Donald Trump has hit the ground running on his hardline immigration agenda, setting the stage for a massive deportation campaign—and turning up the pressure on any officials in his way.
Since taking office Monday, the president has issued a dizzying array of executive orders on immigration and the border, including one that would end the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, which triggered immediate lawsuits and will likely be the first major legal fight of the Trump administration.
The federal agencies under his watch have followed suit: The Pentagon on Wednesday announced it would deploy 1,500 United States troops to the southern border, citing the national emergency Trump declared on his first day. “This is just the beginning,” Robert Salesses, the acting defense secretary, said in a statement. “President Trump directed action from the Department of Defense on securing our nation’s borders and made clear he expects immediate results. That is exactly what our military is doing under his leadership.”
That move came after the Department of Homeland Security rolled back Biden administration humanitarian parole policy, and rescinded guidelines that restricted Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from conducting raids in “sensitive” areas like churches and schools. “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement,” acting DHS secretary Benjamine Huffman said, “and instead trusts them to use common sense.”
That’s drawn blowback from local officials in blue states. “We are not going to interact with ICE,” Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez said this week, as the city braced to become one of the early targets of the Trump crackdown on undocumented immigrants. But the president intends to wield his Department of Justice against officials and governments that defy him: In a DOJ memo Tuesday, Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, said the department will investigate those who decline to cooperate with the enforcement of Trump’s immigration policies. “It is the responsibility of the Justice Department to defend the Constitution and, accordingly, to act lawfully to execute the policies that the American people elected President Trump to implement,” Bove wrote.
It remains to be seen if such threats will cow officials like Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, both of whom have insisted they would not comply with the Trump administration. But Trump’s blitz of immigration measures has empowered state-level immigration hardliners, like the Mississippi Republicans seeking to create an “Illegal Alien Bounty Hunter” program that would reward private citizens for deportations they help facilitate, and appears already to be putting political pressure on swing-state Democrats to fall in line, as 12 in the Senate and 46 in the House did when they voted with Republicans to pass the Laken Riley Act this week. That bill, which heads to Trump’s desk, would make it easier to detain and deport undocumented immigrants charged with minor crimes. Democrats had broadly opposed it when it was first put forth by Republicans last year.
The fact that dozens of Capitol Hill Democrats have now come around on such a hardline immigration bill is a “snapshot of how much the needle has been moved by the anti-immigrant rhetoric of immigrants committing crimes, even though the statistics don’t show that,” as Marielena Hincapié, distinguished immigration visiting scholar at Cornell Law School, put it to NPR. “Both Democrats and Republicans are reacting to that narrative and to the election results.”
It’s a flood-the-zone approach to immigration. But the crackdown also appears to be more methodical and more sophisticated in its strategy, than the one Trump tried in his first term. “They had stuff ready to go,” Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for restricting immigration, told Politico. “They had their ducks lined up better.”
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