Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Agenda Will Be Even Harder to Stop a Second Time

Carlos met his wife in a dance club in California in the mid-2000s. (The Appeal is withholding Carlos’s surname to protect him from retaliation.) She walked in with a friend. He noticed her and thought she was beautiful. He approached her. They danced and made their best attempt at conversation.  “I spoke minimal English, and her Spanish was as good as my English,” he told The Appeal. They were in their mid-20s and didn’t intend anything serious: they lived in different cities, and his situation was precarious. He’d escaped the gangs of El Salvador and was living, undocumented, with his sisters. 

“I grew up in an area of El Salvador where the gangs were in full control… I had several friends that either had to join to avoid getting killed or got killed,” he says. “I decided I had to leave to escape the violence.” 

“My dream was to come to the U.S. and build a life, I wasn’t sure what that looks like, but I envisioned it being violence-free, full of opportunities and happiness.”

The couple’s casual relationship soon turned serious. “We talked every day, and we fell in love, and we moved in together only six months later.” They would go on to have a boy and get married in a ceremony on the beach. A few years later, a daughter followed.

Over the years, they tensely watched the political permutations of US immigration policy. During the Trump era, they were terrified, tracking every move of the administration and hoping that the sanctuary city in which they lived would protect them. The ended up fine: they continued to live, work, and raise their kids. They gained more hope when President Joe Biden won. Biden floated a parole option for undocumented people married to U.S. citizens. They were elated, but a Texas court blocked the measure. “The program is perfect for us … I would not have to leave the country.”

Now, they are terrified of another Trump term. “He is talking about mass deportations and just plain racist, horrible plans,” Carlos says. “I worry about my kids and the fact that he has so many supporters. That worries me more because he woke up the worst in people.” 

Donald Trump, is indeed, outdoing himself in smearing immigrants this election cycle. His campaign has pushed lies about immigration and crime, including slanderous claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. At the Republican National Convention in July, thousands of party activists held signs calling for “Mass Deportations Now” as Trump promised to “launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” In October, he told a crowd, “The United States is now an occupied country. But on Nov. 5, 2024, that will be liberation day in America.”

Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda is nothing new. During his 2016 campaign, he railed against “immigrant rapists” and boasted he’d build a wall to keep them out. He promised to ban immigration from Muslim-majority countries and enact a “zero-tolerance” policy of mass detention for people caught entering the country without papers. As president, however, his attempts to fulfill these promises faltered. Immigrant advocates won court orders blocking policies like the Muslim ban and family separation, and they convinced hundreds of states, cities, and counties to become so-called “sanctuary jurisdictions,” stymying Trump’s efforts to include state and local law enforcement in his deportation efforts.

If Trump wins a second term, however, advocates for immigrants face a much more daunting task. Not only has Trump pledged to resurrect policies like the Muslim ban and the border wall, but his calls for mass deportations go far beyond anything he attempted during his first term. The tools advocates used to resist Trump eight years ago may also be far less effective. Scores of Trump-appointed judges have made the federal courts much more hostile towards immigrant rights. Anti-immigrant think tanks have crafted policies designed to punish state and local authorities who resist deportation efforts. States like Florida and Texas have begun to deputize police and sheriffs to enforce federal immigration laws. In short, the threat to immigrants under a second Trump administration promises to be more extreme and harder to stop.

“What scares me about another Trump term on immigration?” Cornell Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr tells the Appeal. “Everything.”

“We saw how much Trump hurt immigrants in his first administration: the Muslim travel ban, family separations, increased delays in processing routine cases. He will hurt immigrants even more if he’s reelected, with devastating impacts on the U.S. economy, workers, and families.”

Sanctuary Cities in the Crosshairs

While the U.S. Constitution places the authority to set immigration policies in the hands of the federal government, in practice, immigration enforcement often involves close collaboration with state and local officials, tying together immigration policy and the criminal-legal system in what legal scholars like Juliet Stump and César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández have called the “crimmigration” system.

