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President Donald Trump promised a radical reset on immigration, and he didn’t waste any time getting started. Just hours after being sworn in on Jan. 20, he was seated in the Oval Office with a black permanent marker and a stack of leather-bound executive orders. By the end of Day 1, he’d revived many of the same programs and policies he’d previously carried out over four years during his first administration.
There were 10 orders related to immigration in all. And within them lay dozens of policy changes that, if implemented, would upend the immigration system and the lives of millions.
The blitz of executive order signing has continued, so fast and sweeping that it’s been hard to keep up, much less gauge its potential future impact. Trump has paused the resettlement of tens of thousands of refugees who’d already been vetted and approved to relocate to the United States, including as many as 15,000 Afghans. He ended humanitarian parole for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua leaving more than 500,000 already living here in legal limbo. He launched his promised effort to round up and remove millions of unauthorized immigrants starting with those accused of violent crimes, though less than half of the approximately 8,200 people arrested from Jan. 20 through Feb. 2 so far have criminal convictions, according to government data obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
Taken individually, many of the measures could be considered controversial, said Andrew Selee, president of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, but by the time experts get their mind around one new initiative, they learn there’s been another. “It’s really hard for outside organizations, politicians or the public in general to focus on any one of them,” he said.
In the meantime, some pushback has begun. Two federal judges swiftly blocked an order seeking to end birthright citizenship, calling it unconstitutional, while about a dozen other lawsuits have been filed by civil rights groups, religious organizations and states. Advocates sued this week to reverse an order that declared migrants were invading the country and that authorized the president to use extraordinary powers to stop them. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
In order to provide a glimpse of the enormity of the changes that are underway, ProPublica and the Tribune identified nearly three dozen of the most impactful policy changes set in motion by the orders signed on the first day. Most were pulled from the playbook of Trump’s previous presidency. Others are unprecedented.
Trump tried it before
Some of the measures in the executive orders revived policies from Trump’s first administration, including several blocked in court or rescinded following national outcry. Others are expansions of practices that have been carried out by various administrations, both Republican and Democratic.
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Policies he hasn’t tried before
Some of Trump’s measures have never been tried before, like his bid to end birthright citizenship. Others, if implemented, would push the powers of the presidency much further. Orders that declare an invasion of migrants on the border or designate drug cartels and certain transnational gangs as terrorists could have wide-reaching implications that are not yet completely clear.
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