An analysis of Trump's Anti-Immigrant Executive Orders

As promised, Trump signed nearly 100 Executive Orders on his first day back in office

Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

President Donald Trump wasted no time after his inauguration going after his favorite target: Latinos, formerly known to him and his base as Mexicans. Trump did what many expected him to do like signing copious executive orders covering myriad manufactured issues alongside a few surprises like appointing the deputy director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Jennifer Higgins, to acting director.

Below, we’ll assess the first executive orders regarding immigration.

Declared An Immigration National Emergency

President Trump’s declaration of an immigration national emergency opens the door for him to send the U.S. military to the U.S.-Mexico border to assist with border security. It also lays the groundwork for cutting off all asylum claims and challenging U.S. citizenship for children born to noncitizen parents in the U.S. This is the first step in undermining constitutionally protected birthright citizenship and also creates the foundation for mass deportations.

“America’s sovereignty is under attack. Our southern border is overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics that harm Americans, including America. – White House website

The order will also allow emergency funds for border wall construction.

Ended the Use of the CBP One App

The administration also ended the use of the CBP One app which allowed migrants to schedule appointments at eight border points of entry. The app allowed migrants to enter the U.S. legally. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) stated that all existing appointments made through the app have been canceled leaving thousands of migrants in limbo. The CBP One app worked as a lottery system granting no more than 1,450 appointments per day.

“Effective January 20, 2025, the functionalities of CBP One that previously allowed undocumented aliens to submit advance information and schedule appointments at eight southwest border ports of entry is no longer available, and existing appointments have been canceled.” – Customs and Border Protection

It’s worth noting that Amnesty International declared that the CBP One App violates the rights of people seeking asylum according to both U.S. and international law. In May, Paul O’Brien, the Executive Director of Amnesty International said, “The CBP One application turns the legal right to asylum into a lottery system based on chance.”

End Catch and Release

Despite most drugs entering the U.S. being smuggled by U.S. citizens, this executive order portrays migrants seeking asylum as committing these crimes. It conflates one nonexistent program with a nearly nonexistent issue. What isn’t surprising is how the administration is pulling out all the stops to blame immigrants for all the internal problems in the U.S.

One thing this country is known for is blaming nonwhite people for all its problems.

“Deadly narcotics and other illicit materials have flowed across the border while agents and officers spend their limited resources processing illegal aliens for release into the United States. These catch-and-release policies undermine the rule of law and our sovereignty, create substantial risks to public safety and security, and divert critical resources away from stopping the entry of contraband and fugitives into the United States.“

Let’s start by clarifying that there is no “catch and release” program and that the term is used by fishermen and hunters. That such a phrase is used is standard practice in the U.S. which has a long history of dehumanizing nonwhite communities. We should also acknowledge that due process is a right guaranteed to migrants under the constitution just as equal protection under the law is and that courts have also set limits on how long migrants can be detained.

“President Trump will take bold action to secure our border and protect American communities. This includes ending Biden’s catch-and-release policies, reinstating Remain in Mexico, building the wall, ending asylum for illegal border crossers, cracking down on criminal sanctuaries, and enhancing vetting and screening of aliens.” – White House website

It should also be noted that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a limited detention space and lacks the resources, staff, and funding required to detain migrants indefinitely. However, in preparation for the incoming administration, the private prison industry has positioned itself to accommodate Trump’s plans which will be a major boon for shareholders

President Biden seemingly helped Trump by extending private prison contracts allowing them to look into options for expanding their migrant detention capacity, according to an investigation by The Guardian in December. Bills like the Laken Riley Act, which demands migrants accused (not convicted) of simple crimes like shoplifting be detained and deported, have made their way through Congress ensuring increased profits for the private prison system.

Reinstate Remain in Mexico Policy

While Biden never fully ended this program, hence the need for the CBP One App, Trump plans to reinstate his Remain in Mexico policy to levels seen during COVID. There have been rumors of Trump invoking Title 42 again but with seemingly no reason to do so, this appears to be his workaround to closing the border to migrants. What remains unclear is if Mexico will allow this.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum expressed that Mexico would gladly accept repatriations of Mexicans but was not too keen on accepting migrants from all over the world being jettisoned to Mexico. This sets up an indefinite detention scenario for migrants who come from countries that the U.S. does not have a repatriation agreement with such as Venezuela and Cuba.

