The Daily - Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Begins

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

At the heart of President Trump’s flurry of executive orders was a systematic dismantling of the United States’ approach to immigration.Hamed Aleaziz, who covers immigration policy for The Times, explains what the orders do and the message they send.Guest: Hamed Aleaziz, who covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy in the United States for The New York Times.Background reading: Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown enlists the military and will test the law.How Mr. Trump plans to kill the refugee system.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo credit: Paul Ratje for The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. Today, at the heart of President Trump's flurry of executive orders was a systematic dismantling of the country's current approach to immigration. I spoke with my colleague, Hamid Al-Aziz, about what the orders do and the message that they send. It's Wednesday, January 22nd. Hamid, thank you for coming in the studio here in Washington, which is, the studio might be a little grandiose a word for what this is. Sure.

Kind of a closet. It's tight. Yeah. But it gets the job done. You have spent the past 24 hours or so studying President Trump's executive orders on immigration and what exactly they seek to accomplish. So with the benefit of that huge amount of time you've had to study this, how are you

thinking about them individually and collectively? To me it seems like President Trump is cramming basically four years of policy into one day. One half day. One half day. When you look back at the first Trump administration, it took them a long time to introduce policies like remain in Mexico or, you know, trying to strip federal funds from sanctuary cities, ban asylum, all of that happened on Monday night within a matter of hours.

And how would you describe the ultimate goal of all these things he crammed into this first half-day? This was a way for President Trump to reimagine our immigration system, to crack down on the system as a whole, the ability of people to come to this country legally, illegally, and in many ways, to make it more uncomfortable for people who are already in this country unlawfully. You know, to have them rethink whether or not this is worth it. Yeah, the right place for them to be.

And I think at the center of it, it's a condemnation really of the Biden administration's policies. What Trump saw, what Stephen Miller, what many in that circle saw was President Biden opening the borders, making it too easy for people to enter this country and remain indefinitely and allow them to work and live and have no consequences for being in the country unlawfully. Right. And just as a factual statement, under President Biden, undocumented immigration in the United States reached record levels. So

there's some basis for that complaint. So let's talk about the orders that Trump issued on Monday relating to immigration. So where should we start? One of the first things that President Trump did is to get rid of a program that Biden administration put into place in 2023, trying to change the way people were entering the country at the southern border. At some point during the Biden administration, they realized that the current status quo was not working. Tens of thousands of people were crossing the border,

seeking asylum, and were being allowed to stay in the country indefinitely. They saw this as a major problem and incentive for more people to come and to cross. So they thought one way to handle this is to set up a system through an app called CBP one where people could schedule appointments to enter the country at a port of entry. But if you crossed illegally, asylum access was no longer gonna be, you know, given to you. Got it. So this app is an effort to bring some order to the chaos of the border during the Biden presidency.

Totally. The Biden administration felt like they were really providing a roadmap to stabilize the border. You could either come this way and you'd have a chance to stay in the United States, or you come illegally and we're going to turn you back, we're going to deport you, we're going to send you back to your home country. And does this app end up working? Well, according to the Biden administration, it does. Ultimately, in the form of border numbers, the border numbers have been dropping throughout

2024. After the Biden administration put in tough restrictions at the southern border on asylum and paired it with this app, the numbers dropped precipitously. As a point of comparison, you can look back to December 2023, nearly 250,000 people crossed the Southern border. In that month alone. In that month alone. And you see from there to the end of December, 2024, one year later, we're at 45, 46,000 crossings at the Southern border.

And on Monday, President Trump shut down this app. Why would President Trump shut down an app that seemed to be accomplishing what President Biden hoped it would do, which is to bring some predictability to asylum seeking and border crossing at the US-Mexico border? President Trump and Republicans, including Stephen Miller, saw this as another form of illegal immigration.

These were people in their eyes who had no other lawful way to enter the United States through a visa. And if you look at the numbers since early 2023 to the end of 2024, more than 900,000 people use this app to enter the United States. Huh. So while the numbers may have gone down overall once this app goes into place, they're still pretty big numbers by the end of a year. Entering the United States, exactly. Republicans felt like when you're

examining the number of arrests at the southern border every month, you need to add that total of people who are entering using this app. Add that to the total of arrests as well, the southern border, to get a better picture of what's happening at the border of arrests as well, the southern border, to get a better picture of what's happening at the border. So essentially, Trump, Stephen Miller, those around them, would say that this app was a half measure, an unsuccessful solution to the problem of border crossings.

