The Journal. - A New Phase in Trump's Immigration Fight

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Immigrants who took advantage of a Biden-era program to enter the U.S. are now being targeted by the Trump administration, including people who fled the Russia-Ukraine war. WSJ’s Michelle Hackman explains how the program came to be and how Trump cancelled it. Further Reading: - They Thought They Came to the U.S. Legally. Now They’re at Risk for Deportation.  - What Green Card and Visa Holders Need to Know About Recent Deportations  Further Listening: - Trump's Immigration Overhaul  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When President Trump was on the campaign trail, he made a lofty promise. He said he was going to deport millions of illegal immigrants. And on day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. And specifically, he said he was going to deport immigrants who had committed crimes. We are going to crack down on the gangs, the drug dealers, human traffickers, and criminal cartels. And I think the way that it was portrayed was, we're going to go after people who knowingly came here illegally, knowingly broke our laws.

And so I think a lot of people were led to believe that that is what the crackdown was going to look like. And now it looks really different. That's our colleague, Michelle Hackman, who covers immigration. And she says that since Trump took office, the mass deportations have not yet been as mass as he promised. His mass deportation isn't going so well so far. And that's a huge source of frustration for Trump, for people in his administration. Deportations actually aren't that much higher than they were under Biden.

So to increase the number of deportations, the Trump administration is targeting a new group of people. People who came to the United States legally under certain programs. They're broadening the aperture of who we would think of as deportable. So this is it's a whole new scale that we're seeing. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Wednesday, March 19th. Coming up on the show, a new phase in Trump's immigration fight. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has been turning up the heat on deportations.

Over the weekend, his administration deported hundreds of Venezuelans without giving them hearings, citing an 18th century law. He's also been expanding the list of who is deportable by going after people with a variety of legal statuses, including some with green cards or visas. As part of that expansion, the administration is targeting an obscure program known as humanitarian parole.

Humanitarian parole is a part of immigration law that's historically been used for special situations when someone can't get a visa. And so the government says, okay, this is an extraordinary circumstance. We're going to, for humanitarian reasons, let you into the country temporarily on this thing called parole. So the idea is kind of like the U.S. will let in some people under certain circumstances out of the kindness of America's heart, but it's only supposed to be temporary.

The idea is it's supposed to be temporary, but it does, I want to emphasize, really give the government very broad authority to let people in as long as they can say that there's some kind of either humanitarian or public benefit reason to let someone in. Humanitarian parole has also been used during emergency evacuations, like after the Vietnam War, and after the US pulled out of Afghanistan. But humanitarian parole really expanded under the Biden administration, specifically after Russia invaded Ukraine.

So when Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a really interesting incident that happened where people were obviously fleeing Ukraine, they were spreading all over Europe, but a certain number, about 20,000 people, started coming to Mexico and hoping to cross the border to come to America. And we have this incident where in one month, 20,000 Ukrainians all flew to the Mexican city, Tijuana, and came up to this one border crossing, a cross from San Diego, and were all asking for asylum. — The refugee crisis created by the war in Ukraine has come to America's doorstep.

Hundreds of Ukrainians are gathering in Mexico near the U.S.-Mexico border. — And so the Biden administration was processing those people, letting them into the country. But it said we can't just let everyone in the world think if you come to Mexico and then walk up to our border, we're just going to let you in. So the Biden administration decided to expand the use of humanitarian parole and use it as the basis of a program called Uniting for Ukraine. And the deal was if you you apply in advance, so you know, the government has a chance to vet you, and you find an American to sort of financially sponsor you, take you in, be your guarantor in some way, then the government would give you travel permission to fly to the U.S. and live here for a grant of two years.

Now the Biden administration has promised to welcome 100,000 Ukrainian refugees into this country. Ultimately, more than 200,000 Ukrainian refugees moved to the US via this program. As a border gamut, it worked. I mean, literally the day that they announced this program, no one flew to Mexico from there. It was all the Ukrainian immigration issue. Exactly.

The program works so well to get Ukrainians off the US southern border that Biden decided to expand it to other countries in Latin America. Biden was having a crisis at the border. I mean, there were hundreds of thousands of people coming. At the height of it, about 250,000 people crossed illegally in one month. And he had this example of this program sort of fixing a border problem with the Ukrainians. And so people in his administration said, wait a second, you know, there are certain countries in Latin America where the situation is basically, you know, it's different, but it's just as bad as Ukraine.

You know, Haiti, the government, basically the president was assassinated, you know, in Cuba and Venezuela, there were sort of widespread issues with starvation. So Biden decided to offer humanitarian parole to people in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. And so Biden said, these people are not going to stop coming basically, no matter what we do. And so he made this bet where he said, if we let these people in legally, you know, we make them find a sponsor, we have them pay for their own plane tickets, we give them a work permit. They're probably going to choose that overcoming illegally.

