Newsletter: Trump Week 1 Immigration Actions

Is this the "shock & awe" his campaign promised voters?

The first week of the Trump Administration has resulted in a flurry of immigration actions. If you’ve had trouble keeping up, here is a comprehensive summary, courtesy of the Washington Office on Latin America (wola.org). This will be longer than our goal of a 5-minute read, but there’s a lot to unpack:

CBP One appointments canceled

• An executive order abruptly halted asylum seekers’ use of the CBP One smartphone app that, over two years, allowed over 936,500 people in Mexican territory to schedule appointments at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. Since July 2023, appointments averaged about 1,450 per day.

• Late on January 23, the New York Times revealed that, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memo, the new administration is granting agents the discretion to revoke the humanitarian parole status given to those who arrived with CBP One appointments, essentially leaving them undocumented unless they have applied for another status. The discretion to strip parole status could affect up to 1,468,190 people in the United States ( as of December 31), combining parole granted to CBP One arrivals and that given to participants in a program for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (see below). Many have probably sought other statuses like asylum applications or, if eligible, Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

• About 270,000 people inside Mexico have been using the app to try to secure appointments, sharing biometric and other personal data with CBP.

• Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had been scheduling appointments at ports of entry for a few weeks after January 20. The new administration’s order canceled all of those appointments, stranding about 30,000 people inside Mexico.

• The Washington Post, New York Times, El Paso Times, Associated Press, Texas Tribune, BBC, CNN, La Verdad de Juárez, Milenio, Norte, Houston Landing, and iNewSource covered the anguished, despairing reactions of people from several nations, many of whom had undergone arduous overland journeys to Mexico, upon learning that the new administration canceled their long-awaited appointments.

• Between the Biden administration’s June 2024 ban on asylum access between ports of entry and the new cancellation of CBP One appointments at ports of entry, there is currently no practical pathway to protection for migrants arriving at the border. This is despite the guarantee, in Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, that people physically present in the United States may seek asylum if they fear harm upon return.

• The disappearance of CBP One as an alternative asylum pathway led the ACLU to file a motion in an ongoing case against the Biden administration’s June rule restricting asylum access.

• The app’s closure may lead some of the most desperate to attempt to enter the United States while evading Border Patrol. This dangerous option usually involves making a big payment to organized crime-tied smugglers. “I saw the posts that went viral with migrants crying at the border. It was exactly the same here: people are desperate,” Josué Leal, from a shelter in Mexico’s southern state of Tabasco, told the Guardian. “The great majority here now have the idea to get moving, to start going north.” Pedro Ríos of AFSC San Diego told Border Report, “CBP One was the only legal pathway to seek asylum. Now that it’s gone, migrants will be forced to cross the border illegally to seek asylum.”

Shutdown of processing migrants and asylum seekers

• An executive order has suspended the entry of undocumented migrants to the United States under any circumstances. Border Patrol agents are now summarily turning people away regardless of protection needs. The order claims that all who make it to U.S. soil “are restricted from invoking” provisions like asylum. It further restricts undocumented people who cannot prove satisfactory medical and criminal histories.

• CBS News reported that Border Patrol agents “have been instructed to summarily deport migrants crossing into the country illegally without allowing them to request legal protection.” Two CBP sources told CBS that “migrants will not be allowed to see an immigration judge or asylum officer.” Personnel are rapidly deporting adults and families after taking their biometric data and fingerprints. Non-Mexican migrants “are to be detained pending their deportation.”

• It claims its legal basis in section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the President to ban entry of entire classes of migrants but may not ban asylum access to people on U.S. soil who have already entered the United States. It appears to seek to override that with a novel claim that the United States is facing an “invasion” (see below).

• A CBP order obtained by the Washington Post “directs border agents to block entry to migrants on the grounds that they have passed through countries where communicable diseases are present,” without specifying any disease.

• “The fundamental promise of asylum—that someone fleeing danger can present themselves to U.S. officials to seek safety—remained intact in one form or another. With these executive actions, asylum, in that form, is dead,” reads an analysis from the American Immigration Council.

• Under extraordinary cases where asylum seekers actually get processed, the administration intends to detain them as their cases proceed. Any releases into the U.S. interior must have the approval of the chief or deputy chief of Border Patrol in Washington.

“Remain in Mexico” restarts

• The same executive order that halts CBP One restarts the “Remain in Mexico” program, which requires non-Mexican asylum seekers to await their U.S. hearing dates inside Mexican territory.

• In January 21 comments, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum did not say that her government would block the U.S. government from returning non-Mexican migrants with appointments in U.S. immigration courts. “It’s nothing new,” she said of the program. “This is something we don’t agree with. We have a different focus. We want to adjust it,” said Foreign Minister Juan Ramón de la Fuente.

