Trump’s immigration crackdown hits warp speed

It’s been a huge week for President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The Trump administration released a flurry of executive orders and instituted mass arrests across the country that changed the immigration landscape, sometimes in a single day. Thousands of immigrants, through one mechanism or another, have lost the ability to reside legally in the U.S. or have been blocked from getting the chance.

It’s the kind of blitz the White House has described as operating on “Trump speed” — and it was on full blast this week, even as Trump’s public blowup with his one-time ally Elon Musk grabbed all the headlines.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported a wave of arrests, with the agency on Wednesday detaining over 2,200 people — which a senior DHS official, who was granted anonymity to disclose the data, said was the largest single-day arrest total in agency history, only to be topped by over 2,300 on Thursday in a cross-country spree. ICE has also re-arrested immigrants already in the removal process but not actively in detention and has gone after immigrants at their courtroom hearings and check-ins, a departure from the first Trump administration.

“Those two taken together are a complete sea change we have never seen in the history of immigration enforcement in the United States,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration organization that has opposed much of Trump’s second-term actions.

The new high comes days after White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller started reportedly calling for at least 3,000 apprehensions a day — a goal that triples what the agency was hitting when Trump took office and one they have yet to reach. The push for bigger deportation sweeps also builds on Trump framing illegal immigration as an “invasion” threatening the country.

“We cannot allow the previous administration’s invasion of our country of illegal immigrants to continue,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday. “We just can’t have it.”

All signs point to ICE ramping up its officers to get to that number, as more immigration agents are spotted staking out immigration courthouses across the country and as the White House lobbies Congress to pass a mega funding bill that would invest millions more in ICE enforcement.

The administration has also pushed its crackdown beyond arrests. A federal District Court in Texas quickly blessed an agreement between the Department of Justice and the state government that undocumented students across the state will be ineligible for in-state tuition at public universities, clawing back a decades-old standard for Texas’ residents — but issuing a major win for the Trump administration, which filed a suit just hours before to get that very practice suspended.

And the administration didn’t stop with undocumented immigrants. Late Wednesday evening, Trump released his sweeping new travel ban fully restricting immigrants from 12 countries from receiving visas to enter the U.S. An additional seven countries were partially limited and restricted from entry.

Trump said the countries were blocked following an assessment of their national security risks. It’s a plan that’s been months in the making and could have been bigger. And this latest iteration of the multiple travel bans from Trump’s first term — which faced setbacks in federal court — is more likely to withstand legal challenges, POLITICO previously reported.

“We’re seeing the executive branch exploring how far it can go,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “Even the Trump administration expected to lose a lot of cases, but they’re testing the boundaries of their authority.”

And Trump issued an executive order blocking international students from enrolling at Harvard University, another decision “based on national security” that could affect thousands of prospective students and many who have already enrolled.

All in just the last week — it’s a “massive escalation” of enforcement, Reichlin-Melnick said.

“All of which send the message to immigrants, not just the undocumented, that they are not wanted in this country,” he added.

 

 

Since his time on the campaign trail, Trump has made enacting the largest mass deportation in history and securing the border one of the staples of his second term. His flood-the-zone strategy has carried through his first several months back in office, while drawing widespread criticism from Democrats and legal experts who have accused the administration of randomly deporting people without due process and stoking fear in immigrant communities.

It all comes on the heels of the Supreme Court giving the Trump administration the green light to end parole programs for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, leaving over half a million immigrants vulnerable to deportation as they begin to lose their work permits and legal status. The high court had already allowed the Trump administration to move forward with a cancellation of temporary protected status for Venezuelan immigrants last month.

For Cubans, Haitians and Venezuelans in particular, the administration has now blocked thousands from getting TPS, parole status or entering the country with a visa, to varying degrees of severity.

“In the last Trump administration, there was a much smaller number of people who were on some kind of temporary status — like temporary protected status or DACA, there were not very many people who had humanitarian parole — but they tried to end TPS for some of the groups, but were never successful,” Gelatt said. “The fact that they have successfully ended protections for hundreds of thousands of people feels very, very different.”

Not everything is going Trump’s way. Trump’s executive order against Harvard was temporarily shut down almost as soon as it was announced, with Harvard filing suit and a federal judge granting a temporary restraining order on Thursday.

The administration is also taking heat for its expedited removals, with judges across the country emphasizing the importance of due process rights. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg — who has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration over his immigration orders — went as far as to demand the administration provide a plan for returning and providing hearings for all the deported Venezuelan men in El Salvador on Wednesday.

But if comments from Miller, Trump’s senior adviser, are any indication, the administration is undeterred.

“The Supreme Court stripped him of jurisdiction weeks ago. He just doesn’t care,” Miller wrote on X responding to Boasberg. “It’s a judicial coup,” he wrote in other posts.

And if the White House has their way, this week’s blitz of arrests will become next week’s normal.

“President Trump is doing exactly what he promised the American people – securing the Southern Border and deporting illegal aliens,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told POLITICO. “ICE arrests during President Trump’s second term have topped 100,000. Under President Trump’s America First leadership, it’s a bad day to be an illegal alien and a great day to be an American.”