Trump’s Flood of Immigration Changes: What Do They Mean?

PAULA NEWTON, ANCHOR: Now, President Trump’s suspension of that refugee program is just — we’re discussing one of several executive actions aimed at overhauling the U.S. immigration system. On Sunday, in fact, Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported making more than 900 arrests right across the country as a result of the president’s campaign to crackdown on undocumented migrants. He’s already proving that he won’t back down on his promises after Colombia announced it has agreed to all of his terms following a dispute over migrant repatriation flights. Staff writer for The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer, joins Hari Sreenivasan to break it all down.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Paula, thanks. Jonathan Blitzer, thanks so much for joining us. You wrote a recent piece for the New Yorker titled “The Unchecked Authority of Trump’s Immigration Orders.” I guess let’s break down the title a little by little here. What is the unchecked authority that you’re most concerned about?

JONATHAN BLITZER, STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER AND AUTHOR, “EVERYONE WHO IS GONE IS HERE”: There are two general ways in which I think this latest volley of executive orders and presidential actions are unchecked. The first is that very much built into the language and logic of these executive orders and a lot of the president’s new plans is this notion that mass migration constitutes a kind of invasion. That word is where we’ve heard a lot, obviously, politically, and we, at this point, are almost numb to how histrionic and dramatic it sounds. But in a legal sense, the claim being made by the new administration is that this so-called invasion necessitates a whole host of new presidential powers. The president always has a lot of latitude and power over immigration policy but the proposal that we’re seeing in the constellation of these executive orders and a lot of the early actions of the administration suggests that they’re taking the broadest possible view of what the president can do to deal with the reality of people migrating in the region. That’s the first way in which this kind of new set of powers are unchecked. And the other, I think, is a political issue, which is, you know, we’re in a moment where the general consensus seems to be, and I don’t think it’s as clear as the consensus suggests, that the president has a popular mandate to pursue a lot of his immigration policies. Immigration policy is extraordinarily complex. I’m not convinced that the public always understands different facets of what immigration policy looks like, or for that matter, the impact it has on people living in the U.S. And so, my big concern, too, the same day, the first day in which President Trump takes office, that you have all these executive orders coming out of the White House, you also had, in the Senate, 12 Democrats joining Republicans to pass what’s called the Laken Riley Act, which is a draconian and very, very extreme bit of enforcement policy, which suggests to me the fact that Democrats right now are very much cowering from the kind of political threat that Trump seems to represent on this issue. So, my concern too, is that we’re entering a moment of, you know, very wild and radical policymaking from the White House, when there seems to be a real scarcity of political impediments to his pursuit of those powers.

SREENIVASAN: OK. Let’s take that down one step at a time here. We’ll get to the Laken Riley Act. But first, what is the value or the — I guess the worth in giving something in name, calling it an invasion or as one of the other executive orders did, calling out cartels and calling them foreign terrorist organizations?

BLITZER: So, there are kind of two things you see in these executive orders. The first is something that we have seen President Trump do before in his first term, which is to declare a national emergency at the southern border. And factually, I think that is wildly off. And we’re at a moment when the number of arrivals at the southern border are way down. In fact, the situation is very much under control. That’s not to say the system doesn’t need reform and repair, but the idea, even that the president is saying there’s an emergency and he’s sending federal troops to the Pentagon, to the border to assist DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, and law enforcement, that already to my mind is a real misconstrue of what the reality is in the ground. But to your question, the utility for the new administration of calling mass migration an invasion is that it allows the president, by the logic of these executive orders. Now, obviously, this is an unsettled legal matter and there will be all kinds of challenges in the courts. But by the logic of these orders, the idea is that because the arrival of so many people constitutes an invasion, the president has authorities that go over and above authorities laid out in the immigration statutes that regulate and direct immigration policy and that go to questions that are constitutional, that the president is commander in chief, has a responsibility to repel invasions, to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States. Once we enter that territory, the scale of what the U.S. military can be brought in to do expands considerably. Now, we’re in entirely uncharted territory here, so I don’t know what this would all look like concretely, but studied through these executive orders are references to extremely rare and alarming historical acts like the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and the Insurrection Act that basically forecast that the president is willing to go to great, great lengths to use the military to start carrying out enforcement operations at the border and in the interior of the country. We’ll have to see whether or not this materializes, but that’s at least the logic as laid out in some of these orders.

SREENIVASAN: The Alien Enemies Act or the Insurrection Act that some of this reference, I mean, these were in incredibly different times in America, right? But at the same time, the president, even in his first term, was able to mobilize U.S. troops to go to the southern border. And we hear now that the Pentagon is going to dispatch about another 1,500 people to the border as of just this past week.