• During the first Trump administration, more than 71,000 asylum seekers had to “remain in Mexico.” Human rights monitors compiled over 1,500 examples of violent crimes these people suffered during their wait at the hands of Mexican organized crime and corrupt officials.

• With asylum effectively blocked and the border putatively sealed to undocumented people, it is not clear against whom the new administration plans to apply a revived “Remain in Mexico.”

• At least two moderate Democrats from districts that went for Donald Trump in November (Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Glueskamp Perez of Washington) have co-sponsored a Republican-led House bill that would compel the U.S. government to carry out “Remain in Mexico” rather than make it optional.

Humanitarian parole programs end

• The new administration has shut down the Biden administration’s use of a presidential humanitarian parole authority to allow up to a combined 30,000 citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, with passports and U.S.-based sponsors, to enter the United States without having to cross a land border. The program provided a two-year parole status inside the United States to over 531,690 citizens of those countries since late 2022, relieving pressure from the border.

“Mass deportation”

• An executive order mandated the creation of “Homeland Security Task Forces” to manage interior deportation operations in all 50 states.

• It calls for a dramatic expansion of detention facilities and the enlistment of state and local law enforcement to assist in the administration’s promised “ mass deportation” effort. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “is preparing to more than double its detention capacity by opening four new 10,000-bed facilities and 14 smaller sites with space for 700 to 1,000 people,” the Washington Post reported.

• It calls for cutting federal funds to states and municipalities that do not fully cooperate with ICE, including those who fear that such cooperation would hobble policing in communities with significant undocumented populations. The administration has directed federal prosecutors to investigate and potentially prosecute state and local officials who do not cooperate with “mass deportation,” the Washington Post and Bloomberg revealed.

• It requires all noncitizens to register with the U.S. government, presenting their fingerprints. Failure to do so will trigger criminal penalties.

• The administration has eliminated a guidance, which goes back to 2011, preventing ICE personnel from entering “sensitive” facilities like churches, schools, and hospitals. “Rolling back sensitive-location protections risks undermining community trust and, ultimately, ICE’s ability to effectively protect our communities in the long term,” Jason Houser, who served as ICE chief of staff during much of the Biden administration, told the New York Times.

• The new administration would further speed deportations by applying “expedited removal” in the U.S. interior to all who cannot prove that they have lived in the United States for at least two years. Usually used only at the U.S.-Mexico border, this procedure can deport someone quickly without involving an immigration judge. “The overwhelming majority of people in expedited removal are unable to secure legal representation or even consult with a legal representative while detained before being summarily deported,” Human Rights First observed. The ACLU and Make the Road New York have filed suit against this provision.

• White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan said that ICE would not be carrying out raids in Chicago in the first days after inauguration, after news of the plan leaked to the Wall Street Journal and other outlets. Still, the Chicago Tribune reported, people across the city opted to stay home from work.

• A November ICE response to a Fox News inquiry indicated that 1,445,549 people in the United States were on the agency’s “non-detained docket” with final orders of removal, placing them among the most susceptible to rapid deportation. The top ten nationalities listed were as follows. The numbers are not the totality of people facing removal; they are just those who have little or no remaining recourse in the immigration court system:

  • Honduras 261,651

  • Guatemala 253,413

  • Mexico 252,044

  • El Salvador 203,822

  • Nicaragua 45,995

  • Cuba 42,084

  • Brazil 38,677

  • China 37,908

  • Haiti 32,363

  • Ecuador 31,252

• Citing data from Syracuse University’s currently defunct Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), the Central American news site Expediente Público reported that 488,397 Hondurans are currently on deportation order lists—equal to nearly 5 percent of the country’s population.

• The administration fired the acting head of the Justice Department’s immigration court system and three other senior officials.

• Arizona Luminaria covered how community groups in southern Arizona “have been brainstorming, emotionally preparing, conducting know-your-rights trainings, getting documents in order, and more, in readiness for the possible crackdown.”

• The administration announced the deportation of 308 people on January 21, which is not a departure from Biden-era levels. It deported about 176 into Mexico’s organized crime-plagued border state of Tamaulipas. In what may be the first of a daily series of updates, ICE tweeted on January 23 that it carried out 538 arrests that day.

• The Justice Department halted programs, carried out through non-governmental organizations, that funded legal guidance to immigrants facing deportation and legal representation to unaccompanied migrant children.

• Asked on an Italian talk show on January 19 about Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” pledge, Pope Francis replied, “If true, this will be a disgrace, because it makes the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill… This won’t do! This is not the way to solve things. That’s not how things are resolved.”

Declaring that the United States is under “invasion”

• Some executive orders adopt a radical legal theory that asylum seekers and economic migrants meet the definition of an “invasion” under Article IV of the U.S. Constitution. Measures like the ban on all entries of undocumented people rest on the existence of an “invasion” and won’t get lifted until President Trump decides that the “invasion” has concluded. The orders’ “invasion” language is vaguely worded.

