What Trump's executive orders on immigration seek to do
- End birthright citizenship for future children born to mothers who are in the United States unlawfully or temporarily unless the child’s father is here legally and permanently
- Direct federal agencies to identify countries that do not provide sufficient information on their nationals and to bar those nationals from entry to the U.S.
- Send the military to the border by declaring a national emergency
- Halt all refugee admissions into the United States until policy “aligns” with U.S. interests
- Designate cartels and migrant gangs MS-13 and Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations
- Restrict federal funds from sanctuary cities and potentially take legal action against them
- Require immigrants unlawfully in the United States to register and be fingerprinted
- End the CBP One program and the parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans
- Deny public benefits to unauthorized immigrants
- Reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy
“Illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came,” Trump said during his inaugural address.
Changes to the immigration system have already begun. CBP One, a government app used by migrants to submit their information and schedule appointments at southwest border ports of entry, is no longer available for that purpose.
Existing appointments scheduled through the app have been canceled, the statement added. App users began receiving pop-up notifications saying CBP One appointments “are no longer valid” in different languages on Monday. Hours later, President Trump signed an executive order to end the program.
Immigration advocacy groups took legal action against the move to end CBP One, filing a motion for an emergency status conference in D.C. District Court.
“Whether or not Trump enacts additional border policies, the termination of the CBP One appointment process means there is now no way for anyone to seek asylum at the border, even for families,” said Lee Gelernt, the lawyer representing the ACLU in the case.
Those canceled appointments likely number in the thousands. Over 936,000 people scheduled appointments through the app in the two years since the agency began using it for that purpose. In December alone, CBP processed approximately 44,000 asylum seekers who submitted their information through the app.
The state of emergency declared by Trump allows the Defense Department to deploy the military and the National Guard to the border. White House officials declined to elaborate on how many troops would be sent.
The executive action said the troops would help support Department of Homeland Security personnel with logistics, including securing detention space and transporting migrants. The language was in keeping with the Constitution, which prohibits the military from enforcing domestic law inside the U.S. by arresting immigrants.
Trump also signed an executive order to instruct government agencies not to recognize children born in the United States as U.S. citizens if their mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of birth. The order effectively seeks to end birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the Constitution that gives children born in the U.S. citizenship regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
The order also says the federal government should not recognize children as U.S. citizens if they were born to mothers who had lawful but temporary status in the United States and the father was not a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident at the time of birth.
The order states that children born to lawful permanent residents, known as green card holders, are entitled to citizenship.
Birthright citizenship has been understood to be required under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
In the executive order on birthright citizenship, the Trump administration asserted that the Constitution had been misinterpreted by an 1857 Supreme Court decision. The order is likely to be subject to legal challenges that will assert the Trump administration needs to change the U.S. Constitution by passing an amendment through two-thirds vote from Congress, an extremely high bar.
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