And it was facilitating illegal immigration. So what happened once Trump ordered ordered the app be shut down? We saw pretty immediately people on the ground in Mexico processing this news, talking to our colleagues saying they had this appointment, they'd been waiting for it for a long time, and they had no idea what was going to come next, what was going to happen to their cases, their ability to enter the United States. And according to a former Department of Homeland Security official who I spoke with, as of Monday morning,

around 30,000 people had appointments to enter the country using this app, and those appointments are now canceled. Is it right to think that what Trump accomplishes with this executive order that shuts down this app is he's effectively shutting down asylum? Well, there's another order that handles asylum in the southern border. What Trump does in this separate order is to immediately say that there's an invasion

at our border and no longer can we allow people to cross into this country illegally and claim asylum and remain indefinitely. What Trump's saying here is we're going to take the deterrence approach. We're going to tell you no longer can you enter our country illegally and have a chance to stay. So basically Trump is taking away the route Biden had created to apply for asylum without crossing into the country. And with this order, he's saying because of a surge of asylum seekers, what he calls an invasion, we're not replacing that with anything. Asylum, in effect, is over. Exactly. And how should we think about the underlying logic of that?

I think we've all come to understand that asylum as originally conceived is this concept that you are living in a place where life has become intolerably dangerous. Perhaps you're on a government enemies list. Perhaps gangs are threatening you or someone in your family and at any moment it feels like your life may end. That's been a traditional way of understanding why someone would apply for asylum and over the past eight years it's felt like many coming to the United States seeking asylum are coming because their economic circumstances in their home countries are intolerable. And the system has been overwhelmed by a kind of broader understanding of why someone's seeking asylum. Is that essentially

what the Trump people are saying is that the current system has encouraged too many people to invoke asylum and as a result, the entire system has become indefensible. Yeah, exactly. In the order itself, it details how our border system is not equipped to process people, to analyze their backgrounds, any potential criminal history that they have, and our current system just does not work. And to be fair, there is some bipartisan understanding of that, I mean, Democrats have, you know,

by and large come to that conclusion as well. The Biden administration echoed a lot of these talking points of how the asylum system as it is currently at the southern border is just not operable, but they offer these other pathways like the app. Right. They still defended it in principle.

Trump is saying, don't even bother doing that. The system just needs to end. Yeah. The system needs to end. And also, it's important to realize that and to note here that in federal law, there is a provision that says that no matter the way somebody enters the United States, they are able to claim asylum. So this is something that advocates, the ACLU and others will point to when they inevitably sue the Trump administration.

They'll say, this isn't a law. People have the ability to claim asylum whatever way they enter the country. What Trump is saying is that it's worth trying to shut down our southern border, to stop this really high flow of people entering the country, what he terms as an invasion, millions of people coming into the country in recent years. And he's looking with his other executive orders for a way to close the door on other pathways for immigrants who are seeking refuge in this country,

closing those doors one by one. ["The Last Supper"] We'll be right back. Hamid, we've been talking about asylum and President Trump's plans to shut that down in multiple ways. How else is he using these early executive orders to stop foreigners from trying to enter the United States? Yeah, President Trump has directed the DHS secretary to immediately shut down a Biden-era program that allowed immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to fly into the country

through something called humanitarian parole. And just explain what humanitarian parole is and how it fits into Biden's approach to immigration. President Biden saw this as a way to allow people a different way to enter the country and to avoid taking this long journey through Mexico, entering the country illegally, putting their lives in the hands of smugglers.

So kind of like the app. Exactly. And at that time in 2023, the Biden administration was struggling mightily with crossings from migrants from these countries. So they wanted to give these migrants a different way to enter the country and to avoid crossing illegally. They thought this would be a solution to that problem. Basically, the thinking was if they're going to come anyway, let's create a more legal ish path for them. Exactly, and I think that there's almost a political element involved with this program, which is to say to the American public, don't worry. When this person enters the United States, they have a financial sponsor that's going to take care of them. They won't be living off the state.

