The administration has implemented a key strategy significantly to increase arrests, detention and deportation along unauthorized persons periods.  It will, in some, overcome one basic barrier, which is that while crossing the border in an unauthorized way is a misdemeanor, being in the country while they’re not authorized this is civil violation. Being a civil violation there is no authority to detain an individual, much less to impose a court judgment of a fine or jail time.

Alien Registration Act

One February 25, the administration issued a requirement that all aliens who a present in the United States without a visa register with the State Department. This is designed to make being in the U.S. a misdeameanor unless one registers.  (Go here.) And if one registers DHS can find them.

The registration for (AR-2) here which appears to be the one used asks for name at time of entry, other names used, date of first arrival, address, years lived in the United States, date of birth, citizenship/Nationality, usual occupation, fingerprint, gender, present occupation, and marital status. (Go here.)

The American Immigration Council summarizes the language in law:

8 U.S.C. section 1302, codified via the Alien Registration Act of 1940, requires all noncitizens over the age of 14 who have not already registered, and who are in the U.S. for more than 30 days, to register with the federal government within 30 days of their arrival. \

8 U.S.C. sections 1306(a) Under section 1306(a), any noncitizen who “willfully fails” to register with the government (or the parent of any noncitizen under 14 who fails to do so) after 30 days is guilty of a federal misdemeanor crime. If charged and convicted, it allows the noncitizen (or parent) to be sentenced to up to six months in jail and/or fined up to $1,000. Any adult who fails to carry proof of registration can be charged with a misdemeanor and fined up to $100.

Part 6: Most Americans hold contradictory feelings and expectations about immigration. This perpetuates paralysis and instability in immigration politics.

I have read many opinion polls on immigration and spoken with people who self-describe as inclusivist or restrictionist. Many, if not most, Americans have conflicting feelings and expectations about immigration. These conflicts may not be spoken or even self-acknowledged. Many people appear to feel as follows: “I like immigrants, but not so many.”

An individual’s thoughts about immigrants and immigration policy arise from a sponge-like absorption of family, workplace, neighborhood, customer and patient service, and other encounters, past and present. It cannot be overemphasized that the entire political class in the United States, with the exception of radical restrictionists, has failed to stimulate any open and thoughtful discussion of immigration. The stereotype-drenched style of public discourse on immigration leaves the country wide open to exploitative behaviors, such as presidents running immigration policy by fiat.

At this point, very early in the Trump administration, there has yet to arise an articulate defense of an inclusivist vision of immigration, or simply a defense of the status quo.

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Part 5: Nobody, including the Trump administration, can prove whether immigration overall helps or hurts American workers.

My guess is that it generally helps, sometimes spectacularly so, while in other cases it hurts. A summary figure is impossible because of the complexity and adaptability of the American workplace and workforce.

What most of us may probably want, when we think about it, is for foreign workers to complement U.S.-born workers and, by doing so, create jobs for all workers. For example, bringing in a noted chef from Istanbul might enable you to launch a successful Turkish restaurant, or an Indian medical doctor might allow a community health center to stay open on weekends.

Trump’s mass deportation campaign is essentially challenging home builders to pay higher wages to attract U.S.-born workers—and to do so virtually overnight. Sometimes technology can replace foreign workers. But while using robots to replace roofers is conceptually feasible, it cannot happen until robots can carry heavier payloads.

The scenario we want to avoid is one in which employers develop a business model that depends on exploiting workers, especially those who are unauthorized, lack formal skills, or have little English proficiency.

Part 4: The crisis at the southern border reflects a global crisis of how to implement a convention created in 1951.

The UN Convention on Refugees, established in 1951, sets international standards for protecting individuals fleeing persecution. It defines a refugee as a person who, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, is unable or unwilling to return home. The Convention outlines refugees’ rights, including access to asylum, education, and employment, and prohibits forcible return.

