Mass deportations, border crackdowns and ending DACA: Trump's 2nd term immigration agenda
After defeating Vice President Kamala Harris, winning both the electoral college and popular vote by wide margins, President-elect Donald Trump said he has a mandate from voters across the country to make good on his campaign promises, especially on immigration and the border.
“We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly,” he told his supporters early Wednesday morning in his victory speech. “We’re going to fix our borders; we’re going to fix everything about our country. We made history for a reason tonight.”
Like Trump's first White House term, which focus on immigration priorities such as his signature border wall project, his next term likely will put a similar emphasis on the issues.
From expanding deportation guidelines to further curbing asylum access, here’s what President-elect Trump’s first day in the Oval Office may look like:
Trump has repeatedly promised a mass deportation operation
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump called for “the largest deportation operation in American history.”
The removal of undocumented immigrants has been a fundamental part of Trump's platform, but he has provided few details on how he would carry out deportations en masse. The few details he has shared include using the National Guard and local law enforcement such as police departments to carry out his plans.
“If I thought things were getting out of control, I would have no problem using the military,” he told TIME magazine earlier this year.
There are an estimated 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. without documentation, according to government estimates from 2022. A report published by FWD.us projects that nearly 28 million Americans, including 20 million Latinos, live in mixed-status households.
“This amounts to about 1 in 12 total U.S. residents, and nearly 1 in 3 Latinos, at risk of deportation or family separation,” according to the report.
The American Immigration Council estimates that Trump’s plan would cost the U.S. more than $315 billion, accounting for an additional estimated 2.3 million people released into the country by U.S. Customs and Border Protection between January 2023 and April 2024.
Trump unveiled “Operation Aurora” at an Oct. 11 campaign stop in Aurora, Colorado, where he provided more details on how he planned to carry out the deportation of undocumented immigrants with gang ties.
"I make this pledge and vow to you, November 5, 2024, will be liberation day in America," Trump said to his supporters. "I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered."
To carry out his plans, Trump said he intended to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law that allows the president to deport any noncitizen who is from a country with whom the U.S. is at war. Paste BN reported last month that Trump possibly could use the same authority that President Franklin Roosevelt deployed during World War II to detain people of Japanese, German and Italian descent.
Other deportation plans include the removal of “pro-Hamas radicals” to “make our college campuses safe and patriotic again,” according to the Trump campaign’s website.
How would Trump crackdown at the border?
Speaking at the Arizona-Mexico border in Cochise County in August 2024, Trump emphasized the need for “strong borders” after four years of Biden’s policies.
Trump listed his first term’s accomplishments such as partially ending catch-and-release and rolling out the controversial Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as the “Remain in Mexico” program.
“Everybody remained in Mexico until they were checked out, and either they came in or not. Most of them didn't qualify,” Trump said. “The final gaps of the wall were about to be sealed, then Kamala came in and dismantled every single Trump border policy and halted all wall construction."
Curbing immigration at the Southwestern border has remained a major piece of Trump’s campaign and presidency. The president-elect has promised to “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion,” according to the Trump campaign’s Agenda 47 platform.
Trump pledged to resume border wall construction, which paused after he lost the 2020 election. During his first administration, Trump pushed for the construction of about 450 miles of new barriers which cost about $11 billion set aside by Congress in 2019. Most of the construction replaced old, existing fencing.
Trump also proposed adding 10,000 Border Patrol agents at a campaign stop in Prescott Valley, Ariz., where he accepted the endorsement from the National Border Patrol Council. The Border Patrol has struggled to hire and retain agents in recent years despite having funded positions available to fill.
Art Del Cueto, the vice president for the National Border Patrol Council, shared some optimism in an October interview with The Arizona Republic at a campaign event that Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, held in Tucson.
“I think it's achievable, but you have to achieve it through the proper policies,” Del Cueto said. He criticized a similar plan the Harris campaign had announced to hire more agents.
“If they're going to get more agents, just so they can sit in processing centers and process faster, it doesn't make any sense,” Del Cueto said.
He noted that hiring more agents will become increasingly important as more agents begin to hit their retirement age.
Trump has also declined repeatedly to answer whether he would resume family separations at the border.
Here are the legal immigration processes Trump wants to curb
During his second term in office, Donald Trump has vowed to end or drastically change many of the legal pathways set up so that migrants and refugees can reach the United States without having to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.
“As President I will immediately end the migrant invasion of America,” Trump published Sept. 14 in a Truth Social message.
That includes well-established pathways such as the refugee resettlement process, which has been in place for decades. Last year, the U.S. State Department resettled more than 100,000 refugees, the highest number since 1994.
The president has the authority to set a ceiling on how many vetted refugees to admit into the country. When Trump took office in 2017, he decreased the ceilings year after year, eventually hitting a 40-year low in 2021 with only 11,400 refugee admissions that year.
But Trump’s plans also include doing away with the humanitarian parole authority that allowed the Biden administration to process and release thousands of migrants into the country, under a so-called “catch and release” strategy.
Trump promised to end the CBP One phone app, which is the only legal pathway for asylum seekers to make their claims at border ports of entry. The Department of Homeland Security makes 1,450 appointments available daily.
He has criticized the CHNV program, which allowed U.S. border officials to vet migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela and then have them fly into the U.S. under parole. Trump claimed this amounts to a circumvention of immigration laws, criticized the flights and vowed to end them immediately.
Stephen Miller, his closest immigration adviser and the author of many harsh immigration policies, has attempted to limit the availability of legal visas, such as green cards, during the previous Trump administration. Reports indicate he may try to limit other legal processes under a second Trump term.
Will Trump finally succeed in ending DACA?
During his first year as president in 2017, Trump unsuccessfully tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. He ran into a major roadblock when the U.S. Supreme Court blocked his attempts to undo the program in 2020 on procedural grounds.
Since that time, DACA has been subject to a federal lawsuit filed by Texas and other Republican states to declare the program unlawful. That case is before the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans and a decision could come at any moment.
While Trump has not addressed the future of the 12-year-old DACA program under a second term, his past actions lead many recipients to believe that as president he will once again target them for deportation.
There are approximately 535,000 active DACA recipients living in the United States, including about 20,000 active recipients in Arizona.
In 2020, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the high court’s four liberals to keep DACA in place. But one potentially key difference this time around is that the court’s ideological center has shifted sharply to the right.
That means that even without Roberts’ support, there are enough conservative justices to end the program, if (and when) Texas’ lawsuit challenging DACA makes its way to them.
Paste BN contributed to this story.