BLITZER: Yes. And I should say, the fact that troops are being sent to the border to work in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security, that is something that has happened before, not only under Trump in his first term, but under Democrats as well. So, that on its own isn’t something kind of out of left field, say, in the history of U.S. policymaking in regards to the border. Generally, though, there has been more of a specific justification for sending those troops at a given moment in time. Right now, for instance, you know, there aren’t huge numbers of people arriving. It’s not fair or accurate to say that federal immigration authorities are overwhelmed the southern border. So, it’s, of course, extremely dubious to be staging this bit of political theater with troops being sent to the border. But the fact of sending troops — you know, troops — the Department of Defense have actually always had a role to play in immigration management at the border, whether it’s to provide, you know, provisional detention centers for newly arrived migrants, whether it’s to help with monitoring or, you know, logistical tasks along the border, that sort of thing on its own isn’t, you know, wildly unprecedented. What is the language in these executive orders suggesting that the scale of what the U.S. is facing, this so-called invasion, necessitates a whole higher order military intervention. That, to me, is a major departure and a major escalation, the likes of which we’ve really never seen.

SREENIVASAN: You know, one of the executive orders about birthright citizenship challenging the 14th Amendment has already been constitutionally challenged. There was a federal judge that — on Thursday, blocked it, saying it was, quote, “blatantly unconstitutional.” So, I guess, why even take that step? What is behind trying to draft an executive order that not only do you know is going to be challenged, but very likely will get block in court?

BLITZER: Yes, it’s a good question. I think built into the new administration’s plans, and this I’ve gotten from, you know, the president’s advisers and, you know, allies of the president’s over the years, is this idea that if they flood the zone, you know, day one, if they accomplish as one of the — as one presidential adviser had told me in the past, you know, the idea is to accomplish in 100 hours what used to be accomplished in 100 days. The thinking being, if we overwhelm all of the opposition, opposition from Democrats, opposition from civil society groups, operation — resistance from the public, we can achieve more because it’s hard for our political opponents to know even where to start. That said, the idea that that birthright citizenship executive order would come out as starkly and immediately as it did is, I think, also reflective of the fact that they’re ready and willing to fight this thing out in the courts. And I would say a kind of ancillary political benefit for them in these kinds of protracted legal battles is the fact that the public gets desensitized to some of the terms under discussion.

SREENIVASAN: You know, Jonathan, that reminds me there, there were already reports that in Newark, New Jersey, there were ICE raids on a specific business. I know Senator Booker and the mayor, Baraka, have been pushing back about this and want more information on exactly what happened. There seems to be a gap here between what is laid out as an executive order on day one, whether we have to wait for the courts to have injunctions and to stop things versus like the memo that gets written to the local ICE office that says, you can do this now.

BLITZER: In the past, the way ICE conducts its operations is it prioritizes people for arrest. There are so many undocumented people living in the United States that it’s impossible for a law enforcement body to attempt to arrest all of them unless there are some guiding principles for how they go about that work. And so, what’s happened over the years is ICE, as an agency, has refined a set of priorities whereby it essentially targets for arrest and eventual deportation, people who have committed serious crimes and people who have arrived very recently in the country and are undocumented and maybe have orders of removal. And what that’s meant for people who don’t fall into those particular categories is, by and large, they don’t have to worry about the kind of randomness of just getting swept up any particular day because of their legal status. That is all out the window. And a lot of checks on how ICE arrests occurred in the past are also out the window. So, for instance, you know, for years, there was a kind of general idea laid out in the regulation at ICE that, OK, you wouldn’t make arrests at schools, at hospitals, at places of worship, it’s called the Sensitive Locations Policy. That policy has been scrapped. And so, the idea now really is it is a free for all in a way that it hasn’t been for the last four years. And we’re going to see flare ups all over the country. And I think particularly in Democratic enclaves, because there are, A, large immigrant populations in a lot of big metropolitan areas in the United States. And B, because they — those cities represent to the president and his party political opposition.

SREENIVASAN: Are we heading to a scenario here where the federal government tries to prosecute state and local, you know, jurisdictions and individuals and kind of what does that — how does that tension get resolved?

