They have a work permit. They actually can't be deported until their case is over.

12:35And in a lot of cases, that's not going to be for years unless this administration figures out a way to speed up all of the cases. The agency expected to carry out a lot of these raids is ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. And who is the person who has to orchestrate these raids? Who's in charge? It's a man named Tom Homan, who Trump brought in to this newly created role that he calls the border czar at the White House, where Homan is going to be coordinating across the government to make sure that ICE and the military and all these other groups are all working together.

13:18Right now, we're going to shut that border down and get a hold of this problem. What's happening on our border is the biggest national security vulnerability I've seen in my career, and I've got over 35 years doing this. We need to take action to secure the border. Have you spoken with him? What's he like? I have many times. He is, how would I put this? He is a very sort of gruff, plain spoken talker. He really likes to use tough language to describe immigrants. He's sort of bombastic. You know, in an interview recently, he was sort of threatening gang members and saying, we're going to deport you.

14:00And he said, my gang is bigger than your gang. Your days are numbered. My gang's bigger than your gang. And we're going to take you out of the country. We're going to port you out of here. So that's the sort of thing he'll say. But by all accounts, he's a pretty smart guy. I mean, he was a federal agent sort of investigating mass smuggling rings and other sorts of things like that for almost 40 years. And so I think he does sort of have the know-how to pull off some kind of large-scale operation. Homan is one of the people who came up with the idea of family separation, which was put into action in the first Trump administration.

14:39He called it zero tolerance. You know, he said, we should be prosecuting people if they cross the border illegally. We should prosecute them even if they're parents. And that would have sort of the double effect of punishing them because that would then take their children away from them while they're being prosecuted. In his inauguration speech, Trump promised to deport millions and millions of people. Do you think that's realistic? And will Tom Homan be able to carry that out? That is like the question of the hour, Kate. I have written a lot about the challenges that they're going to face to deport people.

15:21Everything from limited government resources to sort of legal hurdles they face that most people are going to need. To go, you know, have a court hearing before they can be deported. All sorts of things that they're going to have to navigate. But if there's any group of people who could potentially try to pull this off, I think it is these people. And so I also don't want to underestimate them. And something interesting that I've observed since the end of the campaign is that Tom Homan actually has been really narrowing this promise of a mass deportation. Trump, you know, during the campaign would say, we're going to deport 15 million people, 20 million people.

16:04Now Tom Homan's on air saying we're going to go after criminals. Well, you know, we don't have an exact estimate of how many immigrants in the country illegally have criminal records, but I would ballpark it as somewhere between half a million to maybe a little bit over a million. That's a much smaller universe of people than Trump was talking about. And I think part of the reason that's gone unnoticed is because Tom Homan has a real talent for at once saying things that are realistic, but sort of saying them in this gruff, tough talking way, which is what Trump wants. Where does Homan fit in the Trump immigration team?

16:46Homan is nearly at the very top of the food chain. The only person who perhaps outranks him in the government is Stephen Miller. You know, Stephen Miller, I think, is familiar to most of our listeners. He is the architect of Trump's immigration agenda. He's really the true believer who's sort of at the heart and soul of all of his nationalist policies. And Stephen Miller is now the deputy chief of staff of the White House. Stephen Miller is very ideas-driven, very policy-driven, very sort of messaging-driven. and Tom Homan is very operational. And I can see those men sort of complementing each other in that way.

17:25What's your thought on whether Trump's policies will face as much opposition as they did in his first term? I think that Trump's opponents, as with sort of the resistance writ large, are a little bit worn down. And we're seeing that in a few different ways. You know, the immigration organizations that are in position to sue are less well-funded than they were last time. You know, fewer people are giving money. And so something I've heard is that they really feel like they're going to have to pick their battles a lot more, the second Trump administration, than they did last time to sort of say, where are the most sympathetic places where we can weigh in or we can fight back?

18:07But I think this administration, broadly speaking, is coming into office in a much stronger position because they ultimately cleared a lot of those legal hurdles they had last time. And so they can go full throttle on a lot of policies this time where people will have less grounds to sue. How will these executive orders and the Trump administration's approach to immigration change the way immigration works in the U.S.? If these first few days are any guide, I think that we're going to see sort of an unprecedented level of activity to slam the doors of immigration shut and to do so in increasingly creative ways.

18:57What are you watching for in the coming days and weeks? I really am watching to see whether the raids that we've been anticipating and reporting on are going to materialize and whether they're going to look different from ICE operations in the past. There is a world in which this administration could sort of conduct business as usual or even a slightly stepped up version of business as usual, but amplify it in a way where it looks very sinister and it looks like it's a new scale. And so that's something I'm going to be watching really closely. Yesterday, the Department of Justice said it would investigate state and local officials who obstruct immigration enforcement.

19:46And today, officials said that the Pentagon is sending up to 1 ,500 active-duty troops to the southern border.

20:04That's all for today, Wednesday, January 22nd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Nancy Youssef and Tarini Partey. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.