Trump's return to White House sets stage for far-reaching immigration crackdown

Republican presidential nominee then-former U.S. president Donald Trump listens to Paul Perez, president of the National Border Patrol Council, as he tours the southern border with Mexico, on Aug. 22, 2024, in Sierra Vista, Ariz. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo)

SAN DIEGO -

“Build the Wall” was Donald Trump's rally cry in 2016, and he acted on his promise by tapping military budgets for hundreds of miles of border wall with Mexico. “Mass Deportation” was the buzzword that energized supporters for his White House bid in 2024.

Trump’s victory sets the stage for a swift crackdown after an AP VoteCast survey showed the president-elect’s supporters were largely focused on immigration and inflation — issues the Republican has been hammering throughout his campaign.

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How and when Trump's actions on immigration will take shape is uncertain.

While Trump and his advisers have offered outlines, many questions remain about how they would deport anywhere close to the 11 million people estimated to be in the country illegally. How would immigrants be identified? Where would they be detained? What if their countries refuse to take them back? Where would Trump find money and trained officers to carry out their deportation?

Trump has said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used 1798 law that allows the president to deport any non-citizen from a country the U.S. is at war with. He has spoken about deploying the National Guard, which can be activated on orders from a governor. Stephen Miller, a top Trump adviser, has said troops under sympathetic Republican governors would send troops to nearby states that refuse to participate.

Trump, who repeatedly referred to immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the United States, has stricken fear in immigrant communities with words alone.

Julie Moreno, a U.S. citizen who has been married for seven years to a Mexican man who is in the country illegally, is adjusting to the idea that she may have to live separately from her husband, who came to the United States in 2004. She can move to Mexico from New Jersey but it would be nearly impossible to keep running her business importing boxing gloves.

“I don’t have words yet, too many feelings,” Moreno said, her voice breaking as she spoke Wednesday of Trump's victory. “I am very scared for my husband’s safety. … If they detain him, what is going to happen?”

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Moreno's husband, Neftali Juarez, ran a construction business and feels he has contributed to the country, paying taxes and providing employment through his company. "Unfortunately, the sentiment of the people who voted is different,” he said. “I feel horrible losing my wife.”

Some policy experts expect Trump’s first immigration moves to be at the border. He may pressure Mexico to keep blocking migrants from reaching the U.S. border as it has since December. He may lean on Mexico to reinstate a Trump-era policy that made asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. immigration court.

Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports immigration restrictions, highlighted campaign remarks by Vice-President-elect JD Vance that deporting millions would be done one step at a time, not all at once.

“You’re not talking about a dragnet,” Arthur, a former immigration judge, told The Associated Press. “There’s no way you could do it. The first thing you have to do is seal the border and then you can address the interior. All of this is going to be guided by the resources you have available.”

Elena, a 46-year-old Nicaraguan who has been living in the United States illegally for 25 years, couldn’t sleep after Trump's victory, crying about what to do if she and her husband, 50, are deported. They have two adult daughters, both U.S. citizens, who have had stomach pain and respiratory problems from anxiety about the election.

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“It is so difficult for me to uproot myself from the country that I have seen as my home,” said Elena, who lives in South Florida and gave only her first name for fear of being deported. “I have made my roots here and it is difficult to have to abandon everything to start over.”

Advocates are looking at where deportation arrests might take place and are watching especially closely to see if authorities adhere to a longstanding policy of avoiding schools, hospitals, places of worship and disaster relief centers, said Heidi Altman, federal advocacy director for the National Immigration Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Fund.

“We're taking it very seriously,” said Altman. “We all have to have our eyes wide open to the fact that this isn't 2016. Trump and Stephen Miller learned a lot from their first administration. The courts look very different than they did four years ago.”

Trump is expected to resume other far-reaching policies from his first term and jettison key Biden moves. These include:

• Trump has harshly criticized Biden policies to create and expand legal pathways to entry, including an online app called CBP One under which nearly 1 million people have entered at land crossings with Mexico since January 2023. Another policy has allowed more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to fly into the country with financial sponsors.
• Trump slashed the number of refugees screened abroad by the United Nations and State Department for settlement in the U.S. to its lowest level since Congress established the program in 1980. Biden rebuilt it, establishing an annual cap of 125,000, up from 18,000 under Trump.
• Trump sought to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shielded people who came to the U.S. as young children from deportation. A lawsuit by Republican governors that has seemed headed for the Supreme Court challenges DACA. For now, hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients may renew their status but new applications aren't accepted.
• Trump dramatically curtailed the use of Temporary Protected Status, created under a 1990 law to allow people already in the United States to stay if their homelands are deemed unsafe. Biden sharply expanded use of TPS, including to hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans.

Maribel Hernandez, a Venezuelan on TPS that allows her to stay in the United States until April 2025, burst into tears as her 2-year-old son slept in a stroller outside New York's Roosevelt Hotel as migrants discussed election fallout Wednesday.

“Imagine if they end it,” she said.