Trump signed a series of executive orders this week. Credit: DHS, Public domain via Wikipedia Commons

Donald Trump has launched his second term with an onslaught of executive actions, going for a reported “shock and awe” approach to consolidating both his functional hold on the government and the appearance of his power. Many of these efforts have some direct bearing on NYC, and here I’ll give a quick rundown of the flurry of immigration actions in particular, given that that’s my area of expertise.

There were nine executive actions issued Monday that touched on immigration, ranging from a relatively vague order to the State Department to “champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first” — as far as I understood, already the basic policy of a U.S. government department — to much more detailed efforts. Several are tied to the declaration of a national emergency at the border, a formal emergency declaration that invokes the language of migrant arrivals being an “invasion,” a once-fringe nativist position that has gained increasing cachet among the GOP and the MAGA wing.

It’s a deliberate word, meant to paint the flow of essentially unorganized and individual arrivals seeking humanitarian protections not only as a coordinated group but akin to a foreign military force that must be countered. That’s obviously not in any real sense what’s happening at the border, and especially not as crossings have come significantly down, but it is the endpoint of a vision of immigration as a national security issue that emerged mainly in the aftermath of 9/11, when the Department of Homeland Security was first created and immigration processing and enforcement functions were moved into it.

There’s too much in these assorted orders to get into in detail, but the most significant upshots from this set of “invasion” orders — one on military deployment, one on ostensibly protecting states from invasion, one on ostensibly protecting the American public against invasion, and one on securing borders — fall along essentially shutting down asylum processing at the border, militarizing it further, engaging in more heavy-handed and indiscriminate interior enforcement, expanding detention, axing humanitarian programs, and more.

To go through some of the big-ticket specifics, the military is directed to have a permanent and apparently enforcement-focused deployment to “seal” the border, along with the construction of more border wall and barriers. Trump invokes the formerly little-used authority known as 212(f) — the same basis of the “Muslim ban” and other mass national bans in his first administration — to attempt to prohibit the entry of all humanitarian migrants, both on the grounds of this being an open-ended “invasion” that only ends when the president says it does, and on a flimsy public health argument that echoes the Title 42 restriction.

A separate order ostensibly about public safety threats and terrorism also lays the groundwork for using 212(f) to again block whole countries as well as would-be immigrants that “preach or call for sectarian violence, the overthrow or replacement of the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands, or who provide aid, advocacy, or support for foreign terrorists.” That seems straightforwardly like a ban on certain types of speech and political advocacy, including likely pro-Palestinian speech and perhaps even pushing against MAGA tenets like anti-trans dogma.

The orders also axe Biden-era prioritization programs that directed internal ICE enforcement to be focused on certain categories like people who’ve committed felony crimes, national security concerns, or recent entrants, instead ordering ICE and CBP to treat everyone without status as an enforcement priority. It seems that one order intends to go in the direction of– or even further than– the pending Laken Riley Act in the Senate by directing the government to detain “aliens apprehended on suspicion of violating Federal or State law, until such a time as they are removed from the United States,” though all of it is so broad and sloppily written it’s hard to tease out what they intended all this to mean. One provision that caught my eye is directing Homeland Security Investigations — the arm of ICE that handles things like counterfeiting, trafficking, and child porn — to instead focus on strict immigration enforcement, effectively taking them off these core investigations into significant criminal matters.

The “invasion” orders would also terminate humanitarian parole programs for various countries, restrict the use of Temporary Protected Status and other discretionary forms of relief, and reinstate the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols, which forced asylum seekers to remain in Mexico as their cases were processed. Then there’s a separate order indefinitely suspending the refugee program, which it conflates with migrant arrivals even though it’s a wholly separate program. It also apparently would give local governors and legislators something like a veto, or at least a say, in refugee resettlement in their states, a longtime conservative bugbear.

Then there’s the one almost everyone has already heard about, attempting to terminate birthright citizenship. Trump would attempt to accomplish this via ordering the federal government to stop issuing or recognizing citizenship documents for certain people born in the United States; while a lot of the reporting has described this as targeting the children of undocumented immigrants, it’s actually much broader, including people whose “mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa)” and whose father was not a citizen or permanent resident. That would encompass the children of H-1B workers, for example, or PhD students, or artist visa holders, or foreign athletes, and so on.

Now, it should be emphasized here that issuing these orders doesn’t make them legal. The birthright citizenship one is the most obviously unlawful, contravening an over-century-old Supreme Court precedent that had established the right firmly under the 14th Amendment. A coalition of 18 states, the city of San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. have already filed suit against it, with four other states filing separately.. A good deal of these provisions will be hard-fought in courts that, while they are increasingly stacked with Trump loyalists, could well push back on the most egregious power grabs. 

Other than on immigration, the executive orders targeted the so-called DEI programs, forcing federal departments and agencies to get rid of everything from diversity initiatives to environmental justice programs and redefining gender as an immutable binary for the federal government. Some of this will trickle down to New York in the form of pumping the brakes on efforts to cut back discrimination across multiple areas, including in higher education and labor.

Orders on the structure of the federal government would also essentially de-professionalize swaths of the federal administrative state by making key employees political employees subject to summary removal. A lot of this ultimately leads to regulatory agencies that are a lot more constrained and incompetent, which will mean the city and state are more on their own when it comes to food safety and medicine. On that note, Trump revoked several healthcare-related orders, including some that were intended to lower prescription drug costs. Between that, tariffs, and his immigration enforcement planks, this early flurry is almost certain to raise some costs in NY significantly.

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Felipe De La Hoz is an immigration-focused journalist who has written investigative and analytic articles, explainers, essays, and columns for the New Republic, The Washington Post, New York Mag, Slate,...

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