Samuel Anthony turns his phone camera around to show me the view from his family home in Sierra Leone. He steps out to a veranda overlooking a carpet of lush green trees dotted with houses that merge with the ocean in the distance. 

“This is how the majority of people live in Sierra Leone,” Anthony tells me, pointing nearby to “pan body” single structures made of zinc. “In America, we call them camper homes.”

The landscape, we both agree, is breathtaking. “But that doesn’t help you financially,” he says. 

When his mother passed away in 2021, Samuel Anthony couldn’t be there for the funeral.

Anthony may have been born in West Africa, but the United States is what he knows. Now 52, he left Sierra Leone in 1978 at the age of 6 with his older sister to join their parents, who had crossed the Atlantic looking for better education. He grew up in Washington, DC, in the 1980s, around the city’s then–red light district of 14th Street—a world away from where he finds himself more than four decades later. 

In 2019, during the first Trump administration, Anthony was one of almost 360,000 immigrants deported that year. He had a decades-old drug conviction. Five years later, the president-elect is set to return to the White House vowing to supercharge mass deportation by the millions.

“When people have killed and murdered,” Trump told NBC News of his mass deportation plans, “when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here.”

Trump touts his deportation agenda as necessary to root out violent criminals. But chances are those targeted by the Trump administration will be people like Anthony, long-time residents who have some type of criminal record and baggage from an imperfect American life. (In fact, recent US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data shows the most common offenses committed by immigrants on the agency’s radar are traffic-related.)

“I didn’t come to America in hopes of becoming a drug dealer and being a bad person,” he says. “Just life, elements of things, not understanding myself put me in a negative spiral. My life spiraled out of control and I was never able to get back on the right track.”

Days before Trump’s inauguration, Anthony fears he might not have a chance to come back. “I never wanted to be here,” Anthony says. “I never looked like this would be my final resting spot in my life.” 

Anthony’s childhood years as a new immigrant in Washington, DC, weren’t easy. In his mind, he was American. The world told him otherwise. “It wasn’t a period of what we call Kumbaya,” Anthony says, “everybody holding hands and singing a song. It was a very hostile era in America, just like we’re going through now with immigration.”

He remembers being bullied in school and struggling to fit in or make friends. “I wanted to be a part of American society,” he recalls. He felt at home and yet denied acceptance. “All I know is these American cities. All I know is Washington, DC.”

When Anthony was about 7 years old, he was sexually abused by a doctor. It wasn’t until later in life that he realized how what happened had affected him. “I have a difficult time trusting people,” he told me.

At the height of the drug era in the US capital, Anthony got involved with drugs. He started carrying weight-loss pills for other people and later began to sell crack cocaine and use PCP. His addiction led him to drop out of college.

“I’ve just been falling and falling inside the pit and never seem to get the right footing.”

Anthony had a couple of run-ins with the police. In 1991, after intervening in a fight, he was badly beaten and taken to the hospital, where the police searched him and found drugs. Five years later, Anthony was arrested and pleaded guilty to drug offenses. He was sentenced to almost 20 years. At the 15-year mark, after Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act to address racial disparities, he was released early.

Upon his release, ICE picked Anthony up and transferred him to a detention center. He didn’t know his drug conviction would impact his immigration status, but he lost the green card he had gotten in 1989, and was put in deportation proceedings.

Because the US government couldn’t obtain his travel documents from Sierra Leone, they couldn’t deport him. Instead, ICE determined Anthony wasn’t a threat or a flight risk and released him in 2012 under an order of supervision that required him to report to the agency regularly.

Anthony started rebuilding his life. He obtained a commercial driver’s license and began working for a trucking company while also driving for Uber and Lyft. He bought a house and reconnected with family, including his daughter Samantha, whose childhood he had missed while in prison. He also started a mentoring program to help formerly incarcerated people.

After Trump took office, in 2017, Anthony’s order of supervision became stricter. He was made to wear an ankle bracelet and had more regular check-ins with immigration. One day in July 2019, Anthony went in for what he thought was just another routine ICE appointment. But instead of letting him go, Anthony says the agents put him in a conference room, threw him on a table, and arrested him. He was blindsided.

Sarah Gilman, co-founder of the Rapid Defense Network, a legal nonprofit focused on detention and deportation defense that has joined forces with the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, unsuccessfully tried to halt Anthony’s deportation in the courts, arguing it was illegal among other reasons because he had a pending case for a U visa—a special protection for undocumented victims of crimes who cooperate with law enforcement. (The Trump administration dropped a guidance encouraging ICE to not deport U visa applicants.)

“Historically, people like Samuel who have criminal convictions,” Gilman says, “even though they serve their time and they’ve [been] quote-unquote rehabilitated…they are often unusually subject to double punishment.” She adds: “What happened during Trump 1.0 was that everybody became a bad immigrant.”

ICE kept Anthony detained until December 2019. Then, they put him on a plane to Morocco and from there to Sierra Leone. He landed in the middle of the night and all he could see was darkness. Anthony remembers wishing he could walk into the ocean and never come back out.

“That’s what’s been happening for the last 22 years of my life,” he says. “I’ve just been falling and falling inside the pit and never seem to get the right footing.”

In Sierra Leone, Anthony has struggled with depression and health problems, including bouts of malaria, stomach issues, and weight loss. His status as a deportee who doesn’t speak the local dialect makes finding a job hard and leaves him prey to extortion. When his mother passed away in 2021, he couldn’t be there for the funeral.

“It was heart-wrenching for my mother,” Anthony’s older sister Samilia says, “to the point that I think it contributed to her depression and ultimate passing.”

She hopes her brother’s story can make people reconsider how they view the immigration system. “It’s just not right,” Samilia says. “Even if you have committed a crime, you’ve paid your dues. If America didn’t want those people, then maybe they should just send them home directly instead of having them be incarcerated for 15 years and then after that send them to nothing.”

Anthony’s lawyers have requested that ICE joins in a motion to reopen his deportation case and dismiss it so that he can have his legal permanent resident status restored. In an October letter in support of Anthony’s petition addressed to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the acting director of ICE, former Attorney General Eric Holder wrote he should not have to “be held hostage to the federal government’s unpredictable shifts in immigration policy.”

Anthony is also applying for humanitarian parole to try to return to the United States while the Biden administration is still in office, but time is against him.

“If Samuel does not come home before Trump comes into power,” Gilman says, “he will never come home over the next four years. And I don’t know if Samuel will survive in Sierra Leone.”

Anthony has no idea how to start over almost 4,500 miles away from the only place he has ever called home. “Here, I don’t feel [a] sense of peace,” he says. “I feel chaos. I see confusion. I see pain. I see myself broken. It’s not easy.”

In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press aired on Sunday, Donald Trump doubled down on two of his main campaign promises: mass deportation and ending birthright citizenship.

“You promised to end birthright citizenship on day one,” Kristen Welker asked. “Is that still your plan?”

“Yes,” Trump responded, “absolutely.”

Welker pushed back, reminding Trump that the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause dictates that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” When asked if he would work around the amendment, Trump said, “Well, we’re going to have to get it changed or maybe have to go back to the people. But we have to end it.”

As I’ve previously reported here and here, Trump actually can’t end birthright citizenship with the stroke of a pen. That would likely be ruled unconstitutional.

But he and his immigration restrictionist allies have a decades-long playbook to question the Citizenship Clause they can borrow from:

[F]or years, immigration restrictionists have continued to advocate for amending or reinterpreting the 14th Amendment, charging that birthright citizenship serves as a “magnet” for unlawful immigration and so-called “birth tourism.” Specifically, they argue that children of undocumented immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because of their parents’ irregular status.

Trump also indicated his administration would have no qualms about conducting sweeping mass deportation campaigns, even if it means removing American citizens alongside their undocumented family members. “I don’t want to be breaking up families,” Trump told Welker, “so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back, even kids who are here legally.”

In a second Trump presidency, opponents of birthright citizenship might also try to renew attacks on a Supreme Court precedent affirming the widely accepted interpretation of the 14th Amendment to include all US-born children, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

In the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case, the justices found that a San Francisco-born child of long-time Chinese immigrants was, indeed, a US citizen.

“The 14th Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory,” Justice Horace Gray wrote for the majority, “including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory.”

Some legal experts and observers have noted that Trump and his allies could attempt to latch onto that last sentence of the landmark Supreme Court ruling as a loophole to attack birthright citizenship. Under that strategy, they might resort to the far-fetched claim that large migrant flows to the US-Mexico border constitute an “invasion” of the United States and, therefore, the children of unauthorized immigrants should be excluded from the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.

Critics of ending birthright citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants argue it would not only constitute bad policy, but also a betrayal of American values and, as one scholar put it to me, a “prelude” to mass deportation.

“It’s really 100 years of accepted interpretation,” Hiroshi Motomura, a scholar of immigration and citizenship at UCLA’s law school, told me of birthright citizenship. Ending birthright citizenship would cut at the core of the hard-fought assurance of equal treatment under the law, he said, “basically drawing a line between two kinds of American citizens.”

During the Meet the Press interview, President-elect Trump also lied about the United States being the only country in the world that has birthright citizenship, which has been easily and widely debunked.

In August 2015, Donald Trump sat down to talk with then–Fox News host Bill O’Reilly about one of his central campaign promises: the mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants. “Our country is going to hell,” Trump said. “We have to start a process where we take back our country.”

O’Reilly found the plan ridiculous. Such a colossal and expensive undertaking, the conservative host said, would take decades. Before then, the courts would stop sweeping raids. The idea, O’Reilly continued, was just “not going to happen.” Perhaps the most obvious reason why, he said, was the 14th Amendment, which “says if you’re born here, you’re an American—and you can’t kick Americans out.” O’Reilly almost screamed at one point: “If you’re born here, you’re an American—period! Period!”

Trump was unconvinced. “Many lawyers are saying that’s not the way it is,” he insisted. The incoming president’s view then, and now, is that the American children of undocumented immigrants should not be entitled to automatic citizenship. And, if prompted to weigh in on this issue, he thought the courts would agree.

“I’d much rather find out whether or not ‘anchor babies’ are actually citizens,” Trump said, “because a lot of people don’t think they are.”

The first Trump administration didn’t test this theory. The second one likely will. The former president has made the end of birthright citizenship a cornerstone of his immigration agenda and mass deportation plan. Automatic citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, Trump said in a campaign video from May 2023, “is based on a historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law.”

In his next term, Trump will aim to dispute more than a century of legal precedent and deal a blow to a bedrock constitutional understanding of what it means to be an American citizen. He cannot change everything with the stroke of a pen. But Trump can—and says he will—begin the long task of dismantling birthright citizenship. There is a playbook, decades in the making.

The process would begin with a presidential action. Couching it as an attempt to tackle the threat of an “illegal foreign invasion” in the form of unlawful migration, Trump has promised to sign an executive order on day one that would challenge birthright citizenship. The proposed rule would instruct federal agencies to deny passports and Social Security numbers to children born to immigrants, unless one of the parents is a citizen or green card holder. Crucially, his candidacy platform stated, the executive order would “explain the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment.”

The 14th amendment’s Citizenship Clause establishes that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Ratified after the Civil War to nullify the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which ruled that Black Americans couldn’t be citizens of the United States, it defined citizenship and enshrined the long-standing doctrine of jus solis (“right of soil”)—meaning citizenship by place of birth—in constitutional law.