A key provision in the Convention, and since 1980 in American law, is that countries must in good faith respond to requests for asylum by anyone standing on their soil. This, of course, creates an enormous incentive to cross borders, even multiple borders, to reach target countries such as the United States. Many who cross a border to claim asylum have a mix of persecution, economic distress, climate distress, and societal collapse issues, which asylum officers and courts must sort out. Huge case backlogs exist,

These standards have not been rewritten in over seven decades, which have seen the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979–1989, 6 million refugees), the breakup of Yugoslavia (1991–1999, 4 million), the Rwandan Genocide (1994, 2 million), the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (4 million), the Ukraine War (8 million), and extreme discord within countries including Myanmar, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and South Sudan (perhaps 25 million). Receiving countries have used complicated protocols to accept, at least temporarily, and resolve inflows.

Countries have been trying to impose greater controls over the volume of inflows and to change how they handle those who gain entry. The bipartisan Senate bill of early 2024, which Trump shot down, modestly embraced the following strategies for asylum control. Trump II has been far more aggressive:

• Shut down most or all asylum programs, notwithstanding commitments made to United Nations conventions and their own laws.
• Fast-track reviews, which for the United States involves adjudications immune from judicial review, plus vastly increasing the capacity of immigration courts. The executive branch and Congress have significantly failed to increase immigration court capacity as asylum applications have risen over the past decade.
• Push asylum reviews away from borders and into remote locations. The United Kingdom’s Conservative Party sought to fly asylum applicants to Rwanda. The Trump administration is trying to reintroduce Stay in Mexico.
• Deportation to cooperating countries—the administration has worked out agreements with several Latin American countries to receive non-nationals.

It is noteworthy that neither the European Union nor the United States has made any overt move to withdraw from the UN Convention or rewrite its standards. The Trump administration may do so.

Part 3: Humanitarian programs to protect persons fleeing from distress were manipulated by Biden. Trump is destroying them.

Prior to the Biden administration, we admitted for permanent residence and potential naturalization roughly one million persons a year. During the Biden years, total influx averaged close to three million a year. Trump is engaged in throwing many of these recent arrivals out.

Humanitarian programs include one for refugees. This program is coordinated with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which oversees the care and protection of over 30 million persons who have fled their country. The UNHCR, American embassies, and nonprofit organizations arrange for individuals to be granted refugee status and flown to the United States. Consistent with the generally parsimonious character of humanitarian programs, refugees entering the United States receive a small subsidy for a few months and must repay the cost of their flight to the United States. By law, the executive branch sets a maximum cap on the number of admissions per year. The Biden administration set it high at 125,000 a year. The Trump administration, during his first term and now his second term, appears intent on destroying the program outright.

Another humanitarian program leading to eventual citizenship is asylum. What distinguishes an asylum case from a refugee case is that for asylum, the individual must be on American soil to apply. (Once a refugee enters the United States, their legal status is essentially the same as an asylee’s.) Persons are eligible to apply for asylum regardless of the nature of their arrival and legal status. This program has no cap. During the last years of the first Trump administration and the first years of the Biden administration, asylum applications increased—alarmingly so during the Biden years.

Biden was never candid with the public about his rerouting of asylum seekers into other ways to enter the United States. He used two temporary stay programs—humanitarian parole and temporary protected status—to shepherd hundreds of thousands of persons into the United States. He did this to reduce pressure on the southern border. These programs hit national media due to the large number of Haitians who appeared in Springfield, Ohio, and Latin Americans, notably Venezuelans, in New York City. In many localities across the country, the surge of temporary authorizations burdened public shelter and local education systems, without federal financial help.

It is no surprise that the second Trump administration is systematically dismantling these temporary humanitarian programs. The beneficiaries are well known in federal databases. Many of them will likely voluntarily self-deport. But many will be deported by ICE. Given that these programs involve sponsoring families and organizations, public outcry may be strong. Three Republican Congressmen from the Miami area quickly spoke out against cancellations.

Part 2: Trump II is making policy by fiat, just as Obama, Biden, and Trump I wrote immigration law from the White House.

