Bulwark Takes - Trump Said He’d Target Illegal Immigration. That Was a Lie. (w/ Doug Rand)

Episode Date: August 29, 2026

Trump’s immigration crackdown isn’t just targeting people who entered the country illegally—it’s making it harder for legal immigrants, international students, nurses, and highly skilled workers to come to and stay in the United States. Catherine Rampell and Doug Rand, former senior advisor at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, break down how the administration is shutting down legal pathways, imposing massive new barriers on H-1B workers, and driving international talent toward other countries.A quick note: This is the kind of conversation we want to do more of at The Bulwark: bringing in people who have actually worked inside the agencies and understand how these policies operate beyond the headlines. There aren’t many outlets putting out substantive conversations with experts like Doug, giving them the time to explain what’s changing and why it matters. If you value having that kind of expertise available—and accessible to everyone—becoming a Bulwark member helps us keep making it possible.

Hey, everyone. I'm Catherine Rampel, the economics editor here at The Bullwork and the author of the Receipts Newsletter. And I am delighted to be joined today by Doug Rand to talk all things, crackdowns on legal immigration. Yes, legal immigration. You know that Donald Trump got into office twice on a platform of cracking down on the quote-unquote illegals. But if you actually look at his agenda, it is, I would say, concentrating the most firepower on those who have documents and deducing them. So, Doug, I have known for a very long time at this point. We've gone through a couple of rounds of Trump White House immigration crackdowns, and I rely on his expertise all the time. He is currently the director of the Talent Mobility Fund. He was senior advisor at USCIS under

Joe Biden. That's the agency that processes various kinds of immigration documents for those who are here in the United States. And he was also a senior aide working on entrepreneurship and immigration in the Obama White House. So, Doug, thank you so much for taking the time to chat again today. Thank you for having me. I wanted to talk, first of all, at a high level about how there have been a lot of attacks on legal immigration lately. I mean, throughout the whole administration, just in the last week. Yeah, I was going to say, just in the last week, tell me if I'm missing anything, but I have global freeze on all green card processing abroad. The largest mass visa revocation in history, something like 200,000 people who are in the United States applying for asylum, are having their

visas revoked. Another attempt at slapping $100,000 fee on people who are applying for H-1B visas. How would you characterize the administration's relative focus on people who are here legally, legal immigration versus unauthorized immigration? I don't think this administration really distinguishes between the two. They are restrictionists. They don't want immigrants. And this is not new.

You can go all the way back before Trump was elected the first time, and there's a very spooky radio broadcast between Steve Bannon and Steve Miller, who of course became senior advisors in Trump 1.0, talking about, you know, isn't the real problem legal immigration? It's changing America in ways we don't like. I'm paraphrasing. It was very, very racially coded, talking about how terrible it is that Silicon Valley has so many, you know, non-white CEOs. I mean, it's all out there. It's been out there for over a decade. It's just what we're seeing now in Trump 2.0, where Stephen Miller is now, continues to be, you know, the president of immigration, basically, is to the extent there were any gloves, they're fully off. And the attempt to not only deport as many people as possible, but also prevent as many people as possible from coming here in the first place and to take as many people who are here legally and convert them into people who are deportable. is proceeding with, you know, an incredibly reckless and, I think, increasingly obviously lawless abandon. You know, what's interesting to me is that when I have talked with Trump supporters over the years, their framework for how they often think about Donald Trump's anti-immigrant policies is like, this is not about racial animus.

This is not about xenophobia. this is about law and order. This is about making sure that people come in the right way, that they are not invading us, that they are not, you know, coming in with their caravans and surging over the borders, et cetera, that they wait in line and they follow the rules. And we want foreigners. This is what I often hear. You know, we like immigrants. My neighbor's an immigrant. My nanny's an immigrant. Whatever. Those are the good ones, but they followed the law. it does seem like, to your point, there's no differentiation with this administration between those who, you know, did it the right way or followed the law or have their documents

and everyone else. And I wonder if, in fact, the methods that we are seeing from this administration are encouraging more people to go into the shadows and to not do things the right way. Do you have a view on that? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I think that was really well said. And I want to be clear, like, I think that the, certainly the vast majority of Americans, and even the vast, even a majority of Republicans, uh, don't have this restrictionist ideological compulsion, um, this fear that, oh my gosh, the United States is going to be majority minority at some point in the 2040s and we have to stand to thwart that and prevent it from happening. That is a that is a fringe position, but unfortunately the people with the most power right now are absolutely devoted to that fringe position.