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama worked to develop close ties between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and state and local law enforcement agencies. During the Bush administration, the Department of Homeland Security implemented the 287(g) program, which allows participating law enforcement agencies to screen and initiate deportation proceedings against people they suspect of being in the country illegally. Bush also launched the Secure Communities program. Participating agencies share biometric information about people they arrest so that ICE can determine their immigration status. ICE can issue “detainers” (also called “immigration holds”), which request that police or jail officials keep someone in custody until ICE can make an arrest.

Under the Obama administration, the Secure Communities program expanded to include nearly every law enforcement agency in the country, allowing ICE to deport record numbers of people and earning Obama the moniker “deporter-in-chief” from immigrant rights groups. In 2015, the program was replaced by a mandate to target people convicted of serious criminal offenses, but Trump renewed Secure Communities by executive order during his first month as president.

Ironically, despite Trump’s rhetoric, fewer deportations occurred during his first term in office than during either of President Obama’s two terms. In many ways, this was the shining achievement of immigrant rights groups during Trump’s time in office.

Drawing on liberal backlash to Trump’s anti-immigrant invective, advocates persuaded scores of cities, counties, and states to adopt “sanctuary” policies, which limit state and local law enforcement agencies from cooperating with requests from ICE to turn over immigrants flagged for deportation. According to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, at least 475 counties adopted new sanctuary policies during Trump’s first three years as president. By late 2019, nearly one in four counties had policies restricting county jails from complying with ICE detention requests, including most counties with large populations of undocumented immigrants.

Immigrant rights activists also pushed many counties to end contracts allowing ICE to use their jails to house immigrants awaiting deportation, and voters ousted several sheriffs who resisted these efforts. Many counties also ended 287(g) contracts, so local law enforcement would no longer enforce immigration law. Without cooperation from local officials, ICE’s efforts to expand deportations floundered.

This, of course, outraged Trump and his allies, who pushed for legislation that would let them deny federal funds to sanctuary jurisdictions. Unable to convince Congress, Trump attempted to cut off funds through executive fiat, signing off on regulations denying federal funds to law enforcement agencies that refused to cooperate with ICE. He even threatened to withhold COVID-19 funding during the height of the pandemic, but even his allies in Congress decided that was a bridge too far.

In the years since Trump left office, anti-immigrant groups have crafted policies designed to force state and local officials to assist with federal deportation efforts. Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Homeland Security recommends withholding FEMA disaster assistance funds from cities and states that refuse to cooperate with ICE. Project 2025 also called for the Department of Justice to require local and state governments to turn over information on immigrants, including motor vehicle and voter registration data, to receive federal grants for law enforcement.

A Mass Deportation Military ‘Blitz’

Frustration with sanctuary jurisdictions may also explain why Trump has announced that he plans to deploy the military to carry out mass deportations during his second term.

He’s repeatedly pledged to invoke the Insurrection Act and the Alien Enemies Act. The Insurrection Act, passed in 1807, allows the chief executive to deploy the U.S. military to address domestic problems like civil disorder or outright rebellion. It has a checkered history: in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was used to clamp down on labor protests. It was also employed in the years after the Civil War to protect Black Americans from the Ku Klux Klan and again during desegregation efforts in the 20th century. In 2020, Trump said he’d invoke the act in response to protests over the death of George Floyd.

Joseph Nunn, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Appeal that the law was intended for a very different law enforcement environment. “It was when you’d have one sheriff in a town being overwhelmed by some kind of civil unrest.”

He notes that the Pentagon would be resistant; soldiers are not trained to carry out military actions against the domestic populace. “But ultimately the military is going to follow the orders of the civilian president. At the end of the day, they will do what their commander in chief is telling them to do.”

The Alien Enemies Act, which Trump also references in his speeches, allows for the arrest or deportation of men over the age of 14 who hail from a country at war with the U.S. Speaking in California, he said he would use the law “to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.” The U.S. is not at war with Venezuela or other Central American countries, but Trump could exploit language in the law that cites “invasion or predatory incursion.”