While the president-elect can’t end birthright citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants with an executive order alone, he can conceivably set up a legal challenge to the reigning interpretation. As Trump hinted at in the 2015 interview with O’Reilly, he and his allies might look at the courts to do their bidding. And they have a playbook for it: undermine the lesser-known Supreme Court landmark decision in the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case reaffirming the guarantee of citizenship to virtually everyone born in the United States.

For years, opponents of birthright citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants have toyed with the possibility of overturning the Wong Kim Ark precedent. Increasingly, such a line of attack seems less hypothetical—especially in light of a Supreme Court conservative supermajority that has demonstrated a willingness to undo their major rulings, like Roe v. Wade, regardless of what the political repercussions and real-life consequences might be.

Inviting the Supreme Court to revisit Wong Kim Ark, explains Robert L. Tsai, a professor of constitutional law at Boston University, “would give the Trump administration the opportunity to ask the court to either overrule or narrow” the well-established legal precedent. “You’ve got a president and a bunch of people around him who disagree fundamentally with notions of citizenship and how they’ve been done for a very long time,” he says. “We’re going to find out just how far they can push those changes.”

It would be nothing short of seismic. “It’s really 100 years of accepted interpretation,” Hiroshi Motomura, a scholar of immigration and citizenship at UCLA’s law school, told me of birthright citizenship. Ending birthright citizenship would cut at the core of the hard-fought assurance of equal treatment under the law, he said, “basically drawing a line between two kinds of American citizens.”

To understand how an attack on birthright citizenship could be mounted, let alone prevail, it’s important to know what stands in the way of it.

Wong Kim Ark was careful. Before he departed California in 1894—boarding a steamship to visit his parents in the Guangdong province of China—Kim Ark ensured he had all the required documents to return. Born in San Francisco in the 1870s to immigrants of humble means—who resettled in China after several years of permanent residence in America—Kim Ark had made the trip before without much trouble. In one of those travels to the family’s ancestral home, in 1889, he married Yee Shee, with whom he would have four children.

But this time, anti-Chinese animus, violence, and laws were on the rise. In 1882, the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The law barred the naturalization of Chinese nationals and the immigration of laborers from China, who were perceived as a threat to the white working class. It marked the first federal restriction on immigration explicitly based on race.

As Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov detail in their 2021 book, American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship, Kim Ark, who worked as a cook from an early age, carried with him an affidavit signed by three white men as witnesses to prove he had been born in California. Still, when he arrived at the San Francisco port aboard the Coptic in August 1895, a customs collector by the name of John Wise denied him entry. Kim Ark was held offshore for five months.

Wise, known for his anti-Chinese bias, considered himself a “zealous opponent of Chinese immigration.” He made it exceedingly difficult for even those exempted from the ban—such as merchants, diplomats, and teachers—to be allowed into the United States. Once, Wise even wrote a poem mocking a Chinese man he had ordered deported that read, “So just to make this poor Wong Fong feel very good and nice, I’ve sent him back to China where he can eat his mice.” 

At the time, anti-Chinese exclusionists had been looking for a test case to challenge birthright citizenship. They considered Chinese Americans incapable of assimilating. But the law had been clear that did not matter. A federal court had ruled just a few years earlier that a 14-year-old born in California to Chinese immigrants—who had been barred by customs officials—was a citizen under English common law and the 14th Amendment. In Kim Ark, they thought they had found an opportunity to set a different legal precedent.

With help from the Chinese Six Companies organization and lawyer Thomas Riordan, Kim Ark filed a habeas corpus petition challenging his confinement and defending his right to reenter the United States as a recognized native-born citizen. “Think of all the people in this country who have been born of parents who owed allegiance to either Great Britain, Germany, Italy, or some other European power,” Riordan argued in court. “Are all of these people to be declared not citizens?”

His goal beyond helping Kim Ark, Nackenoff and Novkov write, was to “have the broad principle of citizenship settled for all time.”

On behalf of the federal government, US District Attorney Henry S. Foote made the case that Kim Ark had become a citizen by “accident of birth” and his “education and political affiliations remained entirely alien to the United States.” Because Wong’s parents were ineligible for naturalization and “subjects of the Emperor of China,” the argument went, Kim Ark himself was “by reason of his race, language, color and dress, a Chinese person.”

A district court judge disagreed, finding that “it is enough that he was born here, whatever was the status of his parents” and that a ruling against Kim Ark, would have resulted in countless people “denationalized and remanded to a state of alienage.”

The government appealed and the case went before the Supreme Court. Delivering a 6–2 decision in March 1898, the justices determined that Kim Ark was indeed a citizen, regardless of his parents’ ancestry. “The 14th Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory” Justice Horace Gray wrote for the majority, “including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory.”

To exclude “from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries,” the opinion continued, “would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”

Chief Justice Melville Fuller dissented, arguing that the 14th Amendment didn’t “arbitrarily make citizens of children born in the United States of parents who, according to the will of their native government and of this Government, are and must remain aliens.”

Nonetheless, the majority’s understanding of the 14th Amendment provided, in no uncertain terms, that birthright citizenship extended to the children of immigrants, even those unable to naturalize. The case had little repercussion in the press at the time and its details have probably eluded many Americans since. Kim Ark and his sons even continued to encounter a myriad of obstacles when traveling in and out of the United States in the ensuing years. But had it not been for Wong Kim Ark, University of New Hampshire historian Lucy Salyer told the Post in 2018, the United States would not be a nation of immigrants, but rather “colonies of foreigners.”

Most legal scholars consider the issue of birthright citizenship settled law. They agree that the key language of the Citizenship Clause—“subject to the jurisdiction”—carves out only two exceptions: the children of foreign diplomats and Native Americans under tribal rule. (In 1924, Congress extended citizenship to all Native Americans born in the country.)

But for years, immigration restrictionists have continued to advocate for amending or reinterpreting the 14th Amendment, charging that birthright citizenship serves as a “magnet” for unlawful immigration and so-called “birth tourism.” Specifically, they argue that children of undocumented immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because of their parents’ irregular status.

Trump attorney John Eastman has said, being born on US soil is not sufficient to confer automatic citizenship. That right should be contingent on “a total and exclusive allegiance” to the United States. In a 2018 Washington Post op-ed, former Trump national security official and Hillsdale College lecturer Michael Anton made the case that Congress could “clarify legislatively that the children of noncitizens” are not citizens under the 14th Amendment.

In the absence of congressional action, some on the right believe Trump should take matter into his own hands. “Judges faithful to their oaths will have no choice but to agree with him,” Anton wrote. “Birthright citizenship was a mistake whose time has gone.” For modern-day critics of birthright citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants, undermining or, at least, circumventing the well-established legal precedent in Wong Kim Ark could be the way to set things in motion.

Opponents like Anton and Eastman have argued that the justices’ ruling in Wong Kim Ark merely applied to the children of legal immigrants like Kim Ark’s parents and never directly addressed the question of those born to unauthorized noncitizens. Attacking the Wong Kim Ark decision as “erroneous and overly-broad,” Eastman has urged the courts to revisit or limit its interpretation.

Rogers M. Smith, a University of Pennsylvania political science professor and co-author of Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity, is part of a minority of constitutional scholars who share that perspective. “It makes no reference whatsoever for the status of unauthorized aliens, which is why I think it doesn’t address that topic,” he told me. “Lots of people think it does by implication, but that’s clearly an argument that could be challenged.”

How the justices would respond to it is anyone’s guess. During the confirmation hearing of Justice Samuel Alito in 2006, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York asked the nominee if he agreed that “all persons mean all persons” according to the 14th Amendment and if a statute to deny citizenship to the US-born children of undocumented parents would be constitutional. Alito did not respond one way or the other, but nodded at “active legal disputes about the meaning of that provision.” If the question came before him as a sitting justice, he said on the occasion, it could “turn out to be a compelling argument or a frivolous argument or something in between.” More recently, Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to opine on the matter.

Because Wong Kim Ark is overwhelmingly considered good law, the Trump administration could also try to work around it. Instead of arguing that the case should be overruled, they could refer to a specific line in the decision: the exemption of children “of enemies within and during a hostile occupation.” Per that reasoning, unauthorized immigrants could be declared perpetrators of an “invasion” of US territory and their children excluded from the birthright citizenship guarantee under the 14th Amendment.

“It’s kind of an ugly analogy,” Smith says, “but that doesn’t mean the Supreme Court won’t accept it.” He attributes the untested argument to a changed political context in which “conservative judges on the bench have opened the doors for right-wing constitutional arguments that were previously viewed as beyond the pale, as too extreme.”

And they might have already found an opening. Judge James C. Ho, who Trump appointed to the ultraconservative 5th Circuit and is thought to be a contender for a vacant seat in the Supreme Court, recently appeared to signal he would consider this theory against birthright citizenship—in what observers have flagged as a notable departure from his previously unflinching endorsement of the accepted understanding and a not-so-subtle effort to prove his loyalty to Trump.

“Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment,” Judge Ho wrote in 2006. “That birthright is protected no less for children of undocumented persons than for descendants of Mayflower passengers.” He added: “Text, history, judicial precedent, and Executive Branch interpretation confirm that the Citizenship Clause reaches most US-born children of aliens, including illegal aliens.”

But in an interview with conservative law professor Josh Blackman, Judge Ho suggested there is “a direct connection between birthright citizenship and invasion.” He was alluding to the idea that migrants coming to the United States constitute an “invasion,” a largely dismissed theory advanced by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and others to justify states taking extraordinary actions to crackdown on migration. “Birthright citizenship obviously doesn’t apply in case of war or invasion. No one to my knowledge has ever argued that the children of invading aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship,” Judge Ho said.

“Effectively, what he’s saying is that even though there’s a guarantee of birthright citizenship,” explains Evan Bernick, an assistant professor of law at Northern Illinois University and co-author of The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit, “the president can kind of turn it off by declaring an invasion and try to remove whoever he says is invading…It’s not even a loophole, it swallows the entire guarantee.” The fact that Trump referred to a foreign invasion in his campaign video, he adds, suggests they might be anticipating litigation and trying to “boost as much as possible their very minimal odds.”

In combination with a touted denaturalization program, it could be a “prelude” to mass deportation. “Even if this ultimately dies in the sense that a majority of the Supreme Court ultimately rejects it,” Bernick says, “it’s worth taking both literally and seriously. It’s not something that can be laughed off in the way that the proposition that a 33-year-old is eligible for the presidency can be laughed off. It’s real. It’s serious. These people believe it and they’re not just doing it because they think Trump wants it. There’s a real constitutional conviction on the part of the people who argue this.”

A growing number of law enforcement authorities and Democratic leaders across the country are speaking out about their plans to thwart one of President-elect Donald Trump’s top immigration priorities: Mass deportation. Taking lessons from the first four years of the Trump era, many have vowed to stand their ground and refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement in arresting undocumented immigrants. They are also preparing counter-lawsuits to have ready to take the incoming administration to court as soon as officials attempt to begin deportations, which they’ve promised to kick off on day one.

In interviews with Politico published Saturday, prosecutors in six Democratic-led states described their plans to pursue legal challenges against actions Trump may take to carry out his immigration agenda.

These include the potential deployment of the US military domestically to find undocumented people, violations of immigrants’ rights to due process, the withholding of funds from s0-called sanctuary cities, and attempts to deputize the National Guard from red states to carry out arrests and detentions in blue ones.