They can't sell it in demographic terms, right? They can't sell it in explicitly racial terms and hold their coalition together. So they talk about crime and they talk about public safety and they talk about welfare and they talk about all these slanders of on immigrants that aren't true. But I think they give it like the tiniest shred of plausible deniability. so that somebody who considers himself Maga can be like, well, I'm not here for the racism, right? I like good immigrants. But what's actually happening on the inside is it's an ideological project. And it rhymes with some of our ugliest, the ugliest periods in our history where the racial and demographic motivation was way more clearly on people's sleeves.

Let's talk about some of those specific things that have happened recently in what the impact might be. there was this global freeze on green card processing abroad. What does that mean in practice? Who does it affect? I want to take a big picture approach here and just go back to your kind of standard Trump supporter who's like, well, I voted for mass deportations of people who, you know, snuck in here. I didn't vote against legal immigration. I want people to do it the right way. Let's look at every way that is the right way and go through all the ways that those paths are being blocked.

So one way, like you said, to come here the right way, is to have a U.S. citizen spouse or U.S. citizen parent or U.S. citizen child. And, you know, the close relatives of U.S. citizens are allowed to apply for permanent residency, a green card from abroad, come here, get their green card. Now they're on the path to becoming an American. You know, something like, you know, three, 400,000 people a year come here that way from lots of different countries. It is the most kind of plain vanilla way of coming to the United States and ultimately becoming an American. And like you said, Catherine, just a couple days ago, without any public notice whatsoever, news outlets started reporting that apparently all the people in those lines doing it the right way have been given notices that their interviews have been indefinitely deferred. You know, they've been put on pause. How long that will last?

We don't know. We can talk about that a little bit more. but the permanent pause has been only on people from 75 countries, which you will not be shocked to learn, are almost entirely in Africa and Muslim majority countries. Like really recreating some of the ugliest racial quotas in our history, but with just enough plausible deniability that they think they can maybe squeak past the Supreme Court. So this is the new Muslim ban, essentially. It's kind of doubling down. So there's the new Muslim ban that everybody knows about. that Trump, you know, instated in his first weekend office in his first term, and then he,

he doubled down in this term. That's 39 countries. But these 75 countries are largely in addition to that. And this is something that has not gotten a lot of attention, I think, because it happened kind of in this really boring State Department notice. It was while Minneapolis was on everybody's mind. But, you know, since January, if you are from, you know, over 100 countries and you're married to you a U.S. citizen or the child of a U.S. citizen or the parent of U.S. citizen, you are eligible for a green card. You cannot come here. They've just slashed legal immigration, long-term legal immigration to this country. It's not just a travel ban. It's not just about tourism or students. It's about demographics. It's about who gets to be an American. And that's been in place.

The 75-country ban was just joined by a federal judge last Friday. So I don't think it's a coincidence that now they're saying, oh, we're going to apply it to everybody because they need to get their house in order and figure out a way to make it less obviously racist. But it'll also affect people who are coming for work, including in, I think, some pretty critical occupational shortage categories, like nurses. My understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that, like, you know, there are a lot of Filipino and Filipino nurses that come to this country and, you know, to fill labor shortages in that occupation and almost all of them, maybe all, maybe virtually all of them, come through this green card pathway. Is that right? That's right. If you think about, you know, the million or so

people who get green cards every year, about half of them are coming from abroad and half of them are already here. And most of the people who are already here are here on some kind of, they came here as a student or they're on some kind of temporary work visa and they're adjusting their status to become a permanent resident. And most of the people coming from abroad are coming. based on family ties. However, you're right, there was a minority of the people coming from abroad for a green card who are coming here for work and are sponsored by an employer. And yeah, a lot of them are nurses. And so that very important employment pathways being closed off. I do want to add, though, that the vast majority of people who come here based on skills or employment are already here.