This is a concern I raised months ago on social media discussing the human costs of mass deportations and Mike Howell from the Heritage Foundation told me to stop being so negative and focus on the “human profits” of it all. When considering that ICE and private detention facilities are only required to pay detainees $1 per day for labor, the motivations of someone like Howell and the private prison industry are becoming clearer.

Designated Cartels as Terrorist Organizations

Another one of Trump’s campaign promises is one his base salivated over: designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations and invading Mexico. However, the executive order also designates street gangs in foreign countries such as Tren de Aragua in Venezuela. Trump is also invoking the Alien Enemies Act to remove suspected members of the gangs from the U.S.

How they are to be designated remains unclear and only promises to create additional chaos for potentially innocent migrants and the agencies involved.

“The Cartels and other transnational organizations, such as TdA and MS-13, operate both within and outside the United States. They present an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. I hereby declare a national emergency, under IEEPA [International Emergency Economic Powers Act], to deal with those threats.”

Marco Rubio had doubts about the effectiveness of such a declaration during his Senate confirmation hearing last week. But Rubio is likely to have been cautious about the issue considering his position as Secretary of State was on the line. If Rubio has taught us anything it’s that he’s much more devious behind the scenes than he portrays himself in public spaces.

This will be a key issue to watch due to its broader foreign policy impact.

Suspended Refugee Resettlement

Trump’s camp had been vocal about ending refugee resettlement which would prohibit refugees from war-torn countries and victims of oppressive regimes from seeking asylum in the U.S. The executive order will openly target those coming from countries like Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela. This means extended family separations for refugees with families that still live in their home countries potentially limiting refugees traveling back and forth to those countries as well.

This could lead to beneficiaries of this program being deported at a later date.

“The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees. This order suspends the USRAP until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States.”

The justification for this on the White House website echoes campaign rhetoric saying the administration is doing this, “after communities were forced to house large and unsustainable populations of migrants, straining community safety and resources.”

What they never mentioned was how migrants were intentionally shipped from states that did have the resources through non-governmental organizations (NGOs), like Texas and Florida, to states that didn’t. Governors like Greg Abbott from Texas were intent on creating chaos in cities like New York and Chicago. The news media bit into the bait hard and parroted a lot of far-right rhetoric while rarely calling out Abbott and other governors for creating the problem, thus, leading us to where we are today.

Attempt to End Birthright Citizenship

While constitutionally protected by the 14th Amendment, Trump’s team is doing what it can to undermine birthright citizenship by redefining what it means. The executive order attempts to reinterpret it as it is written despite the Supreme Court clarifying the rights extended by it in various cases over the last 150 years or so.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” – 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

Birthright citizenship is not something Trump can just wish away. Expect court battles over this and having the law potentially reinterpreted however unlikely it may seem. This is one of the issues that makes clear his targeting of Latinos alongside the context of the discussion always being focused on Latin America and the Caribbean Islands. It’s all up to their interpretation.

“But the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Consistent with this understanding, the Congress has further specified through legislation that “a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a national and citizen of the United States at birth, 8 U.S.C. 1401, generally mirroring the Fourteenth Amendment’s text.”

This executive order seems unlikely to pass muster in the federal courts but considering the situation with Trump cronies controlling the Supreme Court, anything can happen. That uncertainty for millions of people will create a tumultuous environment for the next four years should this executive order not be struck down.

Suspending Entry to the United States

The word “invasion” is used profusely throughout the executive orders. It’s a hyperbolic term employed over the last decade quite often and traces its history back to the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th Century and to David Duke in the 1960s. The reality is that the term is only utilized to justify circumventing U.S. and International law and beginning the use of inhumane policies toward immigrants.

“By the power vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, I have determined that the current situation at the southern border qualifies as an invasion under Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution of the United States.”

Despite nothing happening at the southern border qualifying as an “Invasion” Trump’s team decided to declare it one. Based on the dubious declaration, some of the key components of this executive order are Suspension of Entry, Imposition of Restrictions on Entry for Aliens Invading the United States, Suspension of and Restriction on Entry for Aliens Posing Public Health, Safety, or National Security Risks, Constitutional Suspension of Physical Entry, and Operational Actions to Repel the Invasion.