• The idea that unarmed, non-state, leaderless individuals with humanitarian needs constitute an “invasion” first emerged in Republican circles during the Biden administration. When state governments—especially that of Texas—have sought to use the Constitution’s “invasion” clause to justify hardline anti-immigration policies, “courts have uniformly rejected” them, George Mason University Law School’s Ilya Somin explained in March 2024.

• “The president’s claim that he can simply declare an invasion and thereby eliminate asylum on his own constitutional authority puts us in dangerous and uncharted territory,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who has litigated past high-profile asylum cases, told columnist Greg Sargent at the New Republic.

• “James Madison stated that an ‘[I]nvasion is an operation of war’ in response to claims that the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were authorized by Article IV,” read an analysis at Just Security by Mark P. Nevitt of Emory University School of Law.

• “Of course, unlawful migration is not an ‘invasion’ in any legal sense,” wrote Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice. “The use of commander-in-chief powers to conduct military operations against migrants would be a stunning abuse of power, even by Trump’s standards.”

Domestic use of the U.S. armed forces

• The Defense Department announced that it has formed “a Task Force to oversee expedited implementation of the Executive Orders,” along with a deployment of 1,500 active-duty military personnel to the U.S.-Mexico border.

• The contingent, reportedly about 1,000 Army soldiers and 500 Marines, is meant to be the initial segment of a larger deployment of about 10,000 troops, even though Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions are currently near their lowest levels since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. “This is the initial effort that we can do right away. And then we anticipate many additional missions after this. This is just the start,” said a Defense Department official, according to Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour.

• The Marines had been in California helping put out wildfires.

• “We’ve been told to treat this like a national emergency because it’s been declared a national emergency,” said a Defense Department official cited by CNN. “Don’t be surprised if you see Marines being dropped off by helicopters.”

• About 2,200 troops, nearly all of them National Guard personnel, are already serving at the border under federal command. Those troops have primarily played a behind-the-scenes role in support of CBP. They are distinct from the roughly 4,500 troops deployed in a more aggressive role by the state of Texas under the direct command of Gov. Greg Abbott (R).

• The Biden administration had sent 1,500 active-duty troops to the border in May 2023, for 90 days, to provide additional staffing after that month’s suspension of the “Title 42” pandemic expulsions policy.

• None of the new military personnel “at the moment are intended to perform any law enforcement actions, and they have not received law enforcement training,” reported Schifrin. However, many of the Army personnel will be military police, according to CNN. “The decision to arm them would be left up to the commander for U.S. Northern Command,” reported USA Today, citing a Defense Department official. A “senior Marine official” told Jennifer Griffin of Fox News, “Our response will be immediate. We are going in ready to respond. If the cartels shoot at us we will not stand by… We will be taking whatever equipment we would send if a Marine Expeditionary Unit or MEU were deploying overseas.”

• Among new military missions, according to a Defense Department memo, will be the operation of military aircraft—two C-17 and two C-130 cargo planes—to deport people. Among those likely facing quick deportation are about 5,500 people currently in CBP custody, mainly in the El Paso and San Diego areas, after recent crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border.

• Troops will also assist with border barrier construction.

• The CBP memo “also says the Defense Department ‘may’ convert its bases into ‘holding facilities’” to stage deportations, CBS News reported. So far, according to Schifrin, “There has been no request to use U.S. military bases for detentions.”

• An executive order would involve the armed forces directly in migration control and mass deportation. It charges U.S. Northern Command, the body responsible for military activities in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Bahamas, with “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.”

• Federal National Guard and small active-duty military deployments have operated at the border since the George W. Bush administration. Those have been explicitly “in support of” civilian law enforcement agencies at the border, with little likelihood of confrontation, or usually even contact, between combat-trained soldiers and migrants—or other civilians—on U.S. soil. Past border missions have been legal exceptions to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which bans the use of soldiers in law enforcement—a phenomenon that WOLA has noted with concern in Latin America’s precarious democracies. Still, past administrations have sought to minimize these exceptions’ footprint and scope.

• The mission foreseen in the new executive order appears more aggressive, likely encouraging Northern Command to emulate the model that the state of Texas has adopted for National Guard personnel at the command of Gov. Greg Abbott (R). At the borderline since 2021, Texas troops have sustained many confrontations with migrants, including the discharge of weapons against civilians and allegations of human rights abuse.

• Beyond the current deployment, an executive order declaring a “ national emergency” at the border enables the use of the National Guard and reserves, and calls for a review of military use of force policies.

• Most notably, it sets a 90-day countdown for the Homeland Security and Defense secretaries to determine whether President Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807. That rarely used statute, an expansive exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, could allow Trump to deploy soldiers not just against migrants, but against U.S. citizens participating in political protests.