This is a program that makes sense. And they saw it as a solution that was working. How many people will use it? More than 500,000 in two years use this program. Which is a lot of people. So in Biden's mind, this recognizes a problem at the border finds a way to deal with it. I'm going to guess that to Trump, 500,000 people coming from those countries is perhaps 500,000 too many. They saw this as a way for the government to allow people who had no other route to the United States to fly into the country and to remain as long as they wanted. And

so I think this speaks to a lack of communication from the Biden administration, from President Biden explaining his approach. He was never able to do that in a really succinct way. And other people filled that vacuum. Conservative figures were saying that the U S government was sponsoring people to fly into the United States, to come into your cities. And this just was not true. And so far we've talked about Biden era programs that president Trump has shut down. But he also moved to close off other programs that preceded President Biden and that were supported

on a bipartisan basis. What's an example of an executive order that did that? President Trump decided to pause, suspend our refugee admissions program. As of next Monday, January 27th, the program will be shut down. And in the next 90 days, the Department of Homeland Security will have to deliver a report to President Trump in which they say whether or not it's necessary for President Trump to bring back the refugee program and whether that's in the national interest of the United States.

Can you just distinguish, for those of us who maybe pretend we know but really don't, the distinction between someone seeking asylum and a refugee? Yeah, a refugee is applying for entry into the United States from abroad. They are oftentimes in a third country in a refugee camp. They've gone to the United Nations and they've said, I'm a refugee. That kick starts a process that can take upwards of two years where they're vetted by the United States. They go through all kinds of health and security checks, and they're waiting for a long time to enter the country.

But if they do, at that point, they get a pathway to US citizenship. For all intents and purposes, it's a legal pathway, it's legal immigration to the United States. So this is quite different from someone coming into the US and seeking asylum. How many refugees has the US let in over the past few years? Under the Biden administration, it took them four years to rebuild the refugee system that President Trump dismantled his first time in office.

By the end of the Biden administration last year, they had allowed around 100,000 refugees. This is the highest total in 30 years. Wow. And this isn't something that's historically Democrat or Republican. If you look back to President Bush before he handed over the White House to President Obama, he allowed in over 60,000 refugees. This is a bipartisan supported program. But for Trump, it represents a potential security threat.

And the way he's talked about it is, these are immigrants from areas like the Middle East, Syria, and other places, Sudan, who could potentially be a threat to the United States. These are talking points that he comes back to repeatedly. In the order itself, President Trump cites the fact that our country is taking too many immigrants and we're not equipped to take more immigrants, including refugees. This is not the time for cities like Denver, New York, and other places to take immigrants,

even if they're refugees. So far we're talking about executive actions designed to keep people from coming to the US. But of course, the order that has probably gotten the most attention so far does something different. It affects those already inside the United States. Yeah, the birthright citizenship executive action by President Trump was far more sweeping than I expected, than we expected. How so?

The way it works right now is when you are born in the United States, you automatically get U.S. citizenship. Birthright citizenship. Exactly. This is the way we've long understood U.S. citizenship in the United States. We look to the 14th Amendment, which ensures this right, but President Trump is completely changing that. He's making it so if your mother was here in the country unlawfully or was here with a temporary visa and your father did not have US citizenship or a green card, no longer can you be considered a US citizen. Right. A pretty bold thing to do given that it's in the Constitution. Exactly, and President Trump and some Republicans

saw this as an incentive for immigrants to enter the country unlawfully and be able to have their children get US citizenship. And this is something that they believe no longer should be a thing in the United States. So the motivation behind this is to take away birthright citizenship as a deterrence, because it has been, in Trump's mind,

a lure, a draw for people to come here, have a child in the United States that becomes a citizen, taking it away would take away that incentive. If you look at all these orders together, it's a lot of deterrence, a lot of making people uncomfortable or here in the United States unlawfully or temporarily. And this is just another way to do that.

Of all Trump's executive orders, this one would seem like it has the steepest legal hill to climb. And perhaps deterrence is so primarily the goal that he doesn't mind if it gets legally challenged, but we should assume that this is going to be legally challenged and that it might successfully be legally challenged perhaps alongside many of these executive orders. This is the one that so far has inspired the most lawsuits of all the executive orders so far. Lawsuits already.