These prosecutors said they’re also preparing to fight scenarios where the administration tries to send immigration agents into schools and hospitals, or where they withhold federal funds from local law enforcement to force them into compliance with deportation plans.

Earlier this week, Trump reaffirmed his plans to declare a national emergency in order to use federal troops to round-up targets for deportation.

“If he’s going to want to achieve that type of scale, the largest deportation in US history, as he says, by definition he’s going to have to target people who are lawfully here and … go after American citizens,” Matthew Platkin, New Jersey’s attorney general told Politico, likely referring to the fact that millions of undocumented people live with US citizens, including those whose children were born on American soil. Those children would have to leave the country with deported parents in order for families to stay together. “We’re not going to stand for that,” Platkin added. The goal of top prosecutors across blue states, the president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association Sean Rankin told ABC News, is to put up a “unified front” against Trump’s immigration agenda.

The Trump administration will inevitably face not only legal but logistical obstacles if they attempt to deliver on the promise of conducting an unprecedented mass deportation campaign. As Dara Lind with the American Immigration Council recently wrote in the New York Times, deporting one million undocumented immigrants per year—a fraction of the estimated 11 million living in the country—would cost an annual $88 billion. The limited number of detention beds and immigration courts’ years-long backlog will also inhibit a massive crackdown.

Still, Tom Homan, Trump’s new “border czar,” who won’t require Senate confirmation, has indicated the administration will push hard against jurisdictions that get in their way. “If we can’t get assistance from New York City,” Homan told Fox News recently, “we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City. Because we’re going to do the job. We’re going to do the job without you or with you.” And in fact, Homan has a history of pushing forward extreme immigration policies: As a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official during Trump’s first term, he was the architect of the “zero tolerance” policy that separated thousands of parents from their children at the border. To this day, many have not been reunited.

Several Democratic leaders have publicly said they won’t go along with mass deportation efforts. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, who sued the Trump administration 100 times as attorney general, said they would use “every tool in the toolbox” to protect the state’s population. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Rhode Island State Police said while they cooperate with ICE, “they are not immigration officers and will not expend any time and resources to support mass deportation efforts.”

Top prosecutors in states like Massachusetts are also trying to dispel the unsupported claims, repeatedly reinforced by Trump, that immigrants are more prone to committing crimes. Instead, according to Politico‘s reporting, they hope to make the case that mass deportation would be bad for the US economy. As I’ve previously reported, the mass deportation of undocumented workers would drastically reduce the GDP, make inflation rise, and even result in fewer jobs available for American citizens.

Continuing the string of MAGA loyalist picks to serve in his administration, President-elect Donald Trump on Friday evening tapped Russell Vought to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget—again. Vought, a self-avowed Christian nationalist and key contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for a conservative presidency, led OMB during Trump’s first term, transforming the powerful agency—charged with developing and executing the federal budget, and reviewing executive branch regulations—into a vehicle to deliver on the president’s wildest dreams.

In a recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show on X, in which the former Fox News host said he was “very likely to run OMB again,” Vought described the agency as the “nerve center of the federal government, particularly the executive branch.” He recounted having provided Trump with a plan to divert funding from the Department of Defense to fund his border wall without congressional approval, a move disavowed by the White House counsel and later ruled illegal. “Presidents use OMB to tame the bureaucracy, the administrative state,” Vought said, characterizing it as “the president’s most important tool to deal with the bureaucracy.”

Vought described what kind of person would be best suited to wield the power of this agency on behalf of President Trump. “What you need is people who are able to absorb political heat,” he told Carlson. “They don’t have a fear of conflict. They can execute under withering enemy fire. They are up to speed and they are no-nonsense in their own ability to know what must be done. And they’re unbelievably committed to the president and his agenda.” Vought also advocated for doing away with the notion of independent agencies, singling out the Department of Justice as a target.

Vought most recently led the conservative Center for Renewing America, which he has described as a “shadow” OMB outside the government. He is a big proponent of reviving an executive order from the final days of the first Trump administration that would upend the federal workforce in service of Trump’s goals. Known as Schedule F, the order would reclassify potentially thousands of career civil servants working in policy-related positions as at-will employees and strip them of job protections, making it easier for political appointees to fire them and fill the openings with candidates hand-picked to support MAGA priorities.

At OMB, Vought tried to reclassify almost 90 percent of the agency’s workforce as at-will employees, hoping to set an example for other government heads. As a former OMB worker and author of Trump and the Bureaucrats: The Fate of Neutral Competence put it to me, Vought’s first round leading the agency was nothing short of “traumatic.”

Inside the Trump administration, Vought came across as fiercely dedicated to the America First cause, even if it meant a colossal increase in the federal debt. Trump was prone to outbursts, but to Vought that aggression equaled power. Vought made it his mission to weaponize OMB on behalf of the president, who had long perceived the civil service bureaucracy as an obstacle to his haphazard rule. “We view ourselves as the president’s Swiss Army Knife,” he once said. “How do you come up with options that work and then talk through the pros and cons?” Vought interpreted his job as being inside Trump’s head—a “keeper of ‘commander’s intent.’”

And that appears to be the same approach Vought plans to take when restored to his old job next year. In previously undisclosed videos of 2023 and 2024 private speeches obtained by ProPublica, Vought talked about wanting the “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” adding they should “not want to go to work” when waking up in the morning. “We want to put them in trauma.”

He also suggested creating a “shadow Office of Legal Counsel” to enable a crackdown on anti-Trump dissent. “We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.” A new Trump administration,” Vought declared, “must move quickly and decisively.”

A growing number of law enforcement authorities and Democratic leaders across the country are speaking out about their plans to thwart one of President-elect Donald Trump’s top immigration priorities: Mass deportation. Taking lessons from the first four years of the Trump era, many have vowed to stand their ground and refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement in arresting undocumented immigrants. They are also preparing counter-lawsuits to have ready to take the incoming administration to court as soon as officials attempt to begin deportations, which they’ve promised to kick off on day one.

In interviews with Politico published Saturday, prosecutors in six Democratic-led states described their plans to pursue legal challenges against actions Trump may take to carry out his immigration agenda.

These include the potential deployment of the US military domestically to find undocumented people, violations of immigrants’ rights to due process, the withholding of funds from s0-called sanctuary cities, and attempts to deputize the National Guard from red states to carry out arrests and detentions in blue ones.

These prosecutors said they’re also preparing to fight scenarios where the administration tries to send immigration agents into schools and hospitals, or where they withhold federal funds from local law enforcement to force them into compliance with deportation plans.

Earlier this week, Trump reaffirmed his plans to declare a national emergency in order to use federal troops to round-up targets for deportation.

“If he’s going to want to achieve that type of scale, the largest deportation in US history, as he says, by definition he’s going to have to target people who are lawfully here and … go after American citizens,” Matthew Platkin, New Jersey’s attorney general told Politico, likely referring to the fact that millions of undocumented people live with US citizens, including those whose children were born on American soil. Those children would have to leave the country with deported parents in order for families to stay together. “We’re not going to stand for that,” Platkin added. The goal of top prosecutors across blue states, the president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association Sean Rankin told ABC News, is to put up a “unified front” against Trump’s immigration agenda.

The Trump administration will inevitably face not only legal but logistical obstacles if they attempt to deliver on the promise of conducting an unprecedented mass deportation campaign. As Dara Lind with the American Immigration Council recently wrote in the New York Times, deporting one million undocumented immigrants per year—a fraction of the estimated 11 million living in the country—would cost an annual $88 billion. The limited number of detention beds and immigration courts’ years-long backlog will also inhibit a massive crackdown.

Still, Tom Homan, Trump’s new “border czar,” who won’t require Senate confirmation, has indicated the administration will push hard against jurisdictions that get in their way. “If we can’t get assistance from New York City,” Homan told Fox News recently, “we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City. Because we’re going to do the job. We’re going to do the job without you or with you.” And in fact, Homan has a history of pushing forward extreme immigration policies: As a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official during Trump’s first term, he was the architect of the “zero tolerance” policy that separated thousands of parents from their children at the border. To this day, many have not been reunited.

Several Democratic leaders have publicly said they won’t go along with mass deportation efforts. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, who sued the Trump administration 100 times as attorney general, said they would use “every tool in the toolbox” to protect the state’s population. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Rhode Island State Police said while they cooperate with ICE, “they are not immigration officers and will not expend any time and resources to support mass deportation efforts.”

Top prosecutors in states like Massachusetts are also trying to dispel the unsupported claims, repeatedly reinforced by Trump, that immigrants are more prone to committing crimes. Instead, according to Politico‘s reporting, they hope to make the case that mass deportation would be bad for the US economy. As I’ve previously reported, the mass deportation of undocumented workers would drastically reduce the GDP, make inflation rise, and even result in fewer jobs available for American citizens.

Continuing the string of MAGA loyalist picks to serve in his administration, President-elect Donald Trump on Friday evening tapped Russell Vought to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget—again. Vought, a self-avowed Christian Nationalist and key contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for a conservative presidency, led OMB during Trump’s first term, transforming the powerful agency—charged with developing and executing the federal budget, and reviewing executive branch regulations—into a vehicle to deliver on the president’s wildest dreams.

In a recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show on X, in which the former Fox News host said he was “very likely to run OMB again,” Vought described the agency as the “nerve center of the federal government, particularly the executive branch.” He recounted having provided Trump with a plan to divert funding from the Department of Defense to fund his border wall without congressional approval, a move disavowed by the White House counsel and later ruled illegal. “Presidents use OMB to tame the bureaucracy, the administrative state,” Vought said, characterizing it as “the president’s most important tool to deal with the bureaucracy.”

Vought described what kind of person would be best suited to wield the power of this agency on behalf of President Trump. “What you need is people who are able to absorb political heat,” he told Carlson. “They don’t have a fear of conflict. They can execute under withering enemy fire. They are up to speed and they are no-nonsense in their own ability to know what must be done. And they’re unbelievably committed to the president and his agenda.” Vought also advocated for doing away with the notion of independent agencies, singling out the Department of Justice as a target.

Vought most recently led the conservative Center for Renewing America, which he has described as a “shadow” OMB outside the government. He is a big proponent of reviving an executive order from the final days of the first Trump administration that would upend the federal workforce in service of Trump’s goals. Known as Schedule F, the order would reclassify potentially thousands of career civil servants working in policy-related positions as at-will employees and strip them of job protections, making it easier for political appointees to fire them and fill the openings with candidates hand-picked to support MAGA priorities.

At OMB, Vought tried to reclassify almost 90 percent of the agency’s workforce as at-will employees, hoping to set an example for other government heads. As a former OMB worker and author of Trump and the Bureaucrats: The Fate of Neutral Competence put it to me, Vought’s first round leading the agency was nothing short of “traumatic.”

Inside the Trump administration, Vought came across as fiercely dedicated to the America First cause, even if it meant a colossal increase in the federal debt. Trump was prone to outbursts, but to Vought that aggression equaled power. Vought made it his mission to weaponize OMB on behalf of the president, who had long perceived the civil service bureaucracy as an obstacle to his haphazard rule. “We view ourselves as the president’s Swiss Army Knife,” he once said. “How do you come up with options that work and then talk through the pros and cons?” Vought interpreted his job as being inside Trump’s head—a “keeper of ‘commander’s intent.’”

And that appears to be the same approach Vought plans to take when restored to his old job next year. In previously undisclosed videos of 2023 and 2024 private speeches obtained by ProPublica, Vought talked about wanting the “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” adding they should “not want to go to work” when waking up in the morning. “We want to put them in trauma.”

