President-elect Donald J. Trump, who made immigration a pillar of his campaign, has pledged to unleash a broad crackdown on Day 1 of his second term.
Restricting both lawful and unlawful immigration was a key focus of Mr. Trump’s first four years in the White House, as he leveraged the executive branch’s vast authority over immigration to reshape policy, bypassing the need for new laws from Congress.
All told, Mr. Trump announced 472 immigration actions, large and small, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
Some of them endured only in revised form amid legal challenges. Others were reversed by his successor. But his aggressive action and fiery rhetoric redefined the politics of immigration in America. As he returns to the White House, the signature initiatives of his first term offer insights into what might lie ahead.
Border
The Wall
The most memorable promise that Mr. Trump made on the campaign trail was to erect an impenetrable barrier along the entire southern border, which is almost 2,000 miles, and to have Mexico pay for it.
By the end of his term, the Trump administration said that it had completed about 460 miles of border wall. Some of it was new, but much of it consisted of the replacement, repair or extension of existing barriers.
After the wall was raised to 30 feet, from 17 feet, along some border areas, the number of migrants seriously injured and killed during attempts to climb over increased exponentially.
For Mr. Trump, the wall was a valuable and effective political tool.
“Mostly it was rhetoric, and a lot less on the ground,” said Louis DeSipio, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine.
“He used the wall to convince people that there were simple solutions to a problem that every president before him had recognized was complex and required careful consideration,” Mr. DeSipio said.
Some of the money for Mr. Trump’s efforts on the wall was allocated by Congress and other funds were diverted from the Defense Department budget. Mexico did not pay for any construction or repairs.
In his second term, Mr. Trump could declare a national emergency to unlock funds to move military assets to the border and build more wall, which he has pledged to do.
Family Separation
In April 2018, the Trump administration introduced a “zero-tolerance” policy at the border to discourage unlawful crossings by families arriving in large numbers. It resulted in the separation of about 3,000 children from their parents.
Adults were criminally charged with illegal entry and jailed. Their children were taken from them and sent to government facilities or foster families around the country.
Images and audio of crying children who had been pried from a parent went viral, and the policy drew condemnation from the American public, as well as from prominent figures like the pope and Laura Bush, the former first lady.
A federal court halted the policy in late June of 2018.
Many parents and children remained apart for years, though, because of poor record-keeping by U.S. authorities, and some are still separated.
Title 42
As Covid-19 gripped the United States, President Trump in March 2020 turned to an obscure public health rule, known as Title 42, to close the border, saying it was necessary to prevent the spread of the disease.
The rule empowered agents to swiftly turn back migrants who crossed the border. Until then, migrants who touched U.S. soil could request asylum, and they usually remained in the country while their cases wended through the court.
“Covid-19 gave Trump a golden opportunity to use Title 42 as an extremely effective tool to expel migrants and lower border numbers,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a lawyer and senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.
Tens of thousands of migrants were stranded in makeshift encampments in cartel-controlled border towns in Mexico, where many fell victim to violence.
President Biden left Title 42 in place initially, amid an increase in border crossings. When his administration moved to lift it in 2022, Republican-led states sued, arguing that it was crucial to border security. The measure was finally revoked in May 2023.
Amid a wave of humanitarian crises around the world, and after years of pent-up demand from the pandemic, the number of people crossing began to surge in late 2023, reaching a record 250,000 that December.
After the Biden administration imposed new restrictions on asylum last June, the number of crossings fell rapidly, and by November, the levels were lower than when Mr. Trump ended his first term.
In his quest to shut down the border again, Mr. Trump is likely to invoke another public health emergency after he takes office, people familiar with the discussions have told The Times. They say advisers have spent recent months trying to find the right disease to justify the restriction.
Inside the Country
DACA
Instituted by President Obama in 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, provides protection from deportation and authorization to work to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and meet eligibility criteria.
The program, created by executive action, was intended as a temporary fix until Congress passed legislation to address the fate of the Dreamers, as the immigrant group is known.
It was transformative for hundreds of thousands of young undocumented adults. Many completed college, built careers, bought homes and started families.
At its peak, about 800,000 people were registered.
In September 2017, the Trump administration announced the termination of the program, saying it was unconstitutional. Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior immigration adviser, and Jeff Sessions, the first attorney general under Trump, spearheaded the effort.
Since then, the program has been challenged in court. The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the way the Trump administration sought to terminate the program was unlawful. But the decision did not settle whether the program itself was legal, and DACA has remained entangled in litigation that could end Dreamers’ ability to remain in the country and legally work.
The fate of the program remains uncertain as Mr. Trump prepares to take office.
In a recent interview, he indicated that he was open to addressing the status of Dreamers, without offering details. But, ultimately, only Congress can craft and pass a permanent solution.
Raids
About 11 million undocumented immigrants resided in the United States when Mr. Trump took office in 2017, according to estimates by demographers and other experts.
With resources limited, the Obama administration’s enforcement efforts prioritized arresting undocumented criminals living in cities in the interior of the country.
During the Trump administration, the share of those arrested who had never been convicted of a crime doubled, according to an analysis of Homeland Security data by the Migration Policy Institute.
“Everyone became a target,” Mr. Chishti said. “You weren’t guaranteed that you would return to your kids when you left for work in the morning.”
Thomas D. Homan, a former senior official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who has been named the new “border czar” by Mr. Trump, has said that raids under the new administration would target criminals, but he has not ruled out the possibility that others would be swept up.
Legal Immigration
Muslim Ban
Barely a week into his administration, Mr. Trump signed an order that immediately barred the entry of people from seven predominantly Muslim countries, based on national security concerns. The order, which became known as the “Muslim ban,” caused chaos at airports.
Travelers from the affected countries, including people who were permanent U.S. residents, were taken into custody on arrival. Family members awaiting them scrambled to secure their release with the assistance of volunteer lawyers who descended on airports.
Within hours, the order faced lawsuits.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld a third version, ruling that the president does have the authority to limit who enters the country. Under that version of the ban, the United States barred the entry of nationals from six Muslim-majority countries as well as from North Korea and Venezuela. Obtaining exemptions was a painstaking process.
On his first day in office, President Biden reversed Mr. Trump’s ban, paving the way for thousands of people to be reunited with their loved ones in the United States. Many of them were refugees who had been waiting years to join relatives.
Visas
The Trump administration made it more difficult for foreigners to enter the United States legally by imposing additional screening, and it conducted closer reviews of renewal applications by people already in the country.
In 2017, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that increased scrutiny of applications for high-skilled worker visas, known as H-1Bs, arguing that the program was rife with fraud and was detrimental to American workers.
Denials of H-1B applications, issued mostly to technology workers, reached a high of 24 percent in the 2018 fiscal year.
In a turnabout, Mr. Trump recently praised the program, aligning himself with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who have championed the visa program, even as it was criticized by other Trump allies, including Steve Bannon, who had served in the first Trump administration.
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