Once these immigrants had this status and got into the US, they're only supposed to be here for two years. What's the next step? Is it just two years and goodbye or is there, was there something else that the immigrants could do once they're here to gain more long-term status? Yeah. once they're here to gain more long-term status. Yeah, so the immigrants, once they got here, were eligible to apply for anything else. So many applied for asylum.

A smaller number probably found other paths. More than half a million people entered the US from Latin American countries under the program. And Biden's decision to do this was very controversial. The reason this program was so controversial is because once this humanitarian parole expires, the person is in the country illegally, and they're basically in the same position

as someone else who had crossed illegally. So it's sort of like a way to bring people into the United States legally, so they're not just lining up in this giant queue on the southern border. But the effect is that they're now here. Exactly, exactly. The Republicans in particular have argued that this program is illegal because Congress sets limits on immigration.

You know, we have visa categories. If you don't fit into one, people strongly feel, well, then you have no right to be in the country. You shouldn't be here. And a president shouldn't have the authority to just decide to let a large group of people in who Congress hasn't authorized. When Trump took office, he immediately ended the parole program for Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and no new applicants are being considered. And immigrants who came to the U.S. under the program from Ukraine are now left in limbo.

It's not like I don't want to go to Ukraine, but I want to live. I want to feel safe. And right now my country can't give me that. We'll be right back. Katarina Kirilova grew up in Mariupol, a city in southern Ukraine. It was my hometown. It was close to the sea. I spent a lot of time at the beach. I had friends there.

All my life was there. In February 2022, her hometown came under siege as part of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Like every 10 minutes, something was just burning down. And yeah, of course it was scary. It was really scary. I had a grandma, but she died during the war. Her house was bombed. I had my apartment in Marivu Pol, but it also was bombed and burned down. Katarina says she was an orphan and that her grandmother was the only family she was close to. So she had to find a new place to go.

She eventually found the Uniting for Ukraine program and was accepted. What did you bring to the US when you left Ukraine? It was my dog and a backpack. Yeah, that's it. What was in your backpack? A few T-shirts, because, yeah, I left Ukraine only with my dog. Because, yeah, my apartment burned down with everything I had. So, yeah. Katarina found a sponsor in Texas, a retired military couple, and moved in with them for a few months.

They're really special people for me. I lived with them for a few, for the first two months. Then I found a job and rented my own place. And I did the right thing, you know, like I worked, I never got any benefits. I paid my taxes. After Trump took office, Katerina says she got laid off from the nonprofit agency where she worked, which lost its government funding. And now the future of the Uniting for Ukraine program is unclear.

Katerina said she hoped her status would be extended until the war ends, but that seems unlikely. So right now, like, we're all just waiting, waiting for something. Our colleague Michelle, who covers immigration, says Trump has done more than just end the program. For immigrants who came from Latin America, the Trump administration is revoking some people's status early. — And that has the effect of making them deportable.

And it's happening sort of on a rolling basis. These people are eligible for fast-tracked deportation because they came into the country relatively recently. So that means if you get arrested by ICE, you don't even have the right to go in front of a judge and plead your case. You can just be deported. The other thing that Trump has done is that he's paused the processing of any other application that one of these people has put in.

So let's say you came into the country and then you asked for asylum. Trump has said your asylum claim actually can't be decided because we put them all on pause. And so what happens to these people once their status expires? Are they expected to just leave on their own or is the administration fighting them and deporting them? We're still in the beginning stages. I think that both are going to happen. The administration has created an app that it calls CBP Home, where it's asking people to report their plans to self-deport.

Are there any court challenges to these moves by the Trump administration? report. Are there any court challenges to these moves by the Trump administration? There is a lawsuit filed to try to stop Trump from ending this program. And in some cases, the court has said, you know, even though a program is illegal, some of the people who rely on it, you know, it's unfair to take that away from them. And so it's possible that a court could rule that way, but we just don't know yet. You know, we are here having this debate about whether this program is legal, whether the Biden administration had the authority to use it. But to me, the really salient thing is, these are people who went really far out of their way to do things the right way and to follow all the rules. They

didn't break any laws by coming into the country. And so it's completely sort of changing the set of laws on them sort of with no notice. How do you feel about America right now? Like I have nothing bad to say about America, but what current government is doing. So, immigrants to people who came over here legally. It's cruel to do it to people who doesn't have a place where to go. I feel like I'm being forced to leave.

I feel like I'm being forced to leave. Katerina is planning to stay until her parole runs out. Then she says she'll probably go back to Ukraine, despite the risks. I was able to survive once and escape. And I'm not sure if I'm going gonna be lucky enough to do it again but I don't have much of a choice at this point. How do you feel right now? Because I don't understand what's next, you know. And you have to figure out Plan B. The war is still there and I can't go back to Ukraine. My city is still occupied, so it just...

But I can't live undocumented here either, so it just... I can tell that you're holding back tears right now. Yeah. It's hard to not have a home, and it's hard to understand that there's no place where you can go and to feel safe at least. I felt like I finally got home but now I feel like I'm losing it again. And it's hard. That's all for today. Wednesday, March 19th.

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