He also suggested creating a “shadow Office of Legal Counsel” to enable a crackdown on anti-Trump dissent. “We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.” A new Trump administration,” Vought declared, “must move quickly and decisively.”

In a campaign video from March 2023, Donald Trump laid out his goal to “dismantle the Deep State and reclaim our democracy from Washington Corruption.” Such rhetoric was common in 2016, too. But, this time, his incoming administration has an actionable plan for how to do it.

The idea has existed for years and, as Donald Trump prepares to take office, it will begin on day one: Make thousands of federal career civil servants “at will” employees and, in turn, fireable for not doing what the new administration demands. This will be the first step in a radical reshaping of the federal government.

Repeatedly, the newly elected president has made clear his second term will start with a purge. Once pre-vetted paper-pushers are in place, policies will be pushed through—with less internal resistance from longtime government employees.

To understand the next Trump administration, you have to know about Schedule F.

Signed in the lead-up to the 2020 election and promptly rescinded by the Biden administration, Schedule F would reassign potentially dozens of thousands of policy-related jobs under a new category, effectively stripping career civil servants from employment protections and making it easier for political appointees to fire them.

As I’ve reported before, one of the main champions of Schedule F during Trump’s first was Russ Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget. In that role, the avowed Christian nationalist tried to turn the influential agency into a tool to pursue the president’s agenda without regard for institutional knowledge and expertise and, at times, in defiance of the law.

Vought and the rest of the [Heritage Foundation’s] Project 2025 administration-in-waiting plan to revive Schedule F—and take it beyond the budget office. Potentially, 50,000 federal workers could be affected, their expert roles open to partisan MAGA loyalists ideologically vetted to ensure little resistance to Trump’s project for an imperial presidency. “It’s going to be groundbreaking,” Vought told Heritage President Kevin Roberts on a podcast last year.

The Biden administration has since taken action to strengthen merit-based protections for career civil servants, but some experts and observers have noted the change could end up amounting to little more than a “speed bump” to delay the implementation of Schedule F and prevent the politicization of the workforce. Just last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who could end up overseeing government health agencies under Trump, said as many as 600 National Institutes of Health workers should be fired and replaced.

Plus, Elon Musk seems is in on the act.

This week, President-elect Donald Trump kicked off the process of announcing his picks to staff the incoming administration, selecting a new “border czar,” critical national security roles, and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla) as attorney general. These were sometimes bizarre choices, but still part of a conventional transitional process: a president saying who would be put up to fill key positions.

In less usual fashion, Trump said “first buddy” Elon Musk and former presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy would lead the “Department of Government Efficiency”—a non-government advisory entity whose acronym, DOGE, hints at the Tesla billionaire’s favorite memecoin. The commission, pitched by Musk himself, will work alongside the OMB to restructure federal agencies and slash spending and regulations, until the summer of 2026.

“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump wrote in a statement. According to Musk, who previously advocated for a devastating $2 trillion budget-cut, the group “will send shockwaves through the system and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people!”

Since the announcement, it has raised questions about possible funding sources and the extent of power DOGE can actually exert since federal spending requires congressional approval. But its stated goal of reshaping the executive branch in the image of the MAGA movement signals what is likely to come once Trump takes office: a full-blown war on the federal bureaucracy and career civil servants in Washington.

Late Sunday night, President-elect Donald Trump announced one of his top picks to staff the incoming administration: Tom Homan as the “border czar.” Homan “will be in charge of all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin,” Trump posted on social media. “I have no doubt he will do a fantastic, and long-awaited-for, job.”

There was no surprise there. Having served as acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first term, Homan has been vying for the job since leaving government. He joined the Heritage Foundation as a fellow and became a Project 2025 contributor while launching his own anti-immigration enterprise that spread fearmongering about a “border invasion.” Homan has made no secret of his enthusiasm for this new position with the administration. “Trump comes back in January,” Homan bragged at a conservative conference this summer. “I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”

“I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”

Throughout his campaign, Trump vowed to start a mass deportation campaign on day one and, as Homan has noted, “no one is off the table.” The tough-looking and tough-talking man soon to be tasked with realizing Trump’s promise to detain and remove an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants from the United States has a long career in law enforcement and within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

During the Obama administration, which deported a record number of people, he served as head of the ICE branch charged with arresting and deporting immigrants. For his work, he even won the nation’s highest civil service award. “Thomas Homan deports people,” declared a 2016 profile about him in the Washington Post. “And he’s really good at it.” (Homan reportedly keeps a framed copy of the story in his office.) After taking office, Trump said he had heard people describe Homan as “nasty” looking, and said, “That’s what I’m looking for.”

Homan is the intellectual father of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that separated thousands of children from their parents at the border—more than 1,300 of them remain apart even today. “I’m sick and tired [of] hearing about the family separation,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last year. “I’m still being sued over that, so come get me. I don’t give a shit, right? Bottom line is: We enforced the law.” As far as Homan is concerned, families who crossed the border “chose to separate themselves.”

In interviews, Homan has further underscored his indifference to the human cost of such policies. When asked on 60 Minutes whether it was possible to carry out mass deportation without separating families, he fired back: “Of course there is—families can be deported together.” What this cavalier response conveniently ignores is that millions of US-born children live in mixed-status households with at least one undocumented parent.

Recently, after Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said the state police wouldn’t assist the federal government with carrying out sweeping deportations, Homan suggested politicians in states led by Democrats should “get the hell out of the way.”

“If we can’t get assistance from New York City,” he told Fox News, “we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City. Because we’re going to do the job. We’re going to do the job without you or with you.”

In January, former President Donald Trump will reclaim the White House after years of vowing to unleash an unprecedented overhaul of the immigration system in the United States. With mass deportation as a central promise of his campaign, Trump will undoubtedly build on the sweeping crackdown that marked his first term.

He already has promised to restore the travel prohibition on foreigners from Muslim-majority countries (often called the “Muslim ban”). He wants to revive “Remain in Mexico”—which left thousands of vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers awaiting court hearings stranded in dangerous border towns. Trump has also taken his anti-immigrant rhetoric and proposals to new heights, notably by pledging to carry out the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and attacking legal immigration. 

Indiscriminate workplace raids, massive detention camps, and around-the-clock deportation flights. That’s the radical vision to remove millions of undocumented immigrants put forward by Trump.

Trump’s efforts to reshape the immigration landscape are likely to start immediately. Appearing on Fox News the morning after the election, the president-elect’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt celebrated a “resounding victory” and a “mandate to govern as he campaigned to deliver on the promises that he made, which include, on day one, launching the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants.”

Immigrant rights groups and lawyers have been diligently preparing for the possibility of a Trump comeback. Not unlike the first time around, they will inevitably pursue strategic litigation to stop some of the next administration’s harshest, and possibly unlawful, policies. “I’ve sued every president since George W. Bush, including Presidents Obama and Biden,” Karen Tumlin, founder and director of Justice Action Center, said in a statement. “We have a simple message for President-elect Trump or his deputies if they decide to make good on their despicable plans: We will see you in court.”

Still, the breadth and depth of Trump’s agenda will have lasting impact, not only on immigrants who will directly bear the brunt of a heightened militarized immigration enforcement environment, but also on all Americans.

Here’s how.

Launch Mass Deportation

Indiscriminate workplace raids, massive detention camps, and around-the-clock deportation flights. That’s the radical vision to remove millions of undocumented immigrants put forward by Trump and Stephen Miller, his senior adviser on immigration. They would attempt to accomplish it by invoking a 18th-century wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act—last used during World War II for the internment of Japanese, Italian, and German nationals—and deploying the full force of law enforcement agencies and the US military in violation of due process rights and the law.

A mass deportation campaign would permanently change the United States. It could lead to racial profiling, the potential separation of families, and the wrongful deportation of Americans and lawful residents. It would also ruin the economy.

The logistical and practical challenges of purging even 1 million people a year are considerable, not to mention the moral and human devastation. But, if realized, a recent analysis by the American Immigration Council found that such a project would cost $967.9 billion over more than a decade. The deportation of immigrant workers who are the backbone of so many critical industries would also break the economy, resulting in an estimated drop of up to 6.8 percent in gross domestic product.

End Birthright Citizenship

Trump promised to sign an executive order on day one to end the long-standing constitutional guarantee of citizenship for those born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The order would instruct federal agencies to require that at least one parent be a US citizen or lawful permanent resident for a child to be granted automatic citizenship.

“This current policy is based on a historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocate,” Trump has said. Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution—and reaffirmed in Supreme Court decisions—which states that, with very few exceptions, “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

Revive the “Muslim Ban”

During his first term, Trump took 472 executive actions in his bid to reshape the immigration system. One of them was the infamous “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” order, which permanently suspended the resettlement of refugees from Syria and barred the entry of travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The policy created instant chaos, sparked international repudiation, and galvanized Americans all over the country.

Trump has vowed to restore the so-called Muslim ban. The original iterations faced repeated legal challenges. Federal appeals courts ruled against the Trump administration, concluding that the executive order’s “stated national security interest was provided in bad faith” and “drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.” But in a 5–4 decision in June 2018, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to carry out a version of the ban. On his first day in office, President Joe Biden issue a proclamation reversing it.

End Immigration Programs

Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world who currently benefit from Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—granted to those fleeing wars, natural disasters, and other country-specific circumstances—are at risk of losing protection against deportation.

That includes nationals of Haiti, Yemen, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Venezuela. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook, crafted by a number of administration-in-waiting former officials, specifically calls for the repeal of TPS designations.

While in office, Trump tried to rescind the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that shields from deportation the undocumented youth brought to the United States as children. There were as many as 535,030 active DACA recipients as of June 2024. Miller has said a second Trump administration would again attack the program, whose fate already lies with the courts. “It would be absolutely catastrophic,” Michelle Ming, political director at United We Dream, says of the prospect of tens of thousands of young people losing status. “It would destroy families. It would destroy entire communities.”

Roll Back Refugee Resettlement

In a September social media post in which he introduced to concept of remigration, Trump said he would “suspend refugee resettlement.” The first Trump administration dealt a massive blow to the US refugee resettlement program, and it likely wouldn’t be different this time. In September, Trump said he would “ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip.”

As president, he set an annual cap of 15,000 refugee admissions. The number of admissions went from 84,994 during President Barack Obama’s last year in office to a record low of 11,814 in 2020. Ultimately, the Trump administration resettled fewer refugees than any other going back at least to the Carter administration. Upon taking the White House, Joe Biden worked to restore the program, resettling 100,034 refugees in fiscal year 2024—the most in decades.

Restrict Legal Immigration

While Trump has tried to signal that he’s in favor of legal immigration pathways, his allies have been preparing the terrain to severely restrict them. “Decades of ‘we’re not against legal immigration’ will culminate in the largest cut to legal immigration in US history,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, posted on X.

Their plans include severely curbing asylum, ending diversity lottery visas, and doing away with temporary legal programs like parole that have allowed immigrants from countries such as Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba to come to the United States after being vetted and securing a sponsor. They could even resuscitate the public charge rule making it harder for low-income immigrants to qualify for visas and green cards.

Immigration lawyers have additionally warned that, in a second Trump administration, visa processing might be subject to delays and increased denial rates. “If Donald Trump is elected president in November 2024,” the National Foundation for American Policy stated, “he should be expected to restrict legal immigration, including green cards and [high-skilled] H-1B visas.”