• Adm. Kevin Lunday, the Coast Guard’s new acting commandant following the firing of his predecessor, who was the first-ever female commandant, said on January 21 that he had ordered an “immediate surge” of boats to the United States’ maritime borders. Lunday took care to refer to the “Gulf of Mexico” as the “Gulf of America.”

• “I don’t think we need troops in El Paso,” said El Paso’s mayor, Renard Johnson, according to Border Report. “I go back and say we are a very safe community. We are one of the safest cities in the United States and we don’t need troops along our border here because it’s very safe.”

• The executive orders related to the military “reveal the range of legal theories we should expect to play out over the months to come,” read a Lawfare analysis by Chris Mirasola of the University of Houston Law Center. “Some of these legal theories are recycled from Trump’s first term. Others are far more extreme (and dubious) interpretations of statutory authorities and the president’s constitutional powers.”

• “Anglo-American law has a long tradition of military noninterference in civilian affairs, for the simple reason that an army turned inward can quickly become an instrument of tyranny,” recalled the Brennan Center’s Goitien in a clear-eyed analysis of available military force authorities at the Atlantic. Goitien added that emergency powers “are designed to address sudden, unexpected crises that can’t be handled by Congress through ordinary legislation. There is nothing sudden or unexpected about the problems at the southern border, and Congress can—and should—address those problems.”

Placing criminal groups on the “terrorist list”

• An executive order calls for adding Mexican “cartels” (to be specified later) and two Latin American gangs—the El Salvador-originated MS-13 and the Venezuela-originated Tren de Aragua—to the State Department’s listing of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). This would be the first time that purely criminal groups—generating profits for their own enrichment instead of using them for a claimed religious or political objective—would appear on the FTO list.

• The same executive order sets in motion the eventual use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to summarily remove from the United States all noncitizens suspected of ties to these groups. This ancient law contains few due process protections.

• Placing criminal groups on the FTO list would not enable U.S. military strikes inside Mexico without Mexico’s consent. It could pose other challenges, though. The very definition of “cartel”—many of which change names and fragment often—is blurry. A large number of people on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border who have had financial dealings with cartels could suddenly be facing up to 20 years in U.S. prison for being “material supporters” of terrorism. Asylum seekers fleeing threats from organizations now considered FTOs could see their cases strengthened, while those who had to pay ransoms or extortions could face bars to asylum.

Foreign relations

• President Trump said he plans to impose a 25 percent tariff on all products from Mexico and Canada as of February 1. He insisted that both countries are allowing “mass numbers of people and fentanyl” to enter the United States. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated that Mexico would respond with retaliatory tariffs.

• “The Mexican and US economies are tightly intertwined,” wrote Luis Gomez Romero of the University of Wollongong at the Conversation. “If Trump imposes tariffs on Mexican beer, for example, he will also be imposing them on barley from Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota that’s used to make the beer.”

• In a cable to State Department employees, the new secretary, former Florida senator Marco Rubio (R), wrote, “Mass migration is among the most consequential issues of our time. The era of mass migration must end. This Department will no longer undertake any activities that facilitate or encourage it. Any diplomacy with other nations, especially in the Western Hemisphere, will prioritize securing America’s borders, stopping illegal and destabilization migration, and negotiating the repatriation of illegal immigrants.”

• An executive order requires U.S. diplomats to negotiate new “safe third country” agreements. These would obligate other governments to accept U.S. removals of third countries’ citizens, who would then have to seek asylum in the receiving country’s system. The first Trump administration had signed so-called “Asylum Cooperation Agreements” with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The agreement with Guatemala was the only one to begin operating before the COVID pandemic suspended them. According to a 2021 U.S. Senate report, it flew 945 non-Guatemalan asylum seekers to Guatemala City, zero of whom received asylum.

• An executive order indefinitely suspends the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program pending reports, submitted every 90 days, to determine “whether resumption of entry of refugees into the United States under the USRAP would be in the interests of the United States.” Parallel to this, the administration is closing the “Safe Mobility Offices” that the Biden administration had helped establish in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala, where people could be considered for admission through the refugee program or other legal pathways, including the now-canceled humanitarian parole programs. Citing internal State Department documents, CBS News reported on January 23 that these offices will close.

• “I’ve spoken to multiple officials in Venezuela today and will begin meetings early tomorrow morning,” tweeted Ric Grenell, the administration’s “envoy for special missions.” The U.S. government has no diplomatic relations with the regime in Venezuela, which does not allow U.S. deportation flights to land there.

As comprehensive as this list is - the original post @ wola.org covers even more ground. You can read their original post HERE.

(If you found this summary helpful we invite you to support WOLA’s work).

Despite the length of this edition of the US Border News newsletter, we remain committed to our goal of delivering news that is not only educational and insightful but also engaging and easy to digest in five minutes or less.

Abrazos,

Jack Beavers

Jack Beavers - US Border News