Trump Ran on Border Chaos. Now He’ll Have to Run the U.S. Immigration System.

The Washington Post / Nick Miroff, Maria Sacchetti

16:17 JST, January 20, 2025

President-elect Donald Trump campaigned for office depicting the U.S.-Mexico border as an out-of-control disaster, even as illegal crossings fell steadily throughout 2024 and are now lower than when he left office four years ago.

He has continued to cast migrants as dangerous criminals and promised the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history, glossing over the complexity and cost. His nominees to lead U.S. law enforcement agencies have continued to repeat his distortions.

On Monday, Trump and his team will inherit the U.S. immigration system as it really exists, rather than the one he has often caricatured. He is expected to quickly undo several of President Joe Biden’s policies and issue a raft of immigration-related orders and directives, potentially disrupting the current fragile equilibrium at the southern border and upending U.S. cities and towns where immigrants and their children have found jobs and enrolled in schools.

It will be the first time Trump’s immigration policies are put to the test in a post-pandemic world and a U.S. economy that remains hungry for workers. Trump has boasted that his previous border restrictions deterred mass migration, but analysts say the pandemic toward the end of his term played a more powerful role by stalling global travel and sending U.S. unemployment soaring.

Trump’s campaign promises come with great risk: By rounding up immigrants who fill otherwise vacant jobs, he could hurt the U.S. economy he has pledged to supercharge. By antagonizing Mexico with a rush of deportees, perhaps coupled with tariffs or military strikes on drug cartel targets, he could alienate a crucial partner in enforcement and trade. By pushing ideas that rally his core supporters, he could further divide a nation he has promised to unite.

“I’m concerned that as the new administration embarks on enforcement activities to make a headline, they’re going to encounter an equal and opposite pushback which undermines public safety all around,” said Jeh Johnson, who served as the Department of Homeland Security secretary during President Barack Obama’s second term.

“Images of agents dragging an undocumented person off church steps or out of a school will lead to a backlash and turbocharge the “sanctuary city” movement, making it more difficult for ICE to reach the most dangerous people in these communities,” Johnson said, referring to policies adopted by cities and states that limit cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Trump and his top aides say they plan to bring back the enforcement tools and tactics of his first term by resuming border wall construction, relaunching the “Remain in Mexico” policy that requires asylum seekers to wait outside U.S. territory while their claims are processed and deploying ICE agents more aggressively in communities.

Officials have been planning a large operation in the Chicago area that would begin soon after Inauguration Day and bring in additional officers to ramp up arrests, according to two current federal officials and a former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal law-enforcement planning. But after preliminary details leaked in news reports, the incoming administration is reconsidering the plan, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan told The Washington Post in an interview Saturday. But ICE agents will quickly be more active across the country, he said.

“This is a nationwide thing,” he said. “We’re not sweeping neighborhoods. We have a targeted enforcement plan.”

Trump’s transition team declined to respond to more specific questions about the president-elect’s immigration agenda, executive orders and whether he would leave some Biden policies in place.

“President Trump was given a mandate by the American people to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants, secure the border, and deport dangerous criminals and terrorists that make our communities less safe. He will deliver,” said transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a statement.

Trump’s nominees have continued to echo immigration falsehoods from the campaign trail long after the election has been settled. Pam Bondi, his nominee for attorney general, said during confirmation hearings Wednesday that Venezuela has opened its prisons to send migrants north – a claim Trump has made without evidence. South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), Trump’s pick to lead DHS, said last week that the Biden administration has been bringing migrants into the United States on free flights, which is not true, and has allowed thousands of murderers to cross the border and run amok.

“We’ve had over 13,000 murderers that are loose in this country that have come over that border,” Noem said during her confirmation hearing Friday, repeating Trump’s mischaracterization of DHS data, which shows most of the 13,000 are in prison serving sentences and did not enter the country during Biden’s term.

Illegal migration reached record levels during Biden’s first three years in office, but border crossings are down more than 80 percent over the past year. Biden officials achieved that turnaround by working with Mexico to crack down on migrants traveling north and by imposing sweeping restrictions on access to the U.S. asylum system.

Trump has pledged to “close” the southern border and kick off the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history. His efforts would target border crossers but also the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants who reside in the United States, some for decades. The nation’s largest cities – run by Democratic mayors – are bracing for clashes with the White House over “sanctuary” policies and an immigration enforcement campaign that Trump aide Stephen Miller says will unfold “at light speed.”

Trump took office in 2017 pledging millions of deportations, only to fall far short. He will have political winds in his favor this time. A growing number of Democrats have expressed support for a tougher approach at the border amid the broader reckoning within the party over Biden’s defeat.

Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), who represents a competitive district in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, was one of the Democrats who voted last week to advance the Laken Riley Act, named for a Georgia nursing student slain last year by a Venezuelan migrant. The bill would require ICE to jail migrants accused of property crimes including petty theft, and it would give states more power to sue DHS over crimes committed by immigrants whose cases are under federal supervision. Trump could sign the bill into law as soon as this week.

“If people come into this country, and they’re stealing, we should do everything we can to get rid of them,” Gonzalez said. “I don’t understand why some of my colleagues would oppose that.”