And that's something that's really easy to miss in the way that our immigration system is described, especially by MAGA, but also by people of good faith. It's like, oh, U.S. employers are bringing workers here, you know, bringing, bring in white-collar workers. That's true on the margins for some occupations like nurses, where there's like overseas recruiting or IT staffing. But the vast majority of people who are being, who are from another country and hired by U.S. employers, we're already here. And the vast majority of them were here to study. And that's where the second doing it the right way is being destroyed. Coming here to study is doing it the right way. You, you know, you apply to a U.S. university from abroad.

You get accepted. You go through a massive amount of national security vetting. You have to convince a consular officer abroad that you're not going to overstay your visa. And then if you're lucky, you know, you get to come here to study. And then you have to go through this whole maze of different alphabet soup of visas before you can finally become an American. But, you know, tens of millions of people have followed that path over, you know, the course of a generation or more. And so when you think about somebody who, quote, unquote, came here to work, they came here to study and then they got a job because they were needed and they were competitive.

And then they ultimately, you know, stayed and put down roots. The Trump administration is trying to chop that process up at every point along the way. Just put, you know, every step along the way, kind of cut the bridge so that it's very, very difficult. And I think that stands at odds with people's kind of like out of date intuition about Republicans and even about Trump, which is like, well, Trump's. says nice things about international students. Trumpump was on the campaign trail and he told those podcast bros, those tech bros, like, oh, I want to staple a green card to the diplomas of every international student graduate. Well, it was all a lie.

Or, you know, maybe he feels that in his heart. But the people he's empowering to actually do the dirty work are trying to make it all a bit impossible to come here to study and to ultimately become an American. And if you want, I can go into nerdy or non-nerdy detail about what those steps are. Yeah, well, it did make. It did make me want to ring the necks of a lot of the Trump surrogates who said, like, clearly this is evidence when he made those comments on the podcast about it. Like, oh, he wants to staple a green card to every diploma.

I don't remember for it was every diploma or for STEM graduates or whatever it was. He wanted to make the pathway easier for people who studied in the United States to stay here and work here and contribute their skills here. And it was like, see, this is evidence that this is what he's planning to do. Because he always makes good on his promises. That's well known about the government. Well, he tells audiences what they want to hear. So let's go into some of the specific things that have happened. So I know that the administration has made it much harder for people to study here by changing student visas, for example, to a duration of four years maximum rather than however long the program takes.

And anybody out there is listening and you have like a STEM PhD, you know that that probably took five, six plus years. Now that's no longer an option. You'll have to maybe reapply, maybe get it. Like, this seems like a- Creating uncertainty. It's like a virtual check. It's like a virtual check. Yeah.

Why would you study here when you might have opportunities in the UK and Australia, in China, in all these other places that are like welcoming you with open arms? And by the way, it's working, right? So I just looked up the numbers. You know, before Trump, there were roughly 1.2 million international students in postdocs in the United States. It's all field, STEM and non-STEM. Just in fall 2025. So before they'd even been in office for a year, the number of new international students was 17% down year on year.

And just recently, the best data, we don't know enrollment numbers yet for the fall. We will soon. But just based on common apps, the number of applicants has fallen by 10%, which is the steepest decline ever. So partly it's these regulatory changes. Like let's put up obstacles to the visa process. But I want to be clear, this was already starting last year. And part of it's just being a jerk, right? Like all those students who got their visas revoked, those student, former student green card holders who were, you know, who were being, you know, thrown into deportation proceedings because of their speech.

And a lot of the declines are primarily among Indian students who are, you know, among the highest, the largest population of international students and postdocs. Like, they're seeing all this anti-Indian hatred online and coming from, you know, politicians' mouths. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, this is not the country that was a beacon before. And all these hateful things are coming from the corridors of power. And so, you know, sometimes you don't even have to use policy. You can just, you can just make an example of a small number of people. You can say hateful things. And people are like, I've got choices.