Clarified Military Roles Concerning Immigration

The use of the military along the U.S.-Mexico border is another issue Trump’s base salivated over. The idea began to gain traction when many Republican lawmakers started promoting the idea of shooting migrants crossing the border between points of entry. While the murder aspect of that has died down some, deploying the military satisfies the blood thirst of the administration and its core supporters.

“No later than 10 days from the effective date of this order, deliver to the President a revision to the Unified Command Plan that assigns United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) the mission to seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities.”

The use of the military is contingent upon the language used in the order that suggests it's being implemented to “protect the sovereign territory of the United States from mass unlawful entry and impingement on our national sovereignty and security by foreign nations and transnational criminal organizations” as if countries or cartels are intentionally sending migrants to the U.S. It’s an idea born out of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that suggests Jews are paying people to help migrants reach the U.S. in an intentional effort to make white people extinct.

Something Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, and others firmly believe is happening.

Mass Deportations

To accommodate Trump’s mass deportation plans in light of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) declaring they don’t have the capacity or resources to detain everyone the administration wants to detain, this executive order grants local and state police powers to enforce immigration law and assist federal agencies in the implementation of mass detentions.

“The composition of each HSTF [Homeland Security Task Force] shall be subject to the direction of the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, but shall include representation from any other Federal agencies with law enforcement officers, or agencies with the ability to provide logistics, intelligence, and operational support to the HSTFs, and shall also include representation from relevant State and local law enforcement agencies.”

This executive order blurs the line between the separation of powers which limits federal law enforcement authorities from conducting local policing just as it limits local police’s authority over federal issues. Much discussion has been had about the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution that dictates immigration is solely a federal concern. However, this order attempts to reframe that idea and create an environment that inevitably becomes acceptable in the U.S.

“The Secretary of Homeland Security shall promptly take all appropriate action and allocate all legally available resources or establish contracts to construct, operate, control, or use facilities to detain removable aliens. The Secretary of Homeland Security, further, shall take all appropriate actions to ensure the detention of aliens apprehended for violations of immigration law pending the outcome of their removal proceedings or their removal from the country, to the extent permitted by law.”

Building on the private prison contract extensions for migrant detention and allowing them to pursue avenues to increase capacity under President Biden, this order moves to push the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to allocate resources to allow more detention space to be created in as little time as possible by reallocating funds and resources.

Restoring the Death Penalty

Reinstating the federal death penalty was a given considering Trump’s love for taking people’s lives for simply being accused of a crime (see the Central Park Five). However, the added provision of capital crimes “committed by an alien” shows us the added motivation behind targeting immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean.

“In addition to pursuing the death penalty where possible, the Attorney General shall, where consistent with applicable law, pursue Federal jurisdiction and seek the death penalty regardless of other factors for every federal capital crime involving: (i) The murder of a law-enforcement officer; or (ii) A capital crime committed by an alien illegally present in this country.”

While many will argue that the targeting of Latinos and Caribbean Islanders is a stretch, we should remind them about the context in which “illegal” immigration is discussed, particularly how Latin American and Caribbean Island nations are always part of the discussion and not other countries. That no one ever talks about Europeans who are in the country illegally by overstaying their visas or Ukrainian refugees is also another red flag.

We also recently witnessed the freakout over Indians and Chinese immigrants here on H-1B visas. That came as a result of their not being part of the discussion by any news media largely because of the Latinophoibic nature of the immigration debate. Yet, that discussion showed us the bigoted and racist nature of all of these policies.

Conclusion

Like most of the legislation being pushed by Republicans in Congress, it’s about the messaging and throwing red meat to the base which believes in copious amounts of misinformation regarding many issues his campaign ran on. Despite the messaging aspect of these orders and bills being pushed by Republicans, they are extremely dangerous for nonwhite immigrants who are the clear targets of all these actions. The orders will likely face legal challenges.

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I’m a freelance journalist. Find my work at Latino Rebels, Unicorn Riot, The Antagonist Magazine, and more. I’m also on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Threads. To support my work, become a paid subscriber or donate via Venmo, PayPal, or CashApp.