Four Years
in a Day

Trump was the first president to declare a national emergency in relation to the border in 2019 to tap into funding to build border barriers after Congress stymied his efforts. The order was legally challenged, and President Joe Biden rescinded it upon taking office.

Trump initially paused the refugee resettlement program when he first took office in 2017. He then capped the number of refugees allowed into the country at 18,000, the lowest number in the more than 40-year history of the program.

Thousands of refugees who already had their travel booked saw their plans canceled. Trump also suspended federal funding to all groups who assist refugees already in the United States, including helping them with housing, finding work and other needs.

For years, federal officials under Republicans and Democrats have released certain immigrants they can’t detain, either because of capacity or health or humanitarian concerns. During his first term, Trump ordered an end to “catch and release” practices. But, as did his predecessors, the president had to release tens of thousands of family members and unaccompanied minors because of judges' rulings and laws that ban prolonged detentions for minors, as well as a lack of family detention space.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said the agency is detaining everyone who crosses the border and holding them until they can be processed or transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Trump first launched the policy known as the Migration Protection Protocols in 2019 to deter unauthorized crossings. Under the program, the administration returned about 70,000 people to Mexico. Biden sought to end the policy when he first took office, saying it was dangerous and inhumane. A federal judge ordered the Biden administration to restart it, resulting in around 15,000 more immigrants to be placed in the program until the judge's order was eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Department of Homeland Security announced on Jan. 21 that it was immediately restarting the practice, but it’s unclear how it would be applied since other Trump orders have suspended asylum at the border.

While Trump reached what they called Asylum Cooperative Agreements with El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala during his first term, only the Guatemalan policy went into effect, with 945 asylum seekers being transferred to the Central American country over a year.

Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, reached an agreement with El Salvador that would allow the U.S. to send deported immigrants from other countries to the Central American nation.

During his first term, Trump required that the Department of Homeland Security collect DNA samples from immigrant families, which was later expanded to include others in its custody. The Biden administration revoked the DNA testing contract in 2023.

ICE during the Biden administration was instructed to focus the arrests of immigrants on those in the country illegally who posed threats to the country, border security or public safety. Due to limited resources, agents could decline to take action when there were mitigating factors like age, health, military status, length of time in the country or pending humanitarian applications. Those priorities were challenged and ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court.

On Jan. 21, Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman issued a directive rescinding ICE guidelines, in place since 2011, that required officers to get prior approval to conduct arrests at certain “sensitive locations” such as schools, hospitals and churches. Media reports have already detailed some ICE arrests near churches. A group of Quakers sued over the policy, saying it violates the First Amendment.

A 2019 ProPublica investigation found that the Department of Homeland Security had shifted money away from more complex investigations to support Trump’s push to arrest and deport unauthorized immigrants during his first term, including reassigning hundreds of agents to low-level enforcement tasks.

In 2019, Trump implemented a similar policy to expand the fast-track deportation proceedings, known as “expedited removal.” Before, the practice only applied to people apprehended within 100 miles of a land border who couldn’t prove they had been in the United States for 14 days, as opposed to the broader time frame of two years. Immigrant advocates sued the previous Trump administration over the rule, but the case became moot after Biden reversed the policy.

A Jan. 24 Federal Register notice put the policy into effect. The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups have already filed a lawsuit challenging the policy.

For years, the U.S. has kept track of “recalcitrant countries,” such as Venezuela and Cuba, whose governments have refused to take back their own nationals, hampering deportation efforts. Trump’s first administration issued visa sanctions against Cambodia, Eritrea, Guinea and Sierra Leone for failing to accept deportees.

In a brief diplomatic blow-up, the president of Colombia refused to accept two U.S. military planes carrying deportees, citing concerns about the migrants’ treatment. Trump responded by threatening to impose retaliatory tariffs and visa restrictions on officials and members of the president's family, and the U.S. Embassy in Bogota cancelled visa appointments. Colombia in turn promised to levy its own tariffs on U.S. imports but then backed down and agreed to accept the flights.

The order reestablished the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office, which Trump created in his first administration. Biden dismantled the office and established what he called the Victims Engagement and Services Line to support all crime victims regardless of immigration status. It also included information about reporting abuses inside immigration detention facilities and immigration benefits for crime or trafficking victims.

Trump in the first administration sought to end Temporary Protected Status for thousands of immigrants living in the country legally, impacting some 400,000 people from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan. The ACLU and other advocacy organizations won a lawsuit challenging the policy. The Biden administration extended TPS to hundreds of thousands of people, including Venezuelans.

The Trump administration revoked deportation protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelans that Biden had granted before leaving office.

Various Trump-era rules tried to make it more difficult for asylum-seekers to access work authorizations while they waited — sometimes for years — for their claims to be resolved in immigration court. Several nonprofit organizations sued over the policies, later vacated by a federal judge.

The measure goes further than similar attempts in Trump’s first term to halt some specific law enforcement grants to targeted localities. From the first day of his previous administration, Trump battled against local jurisdictions that refused to cooperate with parts of his immigration crackdown by threatening to limit Department of Justice law enforcement grants as well as suing California over its sanctuary law.

On Jan. 21, the Justice Department instructed U.S. attorneys offices to investigate and prosecute noncompliance with immigration enforcement initiatives.

Unaccompanied migrant children who arrive at the border and are taken into custody have protections under U.S. law and a long-standing legal settlement that says they are supposed to be released to sponsors — usually parents or relatives — in the U.S. In the first Trump administration, the agency in charge of their care began sharing information with ICE and expanded the collection of fingerprints from people in the sponsor’s household to aid in the arrest and deportation of those in the country illegally. Congress moved to place some limitations on the practice. Cases have emerged of migrant children working illegally, sometimes in dangerous jobs, after being released from federal custody to sponsors.

