5 Briefly Defined Trumps Record on Immigration

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When Donald J. Trump became president, he immediately set out to overhaul the country’s immigration system, including a travel ban that mostly affects countries with large Muslim populations and by making drastic changes to the southern border.

Since leaving office, Mr. Trump has attacked his successors’ record on immigration. President Biden did not oppose Mr. Trumps the way some immigration advocates had hoped and he relied on restraint as other presidents have done. But compared to Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden did not use brutality and fear as a cudgel.

That is a mainstay of the Trump immigration approach: deterrence by brutality. Here are five highlights of Mr. Trump’s immigration and border policies.

Mr. Trump began his presidency by signing an executive order aimed at limiting travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries for 90 days. The order, with some exceptions, affected travelers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. It also suspended the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States.

The travel ban caused immediate unrest. Airports are clogged with travelers who boarded planes when the order was signed and have no way to enter the country. Advocates sued, and the case went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the policy in a 2018 decision. The administration has issued additional travel bans over time, removing or adding countries, including some African countries, often using terrorist activities as justification.

The Border Wall

In 2017, Mr. started to focus. Trump on one of his earliest campaign promises was building a physical wall along the border between the United States and Mexico. The idea was first proposed by a Trump campaign aide, Sam Nunberg, as a memory aid to prompt the candidate to remember to talk about immigration in his speeches. But it soon became a rallying cry at his events.

You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort out, maybe thinking about leaving, Mr. Trump told The New York Times editorial board during the 2016 campaign, I can tell the audience, I just say, We will build the wall! And they are going crazy.

Mr. Trump has a series of extreme designs for the wall. He wanted spikes at the top, black paint to burn the hands of immigrants trying to scale it, possibly a moat at the bottom. He wants it 30 feet tall. He asked at one point if migrants could be shot in the legs to slow them down. The assistants ignored such suggestions.

In the end, building the wall involved a partial government shutdown and money for it was not appropriated by Congress. Mr. Trump vowed to make the wall happen himself through the executive branch. Fewer than 500 miles of the barrier, at an estimated cost of $15 billion, have been built, a fact that some of Mr. Trump’s Republican critics privately point out. Trump as a weakness. Almost all of those 500 miles are in areas where dilapidated barriers already stand.

Family Separation

By 2018, Mr. Trump along with Jeff Sessions, the hard-line anti-immigration former senator who was attorney general at the time often criticized his cabinet secretaries for the number of illegal border crossings that still occur. But the administration has a new plan for containment.

We have to get rid of the children, said Mr. Sessions to other officials, who explained a new form of zero tolerance. The policy includes separating children and their guardians who cross the border, and prosecuting adults. According to notes from one of the people at the meeting, Mr. Sessions’ message was: If you care about the kids, don’t take them. No amnesty will be given to people with children.

The result of the policy: pictures and stories of children torn from their parents’ arms, crying and traumatized. Mr. Trump later ended his own administration policy by executive order in 2018, amid widespread outcry and intense media coverage, but in a town-hall meeting on CNN last week, he said he would reinstate the policy if elected in 2024.

In addition, Mr. sometimes seemed interested. Trump on maintaining some aspects of the Obama-era program known as DACA, in which people brought to the United States as children are not deported, a program he promised to end as a candidate. . But he allowed Mr. Sessions to announce its end, and the matter has been tied up in court for years.

Border Surges

For a president obsessed with the number of border crossings, 2019 will be Mr. Trump. An administration deal with Mexico requiring asylum seekers to remain there while awaiting processing in the United States that has been widely criticized by human rights activists as an effort to reduce legal asylum has not yet come into effect. full border.

Played by the administration Mr. Trumps various ways to stop undocumented immigrants that year, including a plan that was ultimately abandoned for deportation raids targeting families in 10 major cities.

The policies of Mr. Trumps has also led to overcrowding of border facilities. When migrant children traveling alone are processed at a Border Patrol facility, they must be transferred to a shelter operated by the Health and Human Services Department, where many are then released to a sponsor who is a relative. son

But Mr. Trump has prevented many sponsors from taking those children by requiring them to provide personal information that some fear will eventually be used to locate and deport them. Many children are held in cells along the border for weeks, even though the government is supposed to move them to shelters within 72 hours. Border facilities do not have access to proper sanitation resources and children in some cases are exposed to disease.

When the coronavirus appeared in the United States in early January 2020, Mr. Trump began banning travel from China, where the virus originated. He also moved to enact a policy known as Title 42 in March, using a little-known part of the public health law to deport migrants and asylum seekers because of the pandemic.

It has empowered the Trump administration to put in place some of its most aggressive border policies, and officials have used the pandemic to quickly turn away migrants at the border without giving most of them a chance to seek asylum.

Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Obama’s immigration agenda. Trump, has repeatedly sought to use the law to block asylum seekers and finally found his opportunity in the pandemic. In violation of international refugee laws, the Trump administration also initially deported children from other countries, including those traveling alone, to Mexico during the pandemic.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations have argued that they need Title 42 to contain the coronavirus pandemic. But the law also had the unintended consequence of encouraging hundreds of thousands of desperate people to make repeated attempts to enter the country. Many of those subject to the rule were quickly returned to Mexico to try again a few days later.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

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