The Project 2025 agenda contemplates undermining T and U visas for undocumented immigrant victims of trafficking and certain crimes who cooperate with law enforcement. (These temporary protections serve as a powerful tool to encourage victims to report crimes and keep their communities safe.) It also envisions winding down crucial temporary agricultural worker programs.

Projecting a scenario in which Trump’s policies result in less immigration and even more people leaving the United States than entering, a preelection Brookings Institution analysis concluded the GDP in 2025 would be $130 billion lower than under a Harris administration.

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In 2016, Andrés García fled anti-LGBQT+ violence in his native El Salvador. Until a few years ago, he lived in Virginia without papers. Then, he got flagged by the police over a minor infraction and transferred to the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He spent a year in ICE detention. In July 2023, García won his asylum case. Now, he fears the outcome of the US presidential election could make him vulnerable to deportation—and danger back home.

I fled my country because I was escaping. I’m a gay man and back in my country it’s kind of hard to be yourself. You can be incarcerated. You can be killed. We don’t have legislation so that we can say: “You know what, I’m gonna be whatever I want to be and the law is going to protect me.” You don’t have freedom as much as you have here.

So, I came here eight years ago looking for safety and a better life for me and my family. I’ve been living in Virginia since I came to the United States and with my sister for the past couple of years. I did go to school to learn English. I’m the type of person who always tries to contribute and to be better each and every day.

If I get deported to my country, it will be the end of me. It scares me to my core just even thinking about it.

Everything was okay. But then, two or three years ago, I was detained by ICE. I was in detention for over a year and was released in 2023. That just made me feel differently because I saw the injustice in the system. In Virginia, you don’t have the right to legal representation if you’re an immigrant in court. You don’t have anyone to tell you what you can apply for or what your rights are. Not knowing the law, not knowing the language, not knowing anything.

I thought I was going back to my country. I thought I was getting deported. But one day, I was like, you know what? I’m just going to fight. And I saw this poster on the phones. It was about CAIR Coalition [now the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights]. I called them hoping they would take my case. A couple of weeks later, they told me they had good news and had accepted my case. They helped me through the whole process. They gave me not just legal representation, but they helped me establish communication with my family back in my country. They saved my life, pretty much.

In the past, I was scared. I was afraid to make my voice heard because of my [lack of] papers. When we won our asylum case, I thought: “I need to give something back to the community.”

I’ve been attending rallies. [My boyfriend and I] went knocking on doors this past weekend. Now, I’m going back to school on November 16. I’ve always been into interior design and that’s what I want to do.

I’m in a safer place now, but I’m still on the immigration system. I will never get off of the system until I become a citizen. What if Trump’s policies become reality where they are going to deport everybody who has a record? If I get deported, my country is in a state of emergency where you don’t have any civil rights. The army is on the streets and they can just detain you and put you in jail without reason. If you have tattoos, they are putting you in jail for a year just to be investigated. The jails are full of gang members and they have zero tolerance to people from the LGBTQ+ community. If I get deported to my country, it will be the end of me. It scares me to my core just even thinking about it.

I’m nervous because it’s not just about me. I have friends, I have family, I have neighbors who are not rightfully here. I have so many gay friends who don’t have papers. They don’t even have a record and they can be deported anytime. It affects everybody.

I heard that Trump also has in mind to pass this law so that companies will be actually forced to just hire people with [legal] papers. I would say 80 percent of my friends are hardworking people, they are loving people, they have no record. Everybody in my community is scared.

It’s frustrating because most of the people, including myself, can’t vote. The people who are actually going to suffer cannot vote so we’re in everybody else’s hands.

Hopefully Trump winning is not going to happen. But we need to be ready for anything, right? I don’t even want to say it because it just breaks my heart knowing that that’s a possibility. I don’t think America can afford four more years of Trump’s era.

Claudia Garcia had never watched a televised presidential debate. On September 10, she tuned into ABC News’ showdown between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris and was stunned to hear the Republican nominee repeat lies about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. “I was like, what?” Garcia recalls. “What is he saying? We are not that [as] people. We don’t eat dogs. We don’t eat cats.” 

An infrequent voter, Garcia will be going to the polls for only the third time in her life this November. Born in Riverside, California, but having spent most of her childhood in Mexico, she felt disconnected from politics. Her father told her voting did not make a difference. “If it’s not affecting me directly,” she thought, “it’s not affecting me.” But her husband, Salvador, a newly naturalized US citizen born in Mexico, felt otherwise. This year, he will be casting his first vote since pledging the Oath of Allegiance in February. Their two adult children will also be voting.

“Why would we support someone who sees us as trash?”

“I think a lot of these migrant and Hispanic homes,” Garcia says, “it’s not just they don’t want their kids to vote or they don’t want to vote themselves. I think we’re not informed…There’s a lot of education still to do in many of our communities.”

The Garcias live in Tulare in California’s Central Valley. Latinos account for 60 percent of eligible voters in the 22nd Congressional District. As my colleague Noah Lanard recently reported from the area, Democrats’ waning support in the region could determine the balance of power in Congress. In one of the closest House races of this election, Rudy Salas is facing a rematch against Republican incumbent Rep. David Valadao to become the first elected Latino congressman from the Central Valley. In 2022, Valadao, who is of Portuguese descent, beat Salas by three percentage points.

For Democrats to have a shot at picking up that seat, they need to not only hold on to Latino voters, but also hope for an end to—as one political strategist put it to NBC News—“anemically low” turnout. In the midterms, the 22nd Congressional District had the third lowest voter turnout of the House districts across the country. To do so, they could use the help of people like the Garcias: Latino voters who have not traditionally voted, or even first-time voters. In California and beyond, the path to controlling Congress and securing the White House may hinge on it. 

The main issues on their mind? The cost of living and immigration. “I was an immigrant myself,” Salvador, who gained legal status as a result of Ronald Reagan’s amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the 1980s, says, “and I want more for the immigrant workers of this country.” He and his wife oppose Trump’s plans to mass deport millions of people from the United States and fear that more family separations are on the horizon if he returns to the Oval Office. 

They also hope comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist remarks about Latinos at a recent Trump rally where he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” can persuade voters to go for Democrats. “In his mind,” Garcia says of Trump, “we don’t matter. If you don’t look like him, then you’re you’re not worth it for him…Why would we support someone who sees us as trash?”

Immigration isn’t the single, or even the most, salient issue for Latino voters nationwide. But it intersects with broader concerns Latino communities have about the economy, jobs, and housing. In the battleground state of North Carolina, a pre-election poll by the civil rights and advocacy organization UnidosUS found that pocketbook issues rank as high priority for the state’s Latino voters. (Many also favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.) There are about 300,000 registered Latino voters in North Carolina.

Numbers showed that 19 percent of the more than 100,000 Latinos who had already voted in North Carolina were first-time voters and 39 percent were infrequent voters.

The daughter of two Mexican immigrants, Irene Godinez started Poder NC Action in 2020 to foster civic participation among the growing US-born Latino youth population in the state. That year, the organization sent out thousands of political mailers featuring the face of iconic Puerto Rican astrologer Walter Mercado as a strategy of tapping into culture to mobilize young people. In that election—which Trump carried by fewer than 75,o00 votes—first-time Latino voters comprised a large share of total voter turnout in North Carolina.

This year, Poder NC Action released a multi-part telenovela called “Alexia the Voter,” inspired by the Netflix show Jane the Virgin, to encourage young North Carolinians to vote. They have also hosted voter engagement events where people can learn about who’s on the ballot while getting their nails or hair done. “Our ultimate goal is to build independent political power,” Godinez, who served as Latino outreach director in North Carolina for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, says, “But while we do that, we are building a political home for progressive Latinos in the state.”

Prior to Election Day, she says, numbers showed that 19 percent of the more than 100,000 Latinos who had already voted in North Carolina were first-time voters and 39 percent were infrequent voters. “These are exactly the people that we’ve been targeting and activating because that’s where we see the opportunity to expand the electorate.”

Among the issues driving that electorate in the state are the economy, reproductive rights, and climate justice, especially in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The young Latino voters Poder NC Action courts also tend to bring up the war in Gaza as a point of concern. (The organization didn’t endorse President Joe Biden, but released a “defensive endorsement” of Kamala Harris because her victory would block a right-wing opponent.)

“The thing I have been hearing from voters that we’ve been talking to is how they haven’t felt seen by the parties whether they’re Democrats or Republicans,” Godinez says, “They don’t feel that either party is reaching out to them and trying to talk to them.” She believes the Democratic Party could have done more to appeal to Latinos in North Carolina, including sending bigger surrogate names to the state and crafting political mailers with original messages that weren’t just translated to Spanish from English.

“Even if we are 300,000 voters in the state right now,” Godinez adds, “we’re going to continue to increase at a faster pace than any other demographic because 50,000 Latinos will age into the electorate every single year. This could have been a really great year for them to lay the foundation of what it could look like to do Latino outreach in a very intentional way.”

In California, Garcia attributes her political awakening to her work, first as a canvasser and later as an organizer, with the group Poder Latinx to get people registered and out to vote. “I cannot be preaching and not doing,” she says. “I need to be a voice to those who don’t have one.”

She says she would like to see immigration reform that would benefit her neighbors and family members who “work out in the field, picking the food that we have on our table.” She also thinks of her nephews who are DACA recipients and whose lawful presence and ability to work and study in the country are in jeopardy. “It hits home,” Garcia says, adding: “Immigration is what motivates me and scares me, and that’s why I’m going to make sure that my ballot gets in the mail today.”

This election cycle, voters in some states will be presented with a confusing question when they cast their ballot: whether to make noncitizen voting—which is already illegal—illegal.

As many as eight states have a ballot measure to amend their constitution to make voting for citizens only: Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin. These amendments are intended to make it explicit that only Americans can vote in state and federal elections, even though it is already very much illegal for non-US citizens to vote (with the exception of a few jurisdictions that allow it in specific local races).

Former President Donald Trump and his allies, with the help of Elon Musk’s disinformation megaphone, have been promoting false claims of noncitizen voter fraud as part of a deep-pocketed preemptive effort to cast doubt on the electoral process and, if need be, challenge the results.

“I realized that we needed to focus on this threat of illegals voting in November because I absolutely believe that that is how [Democrats] are planning to try to steal the election this year,” Cleta Mitchell, who is behind the Election Integrity Network’s highly organized machinations to contest a Trump defeat, told Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk earlier this year.

Without providing any evidence to support her claims, Mitchell said “illegals” are being registered to vote by nonprofits “that are shepherding these migrants all over the country, getting them IDs; getting them housing, paid phone cards, and food cards; and getting them on the voter rolls.” (As I’ve explained before, there is no evidence that noncitizens are voting in significant numbers.)

Election experts have warned that these noncitizen voting ballot measures are not only unnecessary, but also risk disenfranchising voters who are naturalized citizens. A recent investigation by ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, and Votebeat identified at least 1o Americans in Texas who were mistakenly removed from voter rolls over suspicion that they were noncitizens.

Ballot measures to ban something that is already illegal can also serve as a stepping stone for the future introduction of stricter and burdensome voter registration requirements, such as asking for documentary proof of citizenship. Millions of Americans who lack a passport or birth certificate could be shut off from the electoral process as a result.

Noncitizen voting is essentially a myth. But here is where and how it will appear on the ballot in the 2024 election.