ProPublica reported that a longtime immigration enforcement official has been tapped to run the agency responsible for managing unaccompanied migrant children, in a move that has alarmed experts and advocates who are concerned about further information-sharing between the two agencies. ICE has been granted access to a database with information on unaccompanied kids, according to media reports and a former government source who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of continued relationships with the government.

Unauthorized immigrants are already ineligible for many public benefits. The first Trump administration introduced a new rule that said immigrants likely to become a “public charge” would be ineligible for admission into the country or unable to adjust their immigration status once here. The rule was subject to litigation and blocked in court.

Soon after taking office, Trump issued a sweeping travel ban that barred nearly all travelers from five mainly Muslim countries as well as North Korea and Venezuela. The order was immediately challenged in court. After several revisions, the U.S. Supreme Court eventually upheld a third version of the order.

The first Trump administration launched an effort to strip a large number of Americans of their citizenship, including a new section created by the Department of Justice in 2020 dedicated to these cases. According to the ACLU, under the previous administration, those targeted for denaturalization were often Nazis and other war criminals but the first Trump administration included a broader swath of people.

In March 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration implemented a public health rule, known as Title 42, that rapidly expelled back to Mexico almost all migrants without giving them a chance to seek asylum. Biden continued that policy for two years before ending it.

During his first term in office, Trump ordered the deployment of more than 5,000 troops to help secure the U.S.-Mexico border, something both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama did during their administrations. Military bases have also been used in the past to temporarily house migrants.

The Defense Department has sent 1,500 additional active-duty service members to the border, on top of the 2,500 members already in the region. U.S. military aircraft have also started flying undocumented immigrants out of the country, and a base in Colorado will be used to process immigrants arrested in enforcement operations.

Trump first ordered the erection of a border wall in 2017 and used a national emergency declaration to divert military funds for its construction. By the end of his first term, his administration had built about 450 miles, most of it replacing existing structures. Border barriers had mostly been in place since 1996, their construction happening under Democratic and Republican administrations.

The Department of Justice used eminent domain to speed up the construction of border barriers during Trump’s first term, an issue he campaigned on and that was later the subject of an executive order he signed. The federal government previously used the legal maneuver after President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act in 2006.

In Trump’s first term, Attorney General Jeff Sessions implemented a zero-tolerance policy to prosecute all border crossers, which led to family separations affecting thousands of children. The Biden administration formed a task force to reunite families that remained separated years later, but on Day 1 Trump disbanded it.

Trump early in his first term also pledged through executive action to expand detentions. And while space to hold people is limited and dependent on funding from Congress, his administration opened new facilities. Detentions also grew under Obama, who expanded family detention.

The Washington Post reported that ICE is preparing to more than double its detention capacity by opening four new 10,000-bed facilities and 14 smaller sites with space for 700 to 1,000 people, with the Department of Defense potentially using military bases. The White House also said it would expand capacity at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to detain some unauthorized immigrants with serious criminal backgrounds.

In his first term, Trump also moved to expand 287(g) agreements, which have been around since the early 2000s. Biden kept many of them in place and as of December 2024, there were dozens of local law enforcement agencies participating in them across the country. Critics say the program has been costly for localities and has led in the past to racial profiling and caused distrust between police and local communities.

Following the order, the Texas attorney general entered into an agreement with the administration to help with immigration enforcement, and Gov. Greg Abbott gave the state’s National Guard the authority to arrest immigrants at the border, which they weren’t allowed to do before. Experts say Texas, which already has gone further than any other states on immigration, could serve as a model under this order.

Trump in his first term also pledged to hire 15,000 new Border Patrol agents and immigration officers, but those plans fell short. Previous administrations have also pledged to hire more customs officers and border agents, but the agencies have struggled to find and retain qualified personnel.

During Trump’s first term, he also promised “extreme vetting” and early on began collecting social media handles from visa applicants and refugees, even though refugees have long been one of the most thoroughly vetted categories of people entering the country. Immigrant advocates sued over some of these changes when they alleged it resulted in blanket denials of refugee admissions.

On Jan. 23, the acting homeland security secretary used the invocation of an invasion to call on states and local governments to help the federal government with immigration enforcement. The ACLU and a coalition of immigrant rights advocates sued to block the order, arguing it cuts off access to asylum in violation of U.S. law.

Two federal judges immediately blocked the order after at least two dozen Democratic-led states and immigrant rights groups filed multiple lawsuits seeking a temporary restraining order.

Under the programs put in place by Biden, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans could apply for humanitarian parole from abroad and fly to the U.S. if approved, while migrants waiting in Mexico could apply to enter the U.S. through a cellphone app known as CBP One and then seek asylum.

A Jan. 23 Department of Homeland Security memo gives immigration officials the power to quickly deport more than a million immigrants who were allowed into the country under the two Biden-era programs. Migrants who had pending appointments to approach the border on the CBP One app saw them abruptly canceled.

A Jan. 21 Justice Department memo mentions it could prosecute and fine immigrants in the country who fail to register with the government.

The Biden administration distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to support these programs. During the first Trump administration, Department of Justice officials told providers it was halting its legal orientation program, but then Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed course after pushback from Congress and advocates.

The Department of Justice told legal service providers who receive federal funding to stop holding legal orientation and other programs with immigrants. Legal service providers sued to reestablish the services in detention centers. Some services reportedly have been restored following a ruling in a separate lawsuit.