On Day One of his second presidential term, Donald Trump is enacting a pillar of his political agenda, launching the first wave of a new wide-reaching anti-immigrant offensive. The slew of immigration-related executive orders that he signed after taking office on January 20 will not be implemented gradually but will immediately affect thousands of immigrants who are, even now, waiting at the border for entry. Further, Trump is taking aim at the rights of those born in the United States to immigrant parents, threatening to criminalize and push new generations into precarity.
Trump’s orders to militarize the southern border, halt asylum and refugee protections, and end birthright citizenship come at the same time that the infamous Laken Riley Act passed Congress in the final days of the Biden administration, with the support of Democrats and Republicans alike. This law enables the police to criminalize immigrants and fast-track their imprisonment in the horrid conditions of immigrant detention centers and eventual deportation. Further, Trump signaled last week that he would order raids in major cities across the United States to find and arrest undocumented immigrants in the first step of his “mass deportation” plan.
Trump’s show of strength as he reenters the White House is an attempt to present his virulently reactionary agenda in service of the wealthiest exploiters in the world as the “change” that will improve the lives of the working and middle classes. But it is a cynical attempt to divide the working class against itself, pitting immigrant workers against those born in the United States while ensuring that immigrant workers are subject to the worst conditions of exploitation and xenophobic oppression. These attacks must be met with the full force of the labor movement and the rising tide of anti-imperialist youth and workers who refuse to be complicit in the terror the United States inflicts on the working class and poor across the globe.
Asylum Prohibition and Worsening Conditions at the Border
Just hours after Trump took office, thousands of immigrants at the southern border received notifications that the CBP One app — which handles immigrants’ asylum claims for entry into the United States — had been shut down by Customs and Border Protection. Introduced under the Biden administration in 2023, the app was the only way that people could apply for U.S. asylum. Not only are people prevented from scheduling new cases, but previously scheduled asylum interviews were canceled without any recourse.
This coincided with another executive order to halt refugee admissions in the United States for at least four months. The immediate result of this policy is that thousands of people who have already been approved to resettle in the United States are now barred from entry. As Reuters reports, nearly 2,000 Afghan refugees had flights to the United States canceled, including unaccompanied minors and those targeted by the Taliban after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan.
The images at the U.S.-Mexico border are harrowing — families huddled together for comfort, looks of fear exchanged between fellow asylum seekers, and tears streaming down the faces of people who risked their lives to get to the border, only to find that their cases have suddenly disappeared into thin air.
Many of these people have been waiting months or longer for their immigration appointments; having uprooted their lives in many different countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, they have been waiting in Mexico to gain entry to the United States. As Reuters reports, one woman from Honduras waited over a year and half for her appointment, which was scheduled for Tuesday. When she logged into the CBP One app on Monday, she found that her appointment was canceled, leaving her no way to reach the United States and uncertain about her future and those of her family in Honduras who depend on her. “I’m lost,” she said. “I don’t know what to do, where to go.”
According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), nearly 280,000 people log into the app each day. Last year, nearly 1 million people had scheduled appointments. With the stroke of a pen, Trump’s executive order leaves hundreds of thousands of immigrants without any means of applying for asylum in the United States, stranded at the border with nowhere to go. It keeps families separated, thousands of miles and a border wall between them.
Shutting down any clear path to asylum, this executive order — coupled with Trump’s promise to enforce the “Remain in Mexico” program — threatens to exponentially worsen the humanitarian crisis at the border, exposing immigrants to greater risk of violence and poverty.
Militarizing the Southern Border and Criminalizing Immigrants
One of Trump’s first executive orders — which featured prominently in his inauguration speech — was to declare a state of emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border. Further fueling anti-immigrant hysteria, this effectively gives the federal and state governments carte blanche to further militarize the border, building on the work of Trump’s first term and that of his immediate predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden.
The Republican governors at the forefront of the violent anti-immigrant offensive of recent years celebrated Trump’s actions by taking measures to “secure” the border. Officials in Texas installed new buoys — infamous for entangling and drowning immigrants trying to cross the Rio Grande/Río Bravo — to keep immigrants from coming into the United States from Mexico.
The state of emergency obliges the Pentagon to lend more resources to the border. It will mean sending troops to the border, further construction of the border wall, and allocating funds and supplies for the detention and transportation of immigrants detained at the border.
The presence of the military at the border, acting alongside a militarized and reinforced border patrol, will mean the violent repression of immigrants who are suspected of having entered the United States illegally. This will put immigrants in the direct path of the violent police and armed forces, making for a more volatile scenario at the border. Already, dozens of immigrants are killed each year in encounters with CBP and the police. With Trump once again in office and wielding popular support to launch anti-immigrant policies, the stakes of such an order are even greater, taken alongside another executive order that directs the U.S. Attorney General to pursue the death penalty for immigrants who are involved in the death of law enforcement officials and other “capital crimes,” and the designation of Latin American cartels as “terrorist organizations” to justify the possibility of new military aggression in the region.