Idaho

Voting as a noncitizen in Idaho constitutes a misdemeanor. The question on voters’ ballot will look like this: “Shall Section 2, Article VI of the Constitution of the State of Idaho be amended to provide that individuals who are not citizens of the United States may not be qualified electors in any election held within the state of Idaho?” Idaho’s secretary of state, Phil McGrane, recently told the Idaho Capital Sun that his office identified—and was in the process of removing— 36 likely noncitizens on the registered voter rolls. “Out of the million-plus registered voters we started with,” he said, “we’re down to ten-thousandths of a percent in terms of this number.”

Iowa

The proposed amendment in Iowa would change language in the constitution to say “only a citizen” instead of “every citizen” is entitled to vote. In the meantime, state officials already have taken action to challenge the ballots of suspected noncitizens—a move that risks excluding eligible voters. Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, recently said his office identified 87 people who had reported not being a citizen to the state Department of Transportation and who voted in the last 12 years. The audit also reportedly found 67 registered noncitizens who didn’t cast a vote. Another 2,200 names have been flagged as potential noncitizen voters, though some may have naturalized since the time when they self-reported their status. The League of United Latin American Citizens and four naturalized citizens have since filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s program to purge suspected registered noncitizens from voter rolls, claiming the secretary of state’s list “failed to account for naturalization and is designed to facilitate the mass challenging of voters.”

Kentucky

One of two constitutional amendments on Kentucky’s ballot this election, Amendment 1 would add the following sentence to the constitution: “No person who is not a citizen of the United States shall be allowed to vote in this state.” Again, that is already the case. But proponents of the amendment, like Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams, insist the original text stating that “every citizen” can vote isn’t the same as saying “only citizens” can vote. Adams has admitted that he hasn’t seen any evidence of noncitizens attempting to cast a vote in elections.

Missouri

The first checkbox on Missouri’s voter registration document requires applicants to certify they’re citizens of the United States. Still, voters in the November election will see Amendment 7, a ballot measure to ban noncitizen voting (by changing “all citizens” to “only citizens” in the constitution) and simultaneously prohibit ranked-choice voting. Two residents filed a lawsuit challenging the language of the ballot measure as “unfair and inaccurate” for leading voters to think noncitizen voting isn’t already illegal in Missouri. But in August, a judge upheld the ballot language. Critics of the provision have called it “ballot candy” to trick voters into approving a ban on ranked-choice voting.

North Carolina

In June, the North Carolina General Assembly, in which Republicans have a supermajority, passed a bill to amend the language of the constitution to read that “only a citizen of the United States with the listed qualifications is entitled to vote in an election.” (Currently, it states that “every person born in the United States and every person who has been naturalized” has the right to do so.) Between 2015 and 2022, the North Carolina State Board of Elections documented only eight referred cases of noncitizens registering to vote or voting. The “wording of this amendment, which strips out specific language acknowledging that citizens may be born or naturalized, may confuse naturalized citizens and discourage them from exercising their fundamental right to vote,” the ACLU of North Carolina wrote in September.

Oklahoma

Voters in Oklahoma will see on their ballot State Question 834, an amendment to make it clear “that only citizens of the United States are qualified to vote in this state.” In May, the Republican-controlled legislature passed, along party lines, a resolution to place the amendment on the ballot. If approved, it would have the effect of changing a single word in the state constitution’s text: to say “only”—in place of “all”—US citizens may vote in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma State Election Board’s website states that registering to vote in the state as a noncitizen constitutes a felony.

South Carolina

Similar to Oklahoma’s, the ballot measure in South Carolina would amend the state constitution to say that “only a citizen,” instead of “every citizen,” is entitled to vote. But the way the measure appears on the ballot makes it unclear that the constitution already limits voting to citizens. It asks voters: “Must Section 4, Article II of the Constitution of this State, relating to voter qualifications, be amended so as to provide that only a citizen of the United States and of this State of the age of 18 and upwards who is properly registered is entitled to vote as provided by law?” You can’t blame voters for thinking the answer to that question should be yes.

Wisconsin

Wisconsin already requires voters to be US citizens, and when registering to vote, people need to check a box confirming they are citizens. Since 2019, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has identified only three cases of noncitizens being referred for prosecution for casting a vote unlawfully. In most instances, people were mistaken about their eligibility to vote. According to the ACLU of Wisconsin, no jurisdictions in the state currently allow noncitizen voting. But supporters of the proposed amendment—which would change the constitutional text from “every” to “only a” US citizen “may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum”—say it’s necessary because other states have allowed it.

On the evening of January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to, ostensibly, “protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals.” It was among a slew of presidential actions announced in those first days of the administration aimed at rolling back the agenda of his predecessor, from defunding sanctuary cities to tearing down the Affordable Care Act. (Over his four years in office, Trump went on to implement 472 executive actions in an effort to reshape the immigration system.)

“When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before.”

But for many observers, “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” would go down as the most memorable and infamous: the “Muslim ban.”

Touted as an anti-terrorism measure, the first iteration of Trump’s travel ban on foreigners from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—was a watershed moment. It had a particularly harsh toll on Syrian refugees, indefinitely suspending their resettlement (which was considered “detrimental to the interests of the United States,” despite America’s role in the conflict). But, more so, it showed the extent to which the new administration would make its nativist agenda real.

The morning after Trump signed the proclamation, thousands of protesters rushed to airports across the country as word got out that travelers were being stopped and detained. House and Senate Democrats gathered outside the Supreme Court in opposition to the ban. International condemnation followed, with global leaders denouncing Trump’s actions as shameful and divisive. Former President Barack Obama praised in a statement “citizens exercising their constitutional right to assemble, organize, and have their voices heard by their elected officials.”

Back then, the anger and outrage that this could not be normal or, indeed, American, felt palpable and spurred fierce resistance among a cohort unmoored by the Trump administration. But years of anti-immigrant policymaking and rhetoric—especially a flip by Democrats away from condemnation of Trump to tough border talk to win back centrist voters—have changed the landscape. There is now a normalization of the idea that America should restrict immigration.

Facing the prospect of a second Trump administration—and, with it, an escalation in hostility against immigrants and organizers—immigrant rights activists, advocates, and lawyers are building their defenses back up.

In a time of apparent collective amnesia about Trump’s actions, many of the activists have not forgotten what they had to stand up against. Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), an advocacy organization representing more than 200 groups across the state, helped lead a nationwide pushback against the travel ban. “As a Muslim American,” he later recalled in a USA Today op-ed, “it was impossible not to feel directly and personally targeted.”

Now, Awawdeh, and countless other veteran immigrant rights organizers who were at the forefront of the firewall to mitigate the harm of the Trump White House’s attacks on immigrants are gearing up for another battle. Only this time around, they have the benefit of knowing what to expect—and something of a blueprint for how to respond.

“In the scenario where Trump is elected,” Awawdeh tells me, “we go into defend and protect mode. We’ve seen what he’s done to our communities in his first term…He had no regard for the law and he continued to run afoul of the laws on the books, even our own constitution. That didn’t stop him.”

They have their work cut out for them. The former president has promised a seemingly never-ending catalog of crackdowns on all forms of immigration: the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants; deploying the military within US borders (against migrants and, presumably, protesters); ending birthright citizenship for American-born children of undocumented immigrants; and possibly reviving the “zero tolerance” policy of family separation.

If reelected, Trump has also vowed to restore the “Muslim ban” executive order. “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before,” he said in 2023. “Remember the famous travel ban?” Trump reportedly said in September about stopping refugees from Gaza from being allowed into the United States. “We didn’t take people from certain areas of the world.” He added: “We’re not taking them from [terror] infested countries.”

Trump has made expelling the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants from the United States the cornerstone of his 2024 presidential campaign. In interviews and rallies, he has repeatedly vowed to conduct the largest deportation operation in US history, a sweeping effort that would involve gulag-like detention camps on the border and likely the use of the military within US territory—on top of the human cost to immigrants and their families and economic devastation.

“Even if he is unsuccessful in moving mass deportation forward,” Awawdeh says, “What he will do is instill a deeply chilling fear within our communities.”

Awawdeh hopes to take lessons from those first four years of resisting not only the travel ban, but also family separation and a rule punishing immigrants for accessing public benefits. “The biggest piece that we did but didn’t do as strongly in his first go-around was litigation,” Awawdeh says, “and I think that’s the piece that we’re all going to be doubling and tripling down on.”

Policy and legal experts at the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) are actively keeping a growing list of policy proposals from the Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook and drafting legal memos for potential lawsuits. “Part of the analysis is really asking: What are the things that we know are patently unconstitutional?” says Kica Matos, president of the NILC Immigrant Justice Fund. That list includes the promise to end birthright citizenship for US-born children of undocumented immigrants and the plan to deploy the US military to conduct arrests and deportations in the interior of the country.

“The threats to carry this in a bloody way are indicative to us of intentionality to willfully disregard the constitutional rights that we all have and to violate the civil rights of people who might be impacted,” Matos adds.

During “Trump 1.0,” as she puts it, the federal courts served as a bulwark against some of the former president’s most extreme policies. But the Supreme Court has only gotten more conservative and willing to see the limits of presidential power extended, including to dictate immigration policy. In this environment, fighting back will require a collective effort, from inside the courthouses all the way out to the streets.

“We are bracing for the worst, and we have to think ahead because the stakes are too high to wait,” Awawdeh says. “Think of the worst case scenario in your mind of what a white supremacist would do in office with Project 2025 as their manifesto. That’s the way we’re planning right now.”

Strategic litigation is only part of their calculus. Another huge component is community education and readiness. Across the country, advocates are expanding know-your-rights trainings and campaigns about interactions with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They’re also distributing family safety plans to immigrant households and coordinating with local communities to establish safe spaces—including offices doubling as rapid response hubs—where immigrants can seek shelter during raids or roundups, and setting up emergency funds.

In scenario-planning meetings with partner organizations, Lindsay Toczylowski, the co-founder and CEO of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), says they have been asking themselves: Can we look at the past post-election periods and what can we learn from how we all responded as an immigrant rights movement?

ImmDef is a 200-people legal services organization based in Los Angeles that specializes in deportation defense work. (The city has one of the largest number of immigrants with pending deportation proceedings in immigration courts in the country—113,292, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC.) In 2023, the nonprofit represented about 2,500 immigrants in removal proceedings and assisted many more with other legal issues, including newly arriving asylum seekers.

“Every time somebody goes into a courtroom,” Toczylowski says, “their potential exile from their communities, their permanent separation from their families, and oftentimes their life itself is on the line.” For clients facing persecution or violence in their countries of origin, she puts in no uncertain terms, “we’re talking about death penalty cases in immigration court.”

The former president has promised a seemingly never-ending catalog of crackdowns on all forms of immigration

What keeps Toczylowski up at night these days, having seen parents in her own neighborhood get picked up by ICE after dropping off their children at school, is the thought of cases where a lawyer couldn’t intervene in time to stop a deportation. As the November election nears, she wonders what a mass deportation operation will do. “We see what gets left behind when someone is ripped out of our community,” she says.

If sweeping raids and mass deportation come to pass, boosting the legal defense infrastructure to be able to quickly mobilize a network of pro-bono immigration attorneys will be critical. ImmDef has long been investing in building deportation defense capacity. For one, they have been recruiting and training lawyers who are interested in doing that work but lack the legal expertise, cultural competency, or language skills, and have brought on more attorneys to join the strategic litigation and advocacy teams.

