When President-elect Trump enters the Oval Office in January 2025, he will likely transform how the United States conducts immigration policy – with a historic deportation operation, a crackdown on foreign gangs, an end to the broad use of parole to allow in migrants, and renewed border wall construction at the top of his agenda.
“We’re going to fix our borders,” Trump said Wednesday as he declared victory. “We’re going to fix everything about our country, and we’ve made history for a reason tonight.”
Trump made immigration and ending the crisis at the southern border a central part of his campaign, as he had in his initial 2016 White House bid.
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Former President Trump speaks at the U.S.-Mexico border on Aug. 22, 2024, south of Sierra Vista, Arizona. (Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
Those calls were fueled in part by a historic crisis at the border that exploded under President Biden’s watch and just months after Trump left office. While the Biden administration blamed a lack of funding and a broken immigration system, Trump and Republican allies pointed instead to the rolling back of Trump-era policies by the administration.
Whatever the cause, millions of migrants flooded into the United States as numbers skyrocketed in 2021 and remained at record highs through 2022 and 2023. Numbers dropped sharply in June after Biden limited entries into the U.S., although migrants have continued to come into the U.S. via a broad use of humanitarian parole.
While numbers are now down at the border, 2024 has seen a series of high-profile crimes by illegal immigrants, some of whom were allowed into the U.S. under the administration.
Trump has made clear his intention to turn the clock, promising during his campaign to end “every open borders policy of the Biden administration.”
He has promised to continue building the wall at the southern border, over 450 miles of which was built during his first administration. He has also promised to launch the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” to deport millions of illegal immigrants.
“Following the Eisenhower Model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said.
He has also promised to shift enormous parts of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement, and will invoke the Alien Enemies Act to target cartel members and members of violent gangs like the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua.
He said in Auroro, Colorado, last month that Election Day would be known as “Liberation Day” for the U.S. from a foreign occupation.
The U.S.-Mexico border wall in Sasabe, Arizona, on Dec. 8, 2023. (Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images)
“We’re being occupied by a criminal force, and we’re an occupied state that refuses to let our great law enforcement profession do the job that they so dearly want to do,” he said in Aurora. “But to everyone here in Colorado and all across our nation, I make this pledge and vow to you, Nov. 5, 2024, will be Liberation Day in America.”
In terms of actions taken by the Biden administration, a future Trump administration will likely roll back the broad use of humanitarian parole that has seen hundreds of thousands of migrants brought in using the CBP One app – both at the ports of entry and by a controversial travel authorization program for nationals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela that allowed 30,000 in each month from those countries,
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Republicans have also called for a tighter use of Temporary Protected Status, which grants foreign nationals from certain countries protection from deportation and work permits if it is deemed unsafe for them to return.
The incoming administration will likely end the Biden administration’s interior ICE enforcement limits, limit refugee admissions and restore its public charge rule – which limited the ability of immigrants to claim green cards if they are deemed likely to be reliant on welfare.
Other Trump-era policies that could come back include a form of the Remain-in-Mexico policy, which saw migrants stay in Mexico while they wait for their asylum cases to be heard, and travel bans from countries deemed to be national security threats.
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In the last week, Trump also raised the possibility of a tariff on Mexican goods to force Mexico to get tighter control of the numbers coming north.
“I’m going to inform [the Mexican president] on day one or sooner that if they don’t stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country, I’m going to immediately impose a 25% tariff on everything they send into the United States of America,” he said.
Meanwhile, it is unclear if Trump’s election will dissuade migrants from attempting entry into the U.S., or if it might trigger a final surge to attempt entry before he takes office in January.