But these measures extend beyond the border. Trump signed an order that tasks the Attorney General and Homeland Security to establish “task forces” in each state to find and prosecute undocumented immigrants. This same order also penalizes so-called sanctuary states and cities that take in immigrants, revoking federal funding they receive. This means fewer resources for immigrants across the country and more money for ICE and border patrol agents to repress immigrants and keep them in a constant state of fear.
Ending Birthright Citizenship
Trump’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship marks a new escalation in the Far Right’s xenophobic targeting of immigrants. With the racist promise to “protect the meaning and value of American Citizenship,” Trump’s order would ensure that all future children born to parents without papers would not be considered citizens. This breaks over a century of precedent in the United States; legal scholars and immigrants rights organizations say that the order blatantly contradicts the Constitution, which enshrines citizenship for those born on “U.S. soil” in the 14th Amendment.
Of course, the 14th Amendment creates a nationalistic divide between immigrants and “American born” people, making one’s right to freedom of movement, the ability to work and live in the United States contingent on having been born within the artificial boundaries of the United States. This new decree, however, will make a new generation of people in the United States more precarious, lacking economic and political rights, and being subject to deportation from the time they are born.
According to the Pew Research Center, at least 4.4 million minors in the United States had an undocumented parent as of 2022; 1.4 million adults have at least one parent who came to the United States without papers. As the Migration Policy Institute reports, these children are far more likely to live below the poverty line. Revoking the rights of future children who come from immigrant families will increase these levels of poverty, criminalize young people, prevent them from accessing social services and an education, and make it that much harder to pursue a dignified life in the United States.
Fighting Trump Begins with Defending Immigrants’ Rights
We need only look to the last decade of U.S. immigration policy — from Deporter-in-Chief Obama to Trump’s border wall mania to Biden’s repression of Haitian immigrants — to know that immigration restrictions do not stop people who leave their home countries from pursuing a life in the United States. It merely makes it more dangerous. And for the immigrants who do make it across the border, it solidifies their precarious status as second- and third-class citizens.
Restricting immigration in no way addresses the many reasons people “choose” to uproot their lives to move to a country that has historically been hostile to immigrants — namely U.S. imperialist policy, which has put much of the peripheral and semi-colonial countries in incredible debt, orchestrated invasions and coups, and plundered their resources and cultures. Emboldened in his second term, Trump and sectors of the Far Right are on a mission to renew U.S. imperialist aggression on the world stage, particularly in Latin America.
In that sense it is no coincidence that Trump is launching this first round of anti-immigrant attacks while calling for the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, the annexation of Greenland, and the supposed “requisition” of the Panama Canal. Trump’s xenophobia justifies imperialist expansion and divides the vast majority of people who suffer under the yoke of capitalist exploitation and oppression on the basis of a class-obscurantist nationalism.
Trump and the Republicans are not alone in this task. Trump’s actions on his first day in office and in the next week were facilitated by the policies of the Biden administration, including the Democrats’ leap to the right on the question of immigration. The Biden administration followed in the footsteps of Trump’s first term, attempting to enact the “toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen.”
Trump attempts to make immigrants the scapegoats of the capitalist misery he oversees, blaming immigration for the high cost of goods, the housing shortage, and myriad other crises that this system has created for the working class and poor. But that responsibility lies entirely on the shoulders of the capitalist class and its governments — Democrats and Republicans alike.
Militarization and the criminalization of immigrants make the entire working class more unsafe, particularly Black and Brown people who will be the targets of increased policing and the deployment of the military. But Trump’s anti-immigration offensive is the opening salvo of a whole host of attacks that he has planned for the working class in nearly every area of life, which will make living and working conditions more precarious for millions of people.
We can’t rely on the courts to stave off the worst effects of Trump’s xenophobic agenda. Fighting back requires the coordinated action of the working class and the oppressed. The first day of the Trump administration shows that this passes necessarily through the defense of immigrants rights as a fight of the whole working class — across borders. As we wrote in a joint statement with revolutionary socialists across Latin America that form part of the Trotskyist Fraction:
It is essential to fight against the militarization of borders, for full democratic and social rights for migrants, and against all criminalization. We need to fight for the abolition of immigration agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States and the National Institute of Migration in Mexico, whose main function is to terrorize people who leave their native countries in search of a better life and leave them in a situation of greater vulnerability so that companies can exploit them further. We fight for the full rights to healthcare, education, work, food, and housing for immigrants, for equal wages for both U.S. and immigrant workers irrespective of gender, the right to automatic residence in the country of their choice, as well as all political, civil and social rights.