Like the world is getting richer. You know, America doesn't have a lock on like all the greatest universities in the world anymore. We still have most of them. But I'm going to look at other options. I'm going to look at places where I'm welcome. So, so that's already working. without even, you know, and then the policy is making it worse. After you graduate from a U.S. university, there's a longstanding policy that says, if you're

in a non-S. field, you can go work for a U.S. employer in your field while still on a student visa for one year. And if it's a STEM field, it's up to three years. It's called optional practical training. And it is absolutely essential step in that bridge from being an international student to ultimately getting a green card and becoming a citizen. And they're attacking that as well. They're kind of like the first step is having all these press conferences about how the whole program is rife with fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, which is not true. There is some fraud. There's always a kernel of truth, but by and large, it's just a pretty boring standard pathway. And then any day now, maybe by the time you run this episode, I don't know, they're expected to come out with some gigantic fee for this program that's never been seen before.

Rumors are $100,000 or something, but basically shutting it down through an egregious fee. So they've telegraphed their desire to shut down that link in the chain. And then everybody knows about H-1B, which is the next step, right? You go from your student visa to an H-1B and then ultimately to a green card. So if they can prevent people from getting H-1Bs, then, you know, again, they can shut down this right, this doing it the right-way pathway. And I assume, as much as I regret it, we're going to have to talk about H-1B fees again, aren't we? I saw this headline about the $100,000 fee on H-1B applicants, and I was like, this feels like deja vu.

I thought we did this maybe a year ago, but I don't remember, did it get blocked in court? Why are we back where we are? And how is it this different? Last fall, Trump did something very creative. He signed a proclamation using the same authority that the Muslim ban was under, which is basically Congress said the president can ban classes of people from this country if he thinks it's and the public interest. Like, that's the authority for the Muslim ban.

That's the authority for the 39 country ban we talked about earlier. And so they were like, ooh, let's use this to block all H-1B applicants unless they pay $100,000. So it was like a ban with a contingent fee. Very clever. It just fell in the courts because it's ludicrous, right? And it's a funny twist that you'll appreciate, Catherine, because one of the ways the litigators won and got this fee and joined is they said, Hey, look, we know from the tariff cases that only Congress can impose a tax. So this is obviously a tax, right?

You can't just, like, make up a fee that's not paying for government services. It's going straight to the Treasury, right? And so it was blocked. And then, you know, as if by magic, within a month or two later, they come out with this regulation, which is a different process. It's not the presidential population. It's a boring DHS regulation. my old agency, you know, we spent three years, like, meticulously coming up with, you know,

which fees to charge, which filers for green cards and citizenship and visas or whatever. And you have to fund the $6 billion agency through fees, whatever. It's like an incredibly technical bureaucratic process. And they just went, boom, and said, nope, we're just going to tweak the model. Boop, boop, boop. Oh, look, it came up with a $103,000 fee for H-1B workers. So we're just going to do that through it. through this boring USCS. Now, it's totally lawless. It makes me laugh, the nerd part of me laugh,

because it's like all the work that's supposed to go into this. And then they're just pretending that this objective process came up with almost exactly the same fee that they made up last fall. They're going to get sued. They're probably going to get enjoined. So they obviously, they wanted their $100,000 fee. So they like very rapidly and frantically made up a rationalization for it. But now when you apply the math, it means that's a $9 billion revenue source for an agency that only has a $6 billion budget. So they're like, no, no, no, no. We're going to give some to ICE,

which is clearly strapped right now after getting all the money could possibly hope for from taxpayers. They're shaking the tin top, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going to give some to the immigration courts. They're just making stuff up. Like, the agency by law

is only allowed to raise money to recover its costs. It is not supposed to be a money canon for every other agency that touches the immigration system. So I don't think this fee is going to actually go into a, effect. I think it's, I think it's dead on arrival in the courts. But, but, but even when they lose, they win because now they're flooding the headlines again with like, you know, oh, and one more thing,

I should say for all those people, Catherine, who's next you wanted to ring who are like, oh, no, no, no, like, you know, it's not as bad as it looks. Oh, no, no, it's worse than it looks. Because the first hundred thousand dollar H-1B fee, after kind of a weekend of immense uncertainty and frantic phone calls from CEOs to the White House, they eventually walked it back a little and said, Okay, well, it's only going to apply to people who are coming here for the first time. It's not going to apply to the people who studied here. It's not going to apply to the brilliant MIT PhD student who's going to go work for a U.S. company. This new fee applies to everybody, if it ever goes into effect.