“If the president invokes the Alien Enemies Act, it might affect not only undocumented people from Venezuela. It could be applied to permanent residents,” Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel at the Brennan Center and legal expert, told The Appeal. The law, most notoriously, was used against Japanese Americans during World War II when they were rounded up and forced into internment camps.

In an October interview with the New York Times, Trump’s top immigration advisor, Stephen Miller, said that the second Trump administration plans to carry out a “blitz” in which federal and local law enforcement officials would round up people so quickly that immigrant lawyers would be overwhelmed. To avoid the need to keep detained immigrants in local jails, Miller suggested that the military could build massive internment camps on the southern border capable of holding thousands of immigrants at a time.

While some local law enforcement might balk at diverting time and resources to rounding up immigrants, Trump appears to have faith that most will comply. “And our local police is going [sic] to work with us because they know everything about the people,” he said at an August press conference at Mar-a-Lago. “They know their names. They know everything about them. They know their middle name. They know their numbers.”

Many states with anti-immigrant governments are also eager to help Trump’s mass deportation plans. Last year, Texas enacted SB 4, which allows police to arrest people suspected of crossing the Mexican border. The same year, Florida passed SB 1718, which imposed new penalties for immigration law violations and required hospitals to begin collecting information on their patients’ legal status.

On Election Day, voters in Arizona will decide whether or not to enact Proposition 314, which would make crossing the border a state crime. Some anti-immigrant sheriffs, like Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, have taken to carrying out patrols along the border, handing over suspected migrants to Border Patrol agents. This kind of cooperation would likely increase during a second Trump term.

Showdown in the Courts

From the day Trump began his first term, he waged a back-and-forth battle with immigrant advocacy groups who sought to use federal courts to blunt the impact of his crackdown.

Trump enacted his first attempt at a Muslim ban just one week after taking office. On Jan. 27, 2017, he signed Executive Order 13769, which denied entry to the United States to people from seven Muslim-majority nations, including many who had visas or green cards. Within days, however, the American Civil Liberties Union had secured a ruling from a federal judge blocking enforcement of most of the executive order’s provisions.

When Trump tried to get around the injunction one month later by issuing a new executive order, dubbed Travel Ban 2.0, immigrant advocates again succeeded in blocking the implementation of the order for more than a year. However, the Supreme Court ultimately overruled the injunction in a 2018 landmark decision the second time around. The modified ban stayed in effect for the rest of Trump’s time in office before Biden revoked it on his first day as president.

Many of Trump’s other signature immigration initiatives followed a similar trajectory. The Trump administration would issue a sweeping policy change, and then civil rights organizations would convince a federal judge to block the enforcement of the new policy. In some cases, the Supreme Court sided with immigrant advocates. Still, even when the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision, the lawsuits succeeded in delaying implementation for months or years while the cases wound their way through the judicial system.

Legal experts say this tactic will likely be less effective during a second Trump administration. Trump used his first term to flood the federal judiciary with appointees, likely to be more amenable to rubber-stamping anti-immigrant policies. Supreme Court rulings, such as the 2018 decision upholding the revised Muslim ban, have also made the legal landscape less favorable to immigrant rights advocates. Even favorable Supreme Court decisions, such as the 2020 case that upheld DACA, may be at risk. Justices split 5–4 in the DACA case, and the death of Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsberg, who Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced, means that there may no longer be a majority willing to defend the policy.

“With more conservative judges now than in 2016, litigation won’t necessarily succeed,” Yale-Loehr said.

‘The First Term, But on Steroids’

Developments since Trump left office have also raised the stakes for immigrants and their allies. When Biden first became president, his administration rolled back many of Trump’s most egregious anti-immigrant policies. But as the number of immigrants arriving on the southern border increased and anti-immigrant sentiment neared record highs, Democrats’ commitment to immigrant rights faltered.

The Biden administration defended several Trump-era policies in federal court, and he massively expanded the use of electronic monitoring to track asylum seekers and other immigrants at risk of deportation. One program, the Family Expedited Removal Management program, has forced more than 19,000 people to wear ankle monitors while they await decisions on asylum claims. A much larger program, the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, tracks nearly 300,000 immigrants through a smartphone app run by BI Incorporated, a company founded initially to monitor the location of livestock.