We've seen several lawsuits, states across the country on Tuesday, including New York, cities like San Francisco have filed lawsuits over this executive action. So they're already being inundated with legal challenges. The question is, what happens when this inevitably gets to the Supreme Court? It is kind of hard to get over the fact that it is in the US Constitution and is something that most people have recognized as a fact, as just the way things work in the United States. I want to put all these orders together and think about the collective impact.

Taking away this app that gave people appointments to seek asylum, ending essentially asylum itself, ending the refugee program, ending the humanitarian parole program and birthright citizenship, and that of course is on top of Trump's promise to undertake mass deportations in the coming days and weeks. As you're hinting at, it's hard to imagine a stronger message to anyone seeking to come to the United States that it's essentially pointless and futile, and you shouldn't do it. And we're going to make, in your words, the experience very uncomfortable. And what's clear is that poll after poll shows that Americans believe

the country has been allowing too many migrants into the country and Trump now has a mandate to do something about it. He has been calling this a revolution of common sense. For many Americans, many of these orders might look like just that because Biden seem to be taking smaller half measure versions of the same actions. President Trump clearly feels emboldened to take aggressive action. In crackdown on our immigration system, oftentimes when you speak to voters across the country, it comes up almost every time, every single time, people see this immigration system as in chaos and they want some tightening, some control.

And what Trump is saying is this is the time to do that. This is the time to shut it down in many ways. But the question is, will that work? Right? This is going to be a real test of whether or not deterrence works. What the Biden folks saw was if we incentivize people to take legal pathways, come through the app, come through humanitarian parole or through the refugee system, then we'll incentivize people not to cross illegally. And the numbers did after reaching record levels come down. Exactly. You're saying the question is if you start to foreclose the numbers did, after reaching record levels, come down. Exactly. You're saying the question is, if you start to foreclose the legal pathways, are you actually

incentivizing, perhaps unintentionally, a return to higher levels of illegal and more dangerous crossings? It'll be a question of whether or not this communication of mass deportations of no more birthright citizenship of closing down asylum and shutting down our borders, whether or not that will inspire people to go back to their home countries, stay in Mexico, or whether they'll be incentivized to cross the country and try to come into the United States undetected and avoid any law enforcement noticing them. Right. And it will be sometime before we have an answer to that. But beyond the question of whether or not the numbers go up or down in the next couple of weeks, what Trump is doing

here would seem to fundamentally change the United States relationship with those seeking to come here. And I'm remembering a conversation that I had with one of our colleagues, Julie Davis, during Trump's first term about this same set of questions. And the formulation she came up with is that when it comes to immigration, Biden and Democrats, many of them in this moment, see it as a question of what immigrants bring to the United States and the United States' role as a refuge. Trump and many Republicans in this moment

see it very differently as a question of what immigrants take from the United States and the damage that they are causing to it and to its citizens. Exactly. It's almost like the story that Americans and America has told itself is that we're a place of refuge. We're a place that takes in people who are fleeing these really dangerous conditions, and Trump is seeking to remake that idea and say, it's time for Americans to think about themselves. And if we don't have a border of millions of Americans agree with that idea. Mohammed, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. As of Tuesday night, attorneys general from 22 states had sued President Trump in federal court in an effort to block his executive order ending birthright citizenship. In the lawsuits, the officials called the order, quote, extraordinary and extreme. Meanwhile, I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.

During a church service at the National Cathedral attended attended by Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance. Bishop Marianne Edgar Buddy, the leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, appealed directly to Trump to show mercy on immigrants. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we will all want strangers in this land." Trump repeatedly grimaced as she spoke and after returning to the White House from the

cathedral criticized the bishop, saying, quote, I didn't think it was a good service. We'll be right back. I didn't think it was a good service. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, several of those sentenced to the longest prison terms for their role in the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol were released because of President Trump's blanket pardons and commutations. Among those set free were Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers militia, who was serving 18 years for seditious conspiracy, and Joseph Biggs of the Proud Boys,

who was serving 17 years for the same charge. In Congress, lawmakers who had run for their lives to escape the rioters in 2020 were split in their reactions to Trump's pardons. Democratic leaders condemned them as a brazen act of lawlessness, while Republican leaders largely avoided the topic. Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto and Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Paige Cowitt and Maria Byrne, contains original music by Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderland. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you tomorrow.