Yeah. And to your point, even if it doesn't go into effect, it may dissuade enough people about how difficult the landscape is here, both employers and prospective employees. How difficult the landscape is here, how unwelcoming it is here, how burdensome it is to come here. And one thing I do want to emphasize in talking with you is that this is not just a story about, you know, harm visited upon immigrants. You worked in innovation, in entrepreneurship policy for the Obama White House. when we shut off these pipelines of fresh blood coming to this country, whether on H-1Bs or other means to come here, other lawful pathways to come here, what is lost? What do Americans lose out on?

What do American communities, the American economy? Like, there are some mutual gains from trade, as economists like to say. So, like, what are we losing out on when we shut off these? lawful pathways for people to come here. I can give you the standard answer, which is the answer you're expecting. And the standard answer you're expecting is, oh, my gosh, which I learned within a month of working at the Obama White House when I thought I was going to be working on, you know, startups and access to capital and all this like econ stuff.

And I, you know, within a month, everyone I talked to in the tech and entrepreneurship world was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Can you please fix immigration? Because that's our binding constraint, right? Like getting and retaining the talent we need is the binding constraint. how I actually got into immigration policy was like by realizing that DHS is the accidental regulator of global talent. And so we should make it easier or not harder. And so, yes, we can tell that story, and it's a true story about how, you know, I mean, the lowest hanging fruit, right? The most

brilliant people in the world who we educate here and who want to, you know, go on to invent things and go on to start companies and, you know, go on to run companies. It's absurd to kill that golden goose, right? But I'd also like to make, I think, a more fundamental point about why America has always been successful and why America has gotten to this point and why we have such a high standard of living in the first place. It's because we are really good at making people into Americans. And this is something that Ronald Reagan said beautifully in his last speech before the end of his presidency and that used to be a very bipartisan thing to believe, which is there's nowhere else in the

world where you can come here and become an American and become an American that's fully integrated. Your kids are going to have incredible opportunities. They're going to be embraced. There will be no limits on them. And the data bears this out, the economic data, especially children of immigrants are incredibly successful on average. And I'm talking from all socioeconomic strata. We don't need to just cherry pick the best and brightest.

We already do. Universities do that for us for free, basically, as a society. But when you think about the most successful Americans who were born abroad, a lot of them came here based on family. A lot of them came here as refugees, right? When people come here and get to live out their American dreams, many of them become incredibly successful because we're good at that, because we give people opportunities that they will not have in their home countries, whether because of overt, you know, authoritarian squelching of good ideas or just lack of economic opportunity. And so, like, our system of being relatively generous, not incredibly generous, by the way, compared to Canada or Australia or other countries, but, like, reasonably generous about letting people come here based on family ties, letting people come here because they have nowhere else to go and they need protection, letting people come here as students. Like, that process of boosting our population numbers and having more Americans, solving more problems for other Americans and building the economy for other Americans, has only enriched us.

It also is completely counter to all the alleged goals of this administration. Like, Americans are going to get fewer jobs when our economy is throttled by being restrictive on immigration. Americans are going to be less safe because they're allocating, you know, law enforcement resources towards people who pose no threat. And they're doing this all day long. So, of course, people are going to be, I mean, U.S. citizens are going to be victims of crimes who wouldn't have otherwise been because of this insane misallocation of law enforcement

and resources. And like you said, Catherine, by delegalizing people, by taking over a million people who thought they had protections and removing those protections, whether that's temporary protected status or the attacks on DACA or, you know, telling people who are waiting in line the right way for asylum protections, know you're deportable now. People who are married to U.S. citizens who've never been out of lawful, a lawful presence, saying, no, we're going to throw you into detention at the airport. because you don't have your green card yet, and we're going to put you in detention while you're waiting. I mean, this is crazy Terra Incognita, right?