As the 2024 election approached, the Biden administration lurched even further to the right on immigration. In June, the administration issued a new policy removing asylum protections for the vast majority of immigrants arriving on the southern border. The policy mirrors a similar ban enacted during Trump’s first term, which immigrant rights groups successfully challenged in federal court. Almost immediately, the ACLU and other groups filed a lawsuit challenging Biden’s asylum ban, which is still ongoing.

In a press release at the time, Javier Hidalgo, legal director at the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), said, “It remains shocking, if no longer surprising, that the same elected officials who promised to restore our commitment to humanitarian protections are more than willing to sacrifice especially Black and Brown lives for political points and personal gain.”

On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants, has tried to position herself as tough on immigration. In September, Harris toured the border and touted her work as a prosecutor in cases related to international drug trafficking (ignoring the fact that most drug traffickers are U.S. citizens).

“I won’t only bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump tanked, I will do more to secure our border to reduce illegal border crossings,” Harris said during her speech at the border.

Nonetheless, a second Trump term is not only more dangerous for undocumented people and asylum seekers than life under a Democratic president. It’s poised to be catastrophic, even compared to Trump’s first term.

His calls to use the military, other federal agencies, and local law enforcement would have a disastrous impact on immigrant communities. “Mass deportations would gut our communities and destroy our economy,” Huey Fischer García, a staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told The Appeal. A study by Immigration Impact found that immigrants contribute nearly $400 billion in federal taxes and almost $200 billion in state and local taxes.

Trump’s promise to build “The Wall” famously faltered, so there might be a sense that he can’t pull off the mass deportations. As Vox has noted, it would be difficult for Trump to deport as many people as he’d like. But despite logistic and political hurdles, his policy plans would be disastrous for a stunning number of asylum seekers and people with undocumented status.

There are roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. More than 80 percent, like Carlos, have lived in America for a decade or longer. Nearly one in ten U.S. citizen children live in a home with at least one undocumented parent. FWD.us (which previously donated to The Appeal) says more than 28 million people are at risk of family separation if Trump’s mass deportation plans go forward. There are roughly half a million DACA recipients, all of whom would be at risk under Miller’s plan for “indiscriminate” enforcement.

The Trump campaign has also indicated it might target people who aren’t currently eligible for deportation, such as people with Temporary Protected Status and people with pending asylum claims. Three-and-a-half million people have pending asylum claims.

“Think about the first term, but on steroids,” a former White House advisor told CNN.

Just as he dreamed, Carlos found a life full of “opportunities and happiness” in California. He owns a furniture-building business. His wife, an immigrant herself, has a Ph.D. and is also an entrepreneur. From an uncannily early age, his son developed an obsession with air travel, has a pilot’s license, and is weighing being a pilot or aerospace engineer. None of this would have been possible in gang-ridden El Salvador. 

But it wasn’t easy, even under Democratic administrations, even in a sanctuary city. “I couldn’t get a driver’s license, so my wife had to drop me off and pick me up so I wouldn’t risk being pulled over.” They talked to dozens of lawyers, who assured him he was not likely to be deported—he has no criminal record and doesn’t live in an area where ICE raids are likely to occur. Still, it was scary. They talked about leaving the country. “But it would be so disruptive for my wife’s job, her parents, our kids. I couldn’t ask my family to do this.”

He continues, “I pay taxes, I contribute to the economy and the community, I have built so much together with [my wife] here in the U.S.” He’s still lucky, he feels, that they saved money for their plan B (El Salvador) or plan C (Eastern Europe). Others aren’t as lucky. 

“Many in the immigrant community don’t, and I feel devastated for them,” he says. 

“I know so many people that, if deported, their lives, their children’s lives would fall apart,” he adds. 

“Not only that, if deported, these people will no longer build houses, run businesses, clean houses, watch kids, so what would happen to the U.S. economy?”

“As for me, I am staying positive. I think it is highly likely Kamala will win, and that mass deportations will not happen.”

“Immigrants are resilient,” García says. “They built the United States.”