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.
Chapter 1: What are President Trump's new immigration executive orders?
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. 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 Ali-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... Studio might be a little grandiose word for what this is. Sure. Kind of a closet.
Chapter 2: How is Trump's approach to immigration different from Biden's?
It's tight.
Yeah. 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? Yeah.
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 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. To have them rethink whether or not this is worth it. 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.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the CBP One app?
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 an 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.
Mm-hmm.
As a point of comparison, you can look back to December 2023. Nearly 250,000 people crossed the southern border.
In that month alone.
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Chapter 4: How does Trump plan to change asylum policies?
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 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. Yeah.
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 used it?
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Chapter 5: What is humanitarian parole and how does it relate to Trump's orders?
And they're waiting for a long time to enter the country. But if they do, at that point, they get a pathway to U.S. 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 U.S. and seeking asylum. How many refugees has the U.S. 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, you know, these are immigrants from areas like the Middle East. Syria and other places, Sudan, who could potentially be a threat to the United States.
I mean, these are talking points that he comes back to repeatedly. And 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 U.S. 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. Hmm, 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 U.S. citizenship or a green card, no longer can you be considered a U.S. citizen.
Right. A pretty bold thing to do, given that it's in the Constitution.
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Chapter 6: How many migrants used the humanitarian parole program?
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 U.S.
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 seemed to be taking smaller, half-measure versions of the same actions.
President Trump clearly feels emboldened to take aggressive action and crack down 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.
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