President Trump's radical immigration agenda takes shape | The Excerpt
On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: While on the campaign trail, then presidential-candidate Donald Trump made illegal immigration his signature issue and also his scapegoat, routinely equating immigrants with criminals. On Day 1 of his presidency, Trump sought to make good on his campaign promises, signing a flurry of executive orders related to the southern border, illegal immigration and refugee admissions. What’s in all of this legislation and what kinds of impacts are we already seeing? Paste BN National Reporter Lauren Villagran joins The Excerpt to share her reporting.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, January 26th, 2025. On the campaign trail then-presidential candidate Donald Trump made illegal immigration his signature issue, and also his scapegoat routinely equating immigrants with criminals. On day one of his presidency, Trump sought to make good on his campaign promises to curb illegal immigration by passing a flurry of executive orders related to the southern border and refugee admissions. What's in the legislation that he either signed by executive order or was passed by Congress in week one of the Trump presidency? And what kinds of impacts are we already seeing? Here to make sense of it all is USA Today national reporter covering immigration. Lauren Villagran. Lauren, thanks for joining me.
Lauren Villagran:
Thank you.
Dana Taylor:
Lauren, one of President Trump's first official acts as president was to declare a national emergency at the US-Mexico border. What kinds of federal resources does this declaration enable? And how has that been playing out so far?
Lauren Villagran:
Yeah, so that was one of his first orders of business on day one, as he promised, he declared a national border emergency, which opens up avenues for, as you mentioned, additional resources, the potential for quickly, for example, procuring private contracts to support immigration enforcement. It opens the door to a whole host of authorities that he will be able to use.
Dana Taylor:
There have been reports of activity by Border Patrol and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. What do we know so far?
Lauren Villagran:
So Dana, it's a little hard this early into the administration to parse what is typical everyday immigration enforcement in the United States, and what is the ramp up by President Donald Trump? There have been reports around the country. It does seem like certainly immigrant communities are on edge. Even before Trump took office, there were reports of Border Patrol targeting migrants, for example, in Bakersfield, California. USA Today, myself and photographer Josh Morgan went out with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week following along as they arrested migrants with criminal records. So again, some of what we're seeing is just the regular day-to-day enforcement. We have yet to see a real ramp up of deportations for example.
Dana Taylor:
Our colleague Chris Kenning, had an especially moving story this week about flights to the US for Afghan refugees that are being canceled and how people who were supposed to be on them are reacting. There are still a couple of thousand Afghan allies who were still hoping to make it here. The US promised to bring them and their relatives back to the States but those admissions will be suspended on Monday, January 27th. With the Taliban in power and their lives in danger, many of them have been in hiding for years now. What does the future hold for them?
Lauren Villagran:
Well, Dana, like we're seeing with the folks who were supposed to be resettled here from Afghanistan, we're seeing something similar playing out in living rooms across the world, really, for those who were seeking an entrance to the United States under the formal refugee resettlement program. For those families, it's devastating. Trump did promise throughout his campaign that he was going to stop refugee resettlement and curb legal immigration in a variety of ways. This was one of his first actions, and it should come as no surprise because he did something similar during his first administration. It's similar to what's happening at the US-Mexico border, where also on day one, President Trump canceled the CBP One cell phone application, which was another "legal" pathway that the Biden administration had set up for folks to seek asylum. We saw families in tears as that program got shut down. With the refugee resettlement program, it was especially intense because some of these families have been vetted and planning for years and had plane tickets as our colleague Chris Kenning reported, plane tickets to the United States that ultimately were canceled.
Dana Taylor:
There was a heartbreaking photograph captured by USA Today photographer Omar Ornelas at the El Paso border on Inauguration Day. The photo was of a 48-year-old Colombian woman sobbing as she learned that the CBP One app had canceled her 1:00 PM appointment for refugee application be processed by Customs and Border Protection as you mentioned. What happens to these people now?
Lauren Villagran:
Nobody knows. We don't know if they're going to be given an opportunity to seek asylum or cross under Trump's planned Remain in Mexico Program, which is a reboot of the migrant protection protocols from the previous administration. That was the program where folks who crossed the border seeking asylum would be granted an appointment with a US immigration judge, sometimes weeks or months out, and they would be forced to wait in northern Mexico border cities for those appointments. That program, as far as I know, hasn't actually restarted, but there are plans to reboot it. There are an estimated 30,000 people waiting for CBP One appointments in the north of Mexico, and so it will also be up to Mexico what happens to those folks, many of whom are from other countries, from Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Haiti, other locations. It's devastating for those who sought an opportunity to cross the border Legally. Many people, as I and colleagues, including Omar Ornelas have reported, have crossed 12 countries, sometimes been on a journey that has lasted months to reach the US border, only to see their appointments now shut down.
Dana Taylor:
On Inauguration Day, President Trump also signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship, essentially the right to claim status as an American citizen if you're born here. That order was immediately challenged by a number of organizations, and on Thursday was temporarily blocked by a federal judge in Seattle who called it, "blatantly unconstitutional." Why? And what happens next? Can you please walk us through this?