Homan, the “border czar,” has told Republican lawmakers they will need to provide a major increase in funding to pay for the expansion of immigration detention it will require. ICE officials have identified more than 110,000 people with pending claims in the U.S. immigration system who will have to be held in custody under the new law, nearly tripling the number of detainees that the agency currently holds.

Biden faced criticism for swinging too far to the left on immigration after his inauguration, taking a welcoming posture and reversing Trump’s signature policies such as Remain in Mexico. Illegal border crossings exploded over the following months, and Biden officials spent much of his term trying to reassert control. The influx frustrated Democratic mayors in cities forced to spend billions to shelter the migrants, and news reports of heinous crimes – including Riley’s murder – soured public opinion even more.

By early 2024, Biden officials began to consolidate their border policy framework through a system of incentives and deterrents that allowed more migrants to apply to enter the United States legally while cracking down hard on illegal border crossings. Immigration advocacy groups denounced the restrictions on asylum access, but the measures finally began to slow mass migration.

“The Biden administration has cobbled together a flawed but currently functional system of carrots and sticks,” said Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). “Most of that is happening in a relatively orderly way.”

In November and December, more people for the first time went to the official U.S. border crossings, known as ports of entry, than the number apprehended by Border Patrol after crossing illegally.

The Biden administration has been allowing roughly 1,450 people per day to use the CBP One mobile app to schedule an appointment to come to a U.S. border crossing, or port of entry, and make a humanitarian claim, instead of hiring a smuggler and crossing illegally. “CBP One has taken resources away from organized crime in Mexico,” Isacson said.

Biden allowed Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to apply to enter legally, with a U.S. resident to sponsor them, through a temporary program called parole that has accepted roughly 30,000 people per month.

Trump is now preparing to replace these carrots with more sticks, potentially destabilizing the border if more migrants attempt illegal crossings.

Trump aides say Biden’s programs facilitated mass immigration fraud. Noem told lawmakers Friday that Trump will shut down the CBP One app. She did not say what will happen to the roughly 30,000 people who have already scheduled appointments to come to the U.S. border through the app.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday voted 8-6 to endorse Trump’s plan to restore his Remain in Mexico policy, which required migrants to await their asylum hearings on the other side of the border. But Democrats and Republicans remain sharply divided over whether that worked.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), the committee’s chair, said in an email that border apprehensions were under 74,000 in Trump’s final full month in office. Biden’s mix of policies lowered border crossings to 47,300 in December.

“The 2024 election was a clear mandate from the American people to reverse President Biden’s disastrous open border policies,” Paul said, ticking off the actions the president could take under existing law, such as denying entry to anyone who crosses illegally, refusing to grant them asylum and pushing anyone who breaches the border back into Mexico. “The Trump administration demonstrated that when the law is enforced properly, it works.”

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Michigan), the ranking member on the Homeland Security committee, said Remain in Mexico pushed migrants into border cities where drug cartels “raked in billions” by subjecting them to extortion and kidnapping for ransom.

Remain in Mexico ran from Jan. 25, 2019, to the end of Trump’s term and it marked the first time that Mexico permitted the United States to send non-Mexicans into their territory. Hardly any won their cases, and most didn’t have lawyers to defend them, according to data compiled by WOLA.

Gonzalez, the congressman from South Texas, said Trump needs to work with Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum. “She’s not going to be a pushover,” he said. “And Remain in Mexico only works if Mexico is on board.”

Trump attempted other deterrent policies that fell flat, were blocked by the courts or turned public sentiment against him. In 2018, his administration launched a “zero tolerance” policy that separated migrant children from their parents, to punish parents for crossing the border illegally. A Republican-appointed federal judge, who had to oversee the reunifications of distraught parents and children, called the policy “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country.”

Trump has reappointed some of the backers of that policy, including Homan and Miller, the White House adviser. He has also nominated budget chief Russ Vought, who said last year, after being tricked into an interview by British reporters posing as relatives of a deep-pocketed conservative donor, that mass deportations would help “save the country.”

“We are expecting this to be worse than the first time around,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who argued cases against Trump’s policies, including the family separation case. “I’m hopeful that when the American public sees what mass deportations look like in practice, with hardworking families and children being targeted, they will push back.”

Trump’s return has mobilized immigrant advocates who resisted his deportation campaign during his first term, with support from Democratic politicians in cities such as Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. Lawyers are ready to blitz the administration with legal challenges. Advocacy groups are staffing hotlines to respond to mass arrests. And volunteers across the country are once more holding informal gatherings to teach immigrants their rights, to remain silent, to ask to see a warrant and to call their lawyer, if arrested.

Some immigrants are identifying trusted people who can handle their bank accounts and care for their children if agents take them away.

“We have been preparing for a long time for this moment,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, an advocacy group. “We know what to expect. We know that Trump will try to overwhelm us.”

At one gathering in Maryland days after the November elections, advocate Gustavo Torres reminded immigrants shaken by Trump’s victory that they had already lived through far worse than this.

Many fled persecution, violence and torture in their countries, seeking a better life in the United States. They work in construction, health care and other jobs that Americans need. Torres fled Colombia in 1991, when the country was engaged in a war that spanned five decades and claimed more than 220,000 lives.

“You have traveled thousands and thousands of miles to start new lives in Maryland,” said Torres, the executive director of CASA, a national nonprofit that aids immigrants. “We are people who faced incredible challenges, and we are still here.”