Over the last couple of years, the group has tripled their team in San Diego to help prospective asylum seekers with their initial screening credible fear interviews and launched a welcoming project to inform immigrants facing deportation orders about their rights. To that end, they have partnered with Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO), an organization serving indigenous migrants, to create and disseminate educational videos in languages other than English and Spanish.

Toczylowski acknowledges a “whole of immigrant rights movement response” will be necessary, but she believes they’re ready. “We’ve survived things once before and we will survive this time around,” she says, “because there’s no other choice. Our communities need us to be there.”

If implemented, the Project 2025 agenda could undermine deportation defense services and further strain critical and already scarce legal aid for asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors. Among other things, the project’s playbook chapter on DHS pushes for restricting access to federal funds to organizations unless they “support the broader homeland security mission.” Advocates also fear the conservative plot could lead to pressure on local and state jurisdictions to defund legal services, make immigration courts more hostile to immigrants, and even open up legal providers to criminal penalties.

“There’s no question that Project 2025 would shift the landscape enormously,” Shayna Kessler, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s advancing universal representation initiative, says, “and require some real recalibration.” In 2017, in response to an environment of heightened immigration enforcement, the organization established a network of governments, service providers, and advocates to implement publicly funded deportation defense programs at the state and local governments, for immigrants who, unlike their counterparts in the criminal justice system, aren’t entitled to free legal representation.

“If we do enter a period of really intense immigration enforcement again,” Kessler says, “those legal teams will be poised to continue that defense.”

In our conversations, Kessler and others stressed that the fight for immigrants’ rights doesn’t stop at the ballot box. Nor is it contingent on the outcome of the election. If elected, Vice President Kamala Harris might continue the Biden administration’s crackdown on asylum at the southern border. And the immigration system will not cease to be broken. While preparedness is key, so is mobilizing the American public to resist the vilification and dehumanization of immigrants. That will require large scale mobilizations, not unlike the resistance to the travel ban, to draw visibility and push for intervention from elected officials.

“Grave injustices preceded the former administration,” says Faisal Al-Juburi, chief external affairs officer at Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a Texas legal services nonprofit founded in 1986. “And for all intents and purposes will continue into a next administration, no matter who is elected into office.”

This year, former President Donald Trump’s central campaign pledge has been to conduct the “largest deportation operation in American history.”

In his first term, Trump couldn’t deliver mass deportation. This was partially a result of his administration’s haphazard policy implementation, but also because a mass deportation campaign would require an almost unimaginable amount of resources: Removing one million people from the country a year would cost an estimated $88 billion annually, according to the American Immigration Council.

Still, Trump’s potential second administration wants to try again, even if it appears they only have concepts of a plan for how to do carry out mass removal without bankrupting the economy and likely harming millions of immigrants and many more US citizens in the process.

On Sunday, Tom Homan, the one-time cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, appeared on 60 Minutes to sell the plan as not potentially catastrophic. Homan, the “architect” of family separation who said he didn’t “give a shit” about being sued over the infamous practice, has been defiantly positioning himself as the man to get the job done.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he said at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, in July. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

But when asked by CBS’s Cecilia Vega how feasible—or humane—the rollout of a mass deportation proposal would be, his answers inspired little confidence.

Cecilia Vega asks: “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?”

“Of course there is. Families can be deported together,” says Tom Homan, head of ICE during Trump’s family separation policy. https://t.co/If9G1sNEzj pic.twitter.com/TIWhi25Vdu

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 28, 2024

“Let me tell you what it’s not going to be first,” Homan said. “It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all, it’s ridiculous.” Instead, he claimed, there would be “targeted arrests.” But, as I’ve reported before, that’s quite different from the actual plans Trump’s hardline adviser Stephen Miller has been publicly laying out:

When asked by the hosts of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton radio show how the mass deportations project would be realized, Miller said it would require a “switch to indiscriminate or large-scale enforcement activities.” Miller described going to every place where there are known congregations of “illegals” and taking people to federal detention. 

To detain immigrants before carrying out their deportations, Miller said the Trump administration would build massive holding facilities that could accommodate between 50,000 to 70,000 people at any given time. Such an undertaking, he said, “would be greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date.”

In an exercise of semantics, Homan went on to say he doesn’t use the term “raids,” but that “worksite enforcement operations” would be necessary. When Vega pressed him on how the agency would prioritize immigration enforcement against national security and public safety threats, he left no room for doubt that anyone would entered the United States unlawfully would be a potential target. “So you’re carrying out a targeted enforcement operation,” Vega said, “grandma is in the house. She’s undocumented. She gets arrested too?”

“It depends,” Homan said. “Let the [immigration] judges decide. We’re going to remove people that the judges order deported.”

As a retired government official, Homan has making the rounds of conservative media to declare an “invasion” at the southern border. And he has made an enterprise out of it by launching the nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc. and traveling across the country spreading fear-mongering about migrants.

When asked on 60 Minutes how many people would be deported under Trump’s proposed mass deportation operation, Homan said “you can’t answer that question” because it would depend on how many enforcement agents they would have. Currently, ICE has about 6,000 deportation officers. Arresting and removing the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, most of whom have been in the country for more then a decade, would require hiring hundreds of thousands of government employees.

“If there’s no memo, if there’s no plan, is this fully baked?” Vega asked.

“We’ve done it before,” Homan said, presumably referencing the less than successful slur-named militaristic “Operation Wetback” from the Eisenhower administration that Trump has repeatedly invoked as a model. But historians agree that campaign not only led to far fewer deportations than the federal government claimed, but also ensnared US citizens.

A mass deportation of the scale Trump and Homan have been touting would likely have the same result. And as immigration experts have noted, such a plan would negatively impact mixed-status households, potentially tearing families apart. To that, Homan offered an alternative. “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Vega asked. “Of course there is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.”

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Six years on, families remain separated. The Trump administration’s so-called “zero tolerance” policy of splitting families at the border to deter migration is not just a shameful chapter of US history but an ongoing disaster. To this day, the Biden White House is still scrambling to clean up the mess. Some families may never reunite.

It was previously unthinkable: a government program for immigration deterrence predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms.

The cruelty of that policy defined the first Trump term. Images of separated children held in Walmarts converted into shelters sparked comparisons to the detention of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Audio obtained by ProPublica and released in June 2018 underscored the brutality: Guards joked, over the sounds of children wailing and calling for their moms and dads while in custody of Customs and Border Protection, “Well, we have an orchestra here, right? What we’re missing is a conductor.”

The idea of family separation as an immigration deterrence strategy had floated around before during the Obama administration. But it wasn’t until Donald Trump came into office that hardliner senior adviser Stephen Miller pushed to implement it. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in May 2018 when making the zero-tolerance policy public, months after Trump’s Department of Homeland Security had already started tearing families apart. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.” (Sessions even invoked the Bible to defend the policy.)

The unspeakable—and previously unthinkable—horror of a systematic government policy predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms was such that even Donald Trump seemed chastened. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” he said in 2018 upon signing an executive order ending the practice. 

But it was too late. By then, more than 2,000 children had already been taken from their parents and potentially condemned to a lifetime of trauma and negative health outcomes. Ultimately, around 5,000 children were separated and, as of earlier this year, 1,360 hadn’t been reunited with their parents or legal guardians, according to a progress report by the Family Reunification Task Force launched by the Biden administration.

Lawyers and advocates working on the reunification process have witnessed heartbreaking instances of children who were so young when the separation happened that they no longer recognized their parent. “A lot of children who were separated felt abandoned by their parents and so there was resentment when they reunited,” Nan Schivone, the legal director of the migrant rights group Justice in Motion, told me earlier this year.

Even in face of the irreparable harm done to thousands of children and their parents, the Trump campaign won’t rule out bringing back family separation in a potential second term.

“Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come,” Trump said during a CNN town hall last year. “If a family hears they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come.” When pressed further about whether he would reinstate the policy, Trump added: “We have to save our country, all right?”

All these years later, some of the children victimized by family separation are now speaking out. “The worst thing about being [in the shelter] was at night because I always dreamed about my mother and that she was with me,” one unnamed teen says in a video posted on an X account called Same Story, “but when I woke up she wasn’t there.” In another, Billy describes being separated from his father: “I couldn’t speak English. I couldn’t do nothing at all but just sit back and watch my dad be taken away from me.” Reuniting with his father, he says, “was the best moment in my life because it was the first time that I finally felt like I was secure and I was safe.”

Families belong together and free. In 2018, Billy was separated from his dad when they immigrated to the United States in 2018. Now that he’s reunited with his family, he hopes that no family ever has to experience the same story. Share his story because #FamiliesStillBelong. pic.twitter.com/j9Ban3Uye3

— Same Story (@samestoryvoices) September 24, 2024

At a town hall organized by Univision on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed a key constituency eluding the Democratic Party: Latino voters. Her pitch, like much of the campaign, focused on the contrast between her and Donald Trump. “I very much believe that the American people are being presented with two very different visions for our country,” she said.

Still, Harris mostly fronted a “tough on the border” position during the appearance. After moments of empathy and a brief mention of fighting for DACA recipients, Harris touted a now-defunct restrictive border bill pushed by President Joe Biden that overlooked groups like the Dreamers. The vice president talked concrete on crackdown and vaguely on policies to help immigrants. She had a chance to be specific on both counts.

One of the first questions Harris fielded came from Ivett Castillo, the grieving daughter of an undocumented Mexican-born woman who had passed away six weeks prior. “You and I have something in common,” Castillo told Harris. “We both lost our mother.”

Castillo, who lives in Las Vegas, went on to describe how she had been able to help her father get legal status, but not her mother. “She was never ever able to get the type of care and service that she needed or deserved,” Castillo said, sobbing. “So my question for you is: What are your plans or do you have plans to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?”

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

Harris expressed sympathy for Castillo and urged her to remember her mother as she had lived. And she also mentioned a bill that the Biden administration proposed to offer a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. (Harris blamed the fact that it wasn’t picked up by Congress on the “inability to put solutions in front of politics.”)

But that was the extent of Harris’ answer to the question about her policies for the 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. Instead, the Democratic nominee quickly pivoted to the one piece of the immigration debate both parties seem to be laser-focused on exploiting this election cycle: the border.

“A bipartisan group of members of Congress, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came together with one of the strongest border security bills we’ve had in decades,” she said, noting how it would have boosted the border patrol force and help tackle the flow of fentanyl. (The vast majority of fentanyl is brought into the country through ports of entry by US citizens, not immigrants.) Harris then accused her opponent of deliberately killing the proposed legislation in order to keep the border a salient electoral issue. “He would prefer to run on a problem than fixing a problem,” she said.

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about longtime undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

In fully embracing the perception that immigration can’t be anything other than a liability for Democrats and a winning trampoline for Republicans, the party has all but ceded the “moral leadership” President Joe Biden so vehemently vowed to reclaim in the aftermath of Trump’s devastation.

But if Harris’ goal was to underscore the differences between her and Trump’s views and policies on immigration, she missed an opportunity to do so. The Univision audience at the town hall and watching from home heard nothing about the Biden administration’s move to make it easier for undocumented spouses of US citizens to obtain legal status. Nor did they hear about the Republican candidate’s disastrous plans to arrest, detain, and mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants, tearing up families and ruining critical industries.

