Later today, Donald Trump will stand inside the U.S. Capitol to take an oath and share his dark vision of the United States. I’m unlikely to recognize it as the same country in which I live. The Ohio in which Haitians eat cats isn’t the Ohio I know. The Colorado in which Venezuelans have taken over an entire city of 400,000 people isn’t the Colorado I know. The Texas borderlands through which migrants race unimpeded isn’t the Texas I know.
But the chaotic, violent nation that Trump sees is what sold so well with voters in November. Trump and his band of immigration policy advisors have promised a lot. I expect that they will begin to make important immigration policy announcements this week – perhaps before the inauguration parties even end – about parole, expedited removal, and the new administration’s immigration enforcement priorities.
Parole
Since Eisenhower’s time in the White House, presidents have routinely allowed people to enter the United States for pressing humanitarian reasons. Existing immigration law allows the Secretary of Homeland Security to grant parole to anyone “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. In recent years, Republicans have grown to dislike the parole authority that federal law gives the Department of Homeland Security. Texas even claims that the DACA regulation that the Biden administration attempted to put into effect in October 2022 is illegal partly because it uses parole too liberally for the state’s taste.
Under President Biden, federal officials often granted parole to citizens of a handful of countries, including Haiti and Venezuela, who lacked any other legal basis for entering the United States. The Biden administration saw parole as a carrot that incentivized migrants to present themselves to immigration officials. To migrants, parole means living in the United States lawfully while also being able to request—and usually receive—employment authorization.
Just like DHS used parole extensively under Biden, the department is likely to shut it down under Trump. Incoming immigration officials won’t need to change the law. All they need to do is alter how it’s used. Trump can do this quickly by issuing an executive order imposing greater hurdles to accessing parole or he can have DHS leadership do this through a policy memo. Any shift can apply equally to people who are requesting parole for the first time at the border or to people who request to have their parole authorization extended. Since parole permission comes with an expiration date, usually two years, any shift to the federal government’s parole policy will having a rolling effect on people who are already living in the United States as their parole terms come to an end. With that, they will also lose their employment authorization.
Expedited removal
Thanks to a law signed by President Clinton, front-line immigration officers can quickly remove people from the United States who can’t show that they have a valid passport or visa or who officers believe engaged in some kind of fraud to get into the United States. Called expedited removal, this process avoids the immigration court system entirely. That’s likely a major bonus for Trump officials who don’t want to have to deal with the 3.6 million cases that are currently backlogged in the nation’s immigration courts.
Enforcing the expedited removal law to its fullest extent would require an immense amount of staff and detention space, which is why no administration has ever done that. Instead, expedited removal has traditionally applied to people apprehended within 100 miles of the border who can’t show that they have been in the United States for at least two weeks.
During his first term, Trump issued an executive order to expand expedited removal, More than two years later, DHS finally got around to putting that plan into effect. After a court temporarily blocked the administration’s attempt, DHS wasn’t able to do so until the fall of 2020. At that point, Trump was almost out of office. In March 2022, the Biden administration rescinded Trump’s expansion.
To shift gears on expedited removal, Trump officials at DHS will need to issue a formal notice in the Federal Register. That notice needs to spell out just how much they plan to expand expedited removal and when. So while they can’t expand expedited removal immediately, they can certainly start the process.
Enforcement priorities
Every presidential administration brings to its work certain goals. Trump’s team is no different. On the campaign trail, Trump and Vance complained about the Biden administration’s enforcement priorities. Now that they’re in charge, we can expect to see the federal government’s immigration enforcement priorities shift to reflect what Trump wants.
What that will actually mean remains to be seen. During his first term, Trump issued an executive order prioritizing a wide range of people. Migrants who enter the United States without the federal government’s permission or stay after their permission expires “present a significant threat to national security and public safety,” Trump announced in a January 2017 executive order. “Continued illegal immigration presents a clear and present danger to the interests of the United States,” he wrote in a separate executive order issued the same day.
It's also not clear how different Trump’s priorities will be from the Biden administration’s preferred targets. In September 2017, Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, issued a memo explaining that the administration would target people “who are a threat to our national security, public safety, and border security.” Almost immediately, Texas sued, claiming that the administration’s priorities shirked its legal obligation by not targeting enough people. It would take several years, but eventually the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Biden officials explaining that Texas, and other Republican-led states aligned with it, did not have a legal right to sue the federal government over its enforcement priorities.
What’s Next
Trump’s immigration team has used the last four years to prepare for today. They aren’t going to stop once the clock hits midnight. Over the next few weeks, I expect we’ll hear about plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, end Temporary Protected Status, open more immigration prisons, and relaunch the Migrant Protection Protocol/Remain in Mexico and Title 42 initiatives. Eventually the Fifth Circuit will issue a decision about DACA, most likely siding with the claim that Texas and other Republican-led states are making that DACA is illegal. And maybe at some point the State Department will begin the contentious process of rewriting birthright citizenship.