Lauren Villagran:
Yeah, Dana. So this is one of the new steps that the Trump administration has taken to try to curb immigration. Not illegal immigration, but legal immigration. So what the order purports to do is mandate that the federal government not recognize the citizenship of any child, any baby born to a mother who is here on a visa legally or here undocumented or illegally, if neither she nor the father or the other parent is a US citizen. So what we know is that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship. That means anyone born in this country with the very small exception of the children of foreign diplomats, is a US citizen.
That amendment was forged in the wake of the Civil War, and it was meant to provide restitution and recognition to formerly enslaved people to recognize their citizenship in the United States. It has been challenged not in many, many years, and the Supreme Court has recognized that anyone, again born in the United States is a US citizen regardless of their parentage. Almost immediately, immigrant rights organizations, as well as more than a dozen states filed a variety of lawsuits challenging the legality of this executive order, which they say violates the Constitution and that 14th Amendment.
Dana Taylor:
Those who are in the United States under the Temporary Protected Status program or TPS, Haitians, for instance, what happens to them?
Lauren Villagran:
So a move we haven't seen yet, but that many are expecting is that the hundreds of thousands of people in this country lawfully under something called Temporary Protected Status could be revoked. President Biden extended Temporary Protected Status for several nationalities, including Sudanese and Venezuelans, hoping to enshrine their protections for at least a couple more years. However, the Trump administration can quickly revoke status. There is a waiting period of at least 60 days, so it can't happen immediately. But we do know that that is something the Trump administration is evaluating. It was a promise made during the campaign. Everyone will recall when President Trump and Vice President Vance talked about issues, with what they saw as issues with Haitian migrants in a city in Ohio, and they had talked about revoking that status. So I think that community certainly is on pins and needles waiting to see whether they could see their lawful status canceled.
Dana Taylor:
Our colleague Bart Jansen has written about a move by the Trump administration to investigate state and local officials who hinder the immigration crackdown. Walk us through that, please.
Lauren Villagran:
So from the get-go, president Trump has said he wants to see localities work with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So that means local police, local sheriff's offices working hand in glove with immigration deportation agents. Now across the country, cities, counties, states have decided that they are sanctuaries. What does that mean? It means that their local law enforcement promises not to work with ICE on immigration enforcement. Now, why would they do something like that? In communities that are heavily immigrant, the local police often want immigrant communities to know that they are safe if they come forward, if they are victims of crime, if they witness a crime. And say that if they were to work with ICE directly, that could jeopardize that community trust. Now, there are many other jurisdictions in the United States, including Republican-led states, cities, and counties that are eager to work with ICE and are lining up. Florida, Texas for example.
Dana Taylor:
Earlier last week, Congress also passed the Laken Riley Act to crack down on illegal immigration. Tell me what that legislation does.
Lauren Villagran:
This is the first legislation, bipartisan legislation in Congress to pass dealing with immigration enforcement in years. It has been heavily criticized because the legislation asks a lot of ICE and doesn't provide additional resources. For example, it requires the mandatory detention of immigrants charged with or accused of crimes, nonviolent crimes, including shoplifting or theft, including crimes that may be decades old or for which they may have served time. ICE only has 41,500 detention beds. That's what Congress pays for currently. So Congress would have to follow up this legislation with a massive outlay of resources for detention. ICE also only has 6,000 deportation officers nationwide. So this is a big ask for the immigration enforcement agency to fulfill, but it's one that its proponents say is necessary to crack down on illegal immigration. Of course, Laken Riley was the young woman in Georgia murdered allegedly by an undocumented immigrant.
Dana Taylor:
Lauren, I know you've also been talking with immigrant communities across the country since Trump's election win. What kinds of things are you hearing?
Lauren Villagran:
Dana, there's certainly a lot of fear. We, as we said earlier, have not seen a significant ramp up in immigration enforcement yet, but many believe it's coming, and that has a lot of immigrant communities on edge. Folks who may have been living, openly working, bringing their kids to school, they may be questioning their daily routines. For example, the Trump administration has said that churches and schools are no longer off limits for Border Patrol enforcement and ICE enforcement. That may give pause to some parents, and it's something that we saw during the first Trump administration as well. A lot of fear among children who worry that when they get home from school, their mom or dad or both might not be there.
Dana Taylor:
And finally, what kinds of actions are you expecting to see on the immigration front in the coming weeks and months?
Lauren Villagran:
I think what we are watching here at USA Today will certainly be how the Department of Defense rolls out its participation in immigration enforcement. The Defense Department is sending roughly 1,500 troops to the border. We know that they're going to be lining up military planes to deport immigrants in the country unlawfully with removal orders. I understand that the Trump administration is trying to work out some of those deportation agreements right now with countries of origin for the immigrant population here. And so I think we're going to be looking at that ramp up. I think we're also going to see immigration detention on military bases. To what extent and where, that's not clear yet.
Dana Taylor:
Lauren, it's always good to get your insights. Thanks so much for being on The Excerpt.
Lauren Villagran:
Thanks for having me, Dana.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.