And so all these people are now unable to contribute to the economy, you know, above board. And guess what that does? That's how you pull down wages is by forcing people to work under the table, right? The best protection for U.S. workers is to give people a work permit or a green card and let them vote with their feet and take the job and shove it if they don't like it and not be tied to their employer for their livelihood. So, I mean, you couldn't design a better menu of policies to harm Americans.

I did want to step back for a second on a number that you mentioned. You said something like a million people have been delegalized or deducmented. So can we get like what are the top level buckets of people who had documents, who had legal authorization to be here in the United States that have now had that stripped from them? I think the people who've had it officially stripped from them is where you get the million number from. And it's mostly people who had temporary protected status. That's a, that's a status that the federal government can give and taketh away. And the Supreme Court basically just blessed Donald Trump being able to take it away in the most lawless possible way. Like, they could have done it slowly and deliberately, and it would have been bulletproof.

But instead, they did it sloppily and quickly. And the Supreme Court said, yeah, that's fine. And not only that, it can't be challenged in the courts anymore. So really endorsing some very bad arbitrary and capricious government action. But so you hear about people from Haiti, people from Latin America who had temporary protected status. Like those are the people who are now having to work in the shadows or leave. They're also, you know, as everybody knows, probably there are, you know, a lot of people who came to the border over the past several years. During the Biden administration is one way of doing border management.

They were allowed here temporarily in a quasi status called parole. They were allowed to work while they waited to pursue their asylum claims. You know, a lot of that has been revoked. And then there's the unofficial that I don't think is even part of that million number, which is, you know, there's several million people here who've lawfully filed for asylum protections. Some will ultimately be found to be eligible. Some won't. But you're allowed to wait here.

That is doing it the right way. And, you know, all those people are now on notice that, like, we don't care that you have a work permit. We don't care that you're here under color of law. we can still put you in removal proceedings and throw you in detention and basically make your life miserable and hope that you self-deport. One thing that I'm concerned about is if immigrant populations, immigrant communities or people who are relatives and immigrants no longer trust law enforcement, how cooperative will they be if there is like an MS-13 gang member running loose or whatever, you know, if they get robbed, if they get raped, if they get, you know, otherwise abused or assaulted, will they feel comfortable going to the local PD, which may be cooperating with ICE, for example, or the FBI or anyone else, and any other authority figure that they might otherwise report information to or be willing to serve as witnesses for?

Now, you know, it'll be used against them. If they have immigrants living in their homes, right, it's not just the immigrants themselves, but anybody who's in the family of... There's a lot of sheriffs and police chiefs who've been saying this, and, you know, particularly in jurisdictions that have been targeted by the Trump administration by all these, you know, roundups when all these federal agents come into town, you don't even know who they are, you know, from all these different federal law enforcement agencies, it's it's undoing overnight, you know, decades of work to try to get communities to trust their local cops. And yeah, it's going to have tragic results. And one more thing, Catherine, this is just a, speaking of like, you know, all the crazy things is just happened in the past week. There is a credible story just in the past couple days that my old agency, USCIS, has taken the political appointees leadership there, has said to all the hundreds and hundreds of employees who work on fraud detection and national security. That's literally the directorate they work in and said, stop detecting that criminal fraud and national security.

We want you to only be working on two things. Number one, finish the vetting for white South African refugees. And number two, look over all these voter rolls and find every example you can of non-citizens voting because that's what we want. The midterms are coming. We got a big political high stakes conspiracy theory to pursue. And so, I mean, it's just shameless, right? They got elected under the banner of law and order.

and I'm here to tell you, Donald Trump is defunding the police. Yeah, defunding the police and having them chase after his fever dreams of voter fraud. Well, Doug Grant, thanks as always for your time. And thanks to everyone for watching. Please be sure to like and subscribe to the bulwark on YouTube or via substack wherever you get your content from us. We got more great coverage of this and many other economic and immigration stories for you.