BLITZER: You know, one of the striking things with the, you know, sanctuary jurisdictions and so on is the politics in these places has also started to really shift over the last couple of years. And so, there was a lot more outright resistance to the Trump administration in 2017 during that first term than there is now. And some of this is the result of the governor of Texas’ Greg Abbott’s busing plan, which began basically in the spring of 2022. And he bused, you know, more than 100,000 recently arrived migrants from Texas to blue cities and states across the country without coordinating with local authorities ahead of time and very much overwhelming city and state resources. And so, as a result, in a lot of these cities, I mean, I’m speaking to you from New York, the politics in New York City itself and in the suburbs of New York City and in the state at large, have really shifted. And so, you know, there’s — over and above the legal questions are flagging. There’s also this question of political will. You know, if there is sustained and serious pressure from the current administration brought to bear on, you know, cities and states that typically have held the line against these kinds of federal incursions, you know, do local office holders or state office holders really want to duke it out at a time when it seems like, by and large, the public’s hostility to immigration on the whole has really grown.

SREENIVASAN: You mentioned earlier the Laken Riley Act. For people who aren’t aware of it, what is the significance of it that just passed the Senate?

BLITZER: The Laken Riley Act essentially does two things. First, it requires the detention of any undocumented immigrant who is charged of even minor crimes, like shoplifting, for instance, which is to say you do not have to be convicted of these crimes, merely charged, trigger the mandatory detention and what almost always follows in the case of undocumented immigrants in these instances, deportation. And then the second prong of this law, which in many ways is equally radical, is the idea that it allows state attorneys general to sue the U.S. attorney general or the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. If someone who has been paroled into the country, paroled into the country just means that someone has given legal protection to enter the country, it’s not a permanent status, but it is a kind of an official way of bringing someone into the country. If a person paroled into the country goes on to commit any sort of crime or cause any kind of damage, whether it is to a person or to the finances of a person or the state in an amount more than $100. I mean, this is extraordinarily draconian. And the fact that Democrats immediately got on board with it and didn’t really even put up much of a fight or push in a serious way for amendments or carve outs, really reflects their desperation to try to outrun this immigration issue, which they feel has really dogged their party in which the president has clearly used his advantage.

SREENIVASAN: Now, we’ve been talking a lot about immigrants coming across the southern border, but there are obviously asylum seekers, there are refugees, and those programs in the United States have already also been affected by the incoming administration. I mean, we saw the app that a lot of people, asylum seekers might be using at the southern border, and we also have heard reports about refugees, including about what, 1,500, 1,600 Afghans who the United States has said, will take care of you. They are now kind of in limbo too. What’s going on?

BLITZER: So, the U.S. Refugee Program, which Trump essentially decimated in his first term, got restored in large part by the Biden administration. And now, it has been frozen in place again by the Trump administration in the form of this executive order, which basically said, anyone at any stage in the refugee resettlement process is now on hold. And so, you have 10,000 people who have already been vetted, whose security background checks have already been run, who were literally just waiting for airfare to come to the United States and be resettled are now stuck with no obvious path forward for them. So, that’s one prong of all of this. And then, as you mentioned, at the southern border, the Biden administration really cracked down on asylum in between ports of entry. So, if people were to show up at the southern border seeking asylum, the Biden administration was very harsh with them if people showed up in between ports of entry. But what the Biden administration did simultaneously was it said, OK, every day at ports of entry there are appointments for 1,400 people a day to be paroled into the country. And that way they could begin any sort of legal process they want to pursue. The current administration in its executive orders has also immediately halted the app that allowed for those applications and schedulings to start. And an additional program that the Biden administration to put in place, allowing for 30,000 migrants from four countries where there have been high rates of immigration over the last few years, that also got frozen in place. And so, now there are large numbers of people who, by and large, we’re trying to avail themselves of specific legal channels created by the previous administration or already existing in U.S. law who are now completely frozen out of the system.

SREENIVASAN: Jonathan, you’ve been covering this topic for quite some time. You’ve even wrote a whole book about it, “Everyone Who is Gone is Here.” And I wonder — put this in perspective for us, given that even in the length of time that you’ve been following immigration, how significant are the changes that we’re seeing really just in the past week and compare that to what’s been happening, our immigration policy that seems to ebb and flow from one administration to the next?

BLITZER: You know, a lot of the stuff you’re hearing about, a lot of the stuff you’re seeing, whether in the form of executive orders or whether in the form of this new legislation are not addressing particularly acute needs that experts say are things that need to be addressed to improve the immigration system. And so, the political conversation, I guess, when I take this kind of broader view, as you can imagine, politics around immigration have always been intense. They’ve always flared up over time. But we are in a moment where the politics have veered off so drastically from any of the actual policy discussions of what needs to happen or what should happen, that I think there’s a level of dysfunction that’s new.

SREENIVASAN: Jonathan Blitzer, author of “Everyone Who is Gone is Here” and staff writer of The New Yorker, thanks so much.

BLITZER: Thanks for having me.