Some polls suggest stricter border enforcement and, to a lesser extent, Trump’s mass deportation proposal resonates with some Latinos. Even if experts say such plans could impact not only undocumented immigrants, but also mixed-status families and those with legal status. The message may not have caught on. In part, because it seems the campaign has done little to explain the potential catastrophe wrought by mass deportation. (As the New York Times reported, many have not heard about the details of the actual agenda.)

It’s not surprising that Harris has adopted a defensive stance on immigration. From the beginning of her expedited presidential campaign, the former prosecutor has been facing attacks from Republicans falsely dubbing her the “border czar.”

But Harris was also once an unapologetically vocal supporter of undocumented immigrants. When vying for the Democratic nomination ahead of the 2020 election, she released a plan to use executive action to provide a pathway to citizenship to millions of Dreamers. Now, her official platform and rally speeches default to a boilerplate appearance of compromise in the form of “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

It’s not for a lack of emotion. Harris, like Biden, seems to thrive when relating to people and their struggles. “It’s about the dignity of people,” she said at the town hall. “And about the importance of doing what we can as leaders to alleviate suffering… What I think it’s backward in terms of this thinking that it’s a sign of strength to beat people down, part of the backward nature of those kinds of thinking is to suggest that empathy is somehow a weakness. Empathy meaning to have some level of care and concern about the suffering of other people and then do something to lift that up.” She later added: “There’ a big contrast between me and Donald Trump.”

If there was ever a moment to highlight what New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer aptly put as “Trump’s dangerous immigration obsession” and what’s at stake—beyond the more abstract warnings about a threat to democracy and the rule of law—that would have been it. If more people understood what mass deportation really means, maybe a quarter of Democrats would not support it.

At a town hall organized by Univision on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed a key constituency eluding the Democratic Party: Latino voters. Her pitch, like much of the campaign, focused on the contrast between her and Donald Trump. “I very much believe that the American people are being presented with two very different visions for our country,” she said.

Still, Harris mostly fronted a “tough on the border” position during the appearance. After moments of empathy and a brief mention of fighting for DACA recipients, Harris touted a now-defunct restrictive border bill pushed by President Joe Biden that overlooked groups like the Dreamers. The vice president talked concrete on crackdown and vaguely on policies to help immigrants. She had a chance to be specific on both counts.

One of the first questions Harris fielded came from Ivett Castillo, the grieving daughter of an undocumented Mexican-born woman who had passed away six weeks prior. “You and I have something in common,” Castillo told Harris. “We both lost our mother.”

Castillo, who lives in Las Vegas, went on to describe how she had been able to help her father get legal status, but not her mother. “She was never ever able to get the type of care and service that she needed or deserved,” Castillo said, sobbing. “So my question for you is: What are your plans or do you have plans to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?”

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

Harris expressed sympathy for Castillo and urged her to remember her mother as she had lived. And she also mentioned a bill that the Biden administration proposed to offer a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. (Harris blamed the fact that it wasn’t picked up by Congress on the “inability to put solutions in front of politics.”)

But that was the extent of Harris’ answer to the question about her policies for the 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. Instead, the Democratic nominee quickly pivoted to the one piece of the immigration debate both parties seem to be laser-focused on exploiting this election cycle: the border.

“A bipartisan group of members of Congress, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came together with one of the strongest border security bills we’ve had in decades,” she said, noting how it would have boosted the border patrol force and help tackle the flow of fentanyl. (The vast majority of fentanyl is brought into the country through ports of entry by US citizens, not immigrants.) Harris then accused her opponent of deliberately killing the proposed legislation in order to keep the border a salient electoral issue. “He would prefer to run on a problem than fixing a problem,” she said.

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about longtime undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

In fully embracing the perception that immigration can’t be anything other than a liability for Democrats and a winning trampoline for Republicans, the party has all but ceded the “moral leadership” President Joe Biden so vehemently vowed to reclaim in the aftermath of Trump’s devastation.

But if Harris’ goal was to underscore the differences between her and Trump’s views and policies on immigration, she missed an opportunity to do so. The Univision audience at the town hall and watching from home heard nothing about the Biden administration’s move to make it easier for undocumented spouses of US citizens to obtain legal status. Nor did they hear about the Republican candidate’s disastrous plans to arrest, detain, and mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants, tearing up families and ruining critical industries.

Some polls suggest stricter border enforcement and, to a lesser extent, Trump’s mass deportation proposal resonates with some Latinos. Even if experts say such plans could impact not only undocumented immigrants, but also mixed-status families and those with legal status. The message may not have caught on. In part, because it seems the campaign has done little to explain the potential catastrophe wrought by mass deportation. (As the New York Times reported, many have not heard about the details of the actual agenda.)

It’s not surprising that Harris has adopted a defensive stance on immigration. From the beginning of her expedited presidential campaign, the former prosecutor has been facing attacks from Republicans falsely dubbing her the “border czar.”

But Harris was also once an unapologetically vocal supporter of undocumented immigrants. When vying for the Democratic nomination ahead of the 2020 election, she released a plan to use executive action to provide a pathway to citizenship to millions of Dreamers. Now, her official platform and rally speeches default to a boilerplate appearance of compromise in the form of “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

It’s not for a lack of emotion. Harris, like Biden, seems to thrive when relating to people and their struggles. “It’s about the dignity of people,” she said at the town hall. “And about the importance of doing what we can as leaders to alleviate suffering… What I think it’s backward in terms of this thinking that it’s a sign of strength to beat people down, part of the backward nature of those kinds of thinking is to suggest that empathy is somehow a weakness. Empathy meaning to have some level of care and concern about the suffering of other people and then do something to lift that up.” She later added: “There’ a big contrast between me and Donald Trump.”

If there was ever a moment to highlight what New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer aptly put as “Trump’s dangerous immigration obsession” and what’s at stake—beyond the more abstract warnings about a threat to democracy and the rule of law—that would have been it. If more people understood what mass deportation really means, maybe a quarter of Democrats would not support it.

Twelve years ago, when former President Barack Obama proudly created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to shield undocumented youth from the threat of deportation, all involved thought of it as a temporary fix. It would be, as Obama said, a “stopgap measure.” Eventually, everyone assumed Congress would get together and pass legislation for the so-called Dreamers brought to the country as children.

But, as I’ve written about before—despite the seeming bipartisan consensus of the time and DACA’s outsized weight on the lives of the 800,000 undocumented young people who have benefited from it and built their lives in the United States—the long-envisioned legislative agreement that would have afforded DACA recipients a pathway to citizenship never came to be.

Now, the prospects of a bill to help Dreamers seem grim. Both presidential candidates are more focused on talking up border security. And this year, when Democrats supported a proposed bipartisan immigration bill, they all but ignored the predicament of the undocumented youth as part of the discussion.

With Dreamers off the agenda, DACA has lived far past its intended transitionary period. That means recipients are stuck in legal limbo and at the mercy of presidential transitions and the whims of the judiciary.

Now, the fate of hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth sits in the hands of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguably the most conservative jurisdiction in the nation where Trump-appointed judges are pushing the MAGA agenda to reshape the United States one radical ruling at a time.

“Living as a DACA recipient, not a day passes that I do not think about how my life could be so different if I had a permanent sense of security in my country, the only country I know,” Jose Barrera with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) said in a statement ahead of this week’s hearing. “Others who, like me, are DACA recipients try to live their lives the best they can every day, but you can’t help but feel forgotten when year after year, Congress and our elected leaders fail to resolve this issue. Our lives cannot be kept on hold forever.”

On Thursday morning, a panel of three federal judges—none of whom are Trump appointees—heard oral arguments in Texas v. United States. The case was brought by Republican-led states in 2018 challenging the legality of DACA. Outside the courthouse, DACA recipients and supporters chanted, “Home is here.”

In 2021, Texas District Court Judge Andrew Hanen ruled that Obama exceeded the executive branch’s authority in creating DACA and that the memorandum violated the rulemaking process. In so doing, Hanen blocked the processing of new applications nationwide.

After the Biden administration appealed and issued a final rule to codify DACA into federal regulation, the Fifth Circuit sided with the states and upheld the district court’s decision. The judges—one Bush and two Trump appointees—rejected the government’s argument that DACA is an appropriate exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The case then went back to the lower court, where in 2023 Hanen declared DACA unlawful. “While sympathetic to the predicament of DACA recipients and their families,” he wrote, “this Court has expressed its concerns about the legality of the program for some time.”

Twelve years after DACA’s signing, and after years of legal wrangling, the program is in a perilous place. At Thursday’s hearing in New Orleans, there were a slew of specific questions before the judges: whether the Biden administration acted within its authority when it attempted to strengthen and safeguard DACA in 2022; if the lower court’s ruling halting new applications nationally was excessive; and whether the state of Texas, a plaintiff, successfully showed evidence of harm as a result of costs associated with social services provided to DACA recipients.

The Texas v. United States case could drag for weeks or months and eventually make its way to the Supreme Court. But what happens to DACA will also hinge on the outcome of the November presidential election. While in office, Donald Trump tried to rescind the program. The Supreme Court ruled the move was “arbitrary and capricious.” (It did not address the underlying issue of DACA’s validity.)  If Trump takes back the White House, Cecilia Muñoz, who served as director of the Domestic Policy Council under Obama and helped establish DACA, told me, “You can expect DACA to shrink or disappear entirely.”

On the other side, Vice President Kamala Harris, throughout her career, has voiced strong support for DACA. As she sought the Democratic nomination in 2019, Harris put forward a comprehensive plan to provide a pathway to citizenship to more than 2 million Dreamers through executive action. The roadmap, which mirrors ongoing demands from immigrant rights groups, included measures to expand DACA eligibility and the use of the so-called “parole in place” power to remove barriers preventing Dreamers with American espouses from qualifying for a green card.

“Dreamers cannot afford to sit around and wait for Congress to get its act together,” Harris said at the time. “These young people are just as American as I am, and they deserve a president who will fight for them from day one.”

It remains to be seen if she’ll honor that pledge as the 2024 Democratic nominee. So far, Harris’ commitments have been somewhat more modest. In June, on the occasion of the program’s anniversary, she vowed to “continue fighting to protect Dreamers,” but placed the responsibility of addressing the issue of a pathway to citizenship on Congress. “We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border,” she said at the Democratic National Convention in August.

At the hearing, the US government lawyer Brian Boynton and counselors for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the state of New Jersey defending DACA, disputed Texas’ legal standing to sue, arguing the harm the state claims to experience from health care and education costs—as well as their assertion that in the absence of the program, recipients without legal status would choose to leave the state or the country—is too indirect and speculative. (One of the judges seemed to agree, pressing the lawyer for Texas to provide concrete evidence to back up the assumption that DACA recipients would likely “self-exile.”) They also asked the court to consider the impact of the program on thousands of US citizen children whose parents have DACA, as well as on businesses across the dozens of states that benefit from it.

One of the judges also challenged Texas on the issue of whether states can rely on lower courts to “usurp” federal immigration policy. He cited a “sea change” decision by the Supreme Court last year reaffirming the executive branch’s authority to govern on immigration. Towards the end of his arguments, the Texas counsel acknowledged that they’re asking for DACA to be wound down across the country. The lawyer representing the Biden administration petitioned the court to at minimum continue to preserve DACA for the more than 500,000 current recipients.

“This case should not even be in court in the first place. DACA recipients only bring benefits to the states in which they live,” Nina Perales, the attorney arguing for MALDEF, said at a press conference afterwards. “Consistently since the very beginning of this case Texas has never been able to point to any DACA recipient that caused any harm to the state of Texas and Texas was the only state that tried.”