When changes to immigration policy are made by White House fiat, there is no transparent debate, and pros and cons are buried in the abstruse language of lawsuits.

Obama used this strategy in 2012 when he issued an executive memorandum to create Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This program protects from deportation and provides work authorization for persons who arrived in the United States unauthorized and as young children. A lawsuit to kill the provision by nine red-state attorneys general has been working its way through the courts, and I expect that the Trump administration will no longer defend DACA. This will put about 600,000 persons, well known in government databases, at risk of deportation.

The first Trump administration used the pretense of the COVID pandemic to invoke a little-known provision in law to restrict border entry.

Biden issued an immigration reform bill shortly after coming into office but said little about it. He used executive action to launch a tidal wave of temporary authorizations, using provisions in law designed for relatively precise applications (humanitarian parole and temporary protected status). JD Vance and other Republicans referred to Biden’s program as illegal because they considered his use of these provisions unconstitutional.

In the first few days of his second administration, Trump abruptly ceased all asylum proceedings on the southern border and stopped the refugee program. Trump is, in effect, rewriting the nation’s immigration law wholesale. It is noteworthy that he has not yet called for a new, comprehensive immigration law by Congress, which some Republican senators, such as Tom Cotton, have shown interest in.

It is not that Congress has not tried to assert its role. Two major immigration reform legislative initiatives since 2000 failed. When George W. Bush was re-elected president in 2004 with significant Hispanic support, he saw an opening for an immigration overhaul and a signature second-term achievement. He began pressing for action in 2006 in an Oval Office address.

The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 was a bipartisan effort led by Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain. Key features of the bill included a path to legalization for many undocumented immigrants; increases in legal immigration; a temporary guest worker program; and enhanced enforcement measures, including a southern border fence. The bill ultimately failed to overcome a filibuster led by right-wing Republicans.

The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 was developed by a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” in the Senate, including Republicans John McCain, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham, and Democrats Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, and Michael Bennet. The bill proposed increasing border security with additional fencing, surveillance drones, and 20,000 more Border Patrol agents; a 13-year path to citizenship for most undocumented immigrants; expanded opportunities for highly educated immigrants; a guest worker program for lower-skilled agricultural workers; and mandatory use of E-Verify for all employers. The bill passed the Senate with 68 votes, including support from 14 Republicans and all Democrats. However, it failed in the House of Representatives when Speaker John Boehner refused to bring it up for a vote.

Both initiatives failed due to intense opposition from right-wing Republicans, despite initial bipartisan support and, in the case of the 2013 bill, strong Senate approval. In retrospect, if either the 2007 or 2013 immigration bill had passed, we would have today a far more orderly and legitimate system of immigration.

Senator Tom Cotton is probably the most articulate Republican politician on the topic of a new comprehensive immigration law. It remains to be seen if President Trump decides to cede his self-arrogated power to a new effort by the Senate.

Part 1: Trump’s immigration policy is part of a wholesale abandonment of an Enlightenment-inspired commitment to global human rights and human welfare.

The Trump administration is abandoning our commitment to help advance human capabilities throughout the world. Call this commitment a genuine gesture or a form of imperialism, but it has been part of American political culture and of both parties since World War II.

The globe is interconnected; the actions of countries can threaten the life chances of persons anywhere, such as driving persons to flee or creating mass expulsions. What happens in Ukraine or the Democratic Republic of Congo eventually affects us. But the case for our paying attention to persons far from our borders rests more on Western Enlightenment ideology, namely the belief that all persons have a right to sustenance, protection of life, and advocacy for human capabilities.

A global compact for recognizing persons fleeing their country was created by the United Nations. The main instrument is a 1951 convention on refugee rights. Key provisions of the convention were expressly incorporated into American law by the Refugee Act of 1980.

Putting this history into broader context starts with post-WWII mass expulsions, mostly Germans living in Eastern Europe. Perhaps it is no coincidence that arising out of post-war Europe, especially Eastern Europe, were human rights concepts that led to international agreements on genocide (1948), human rights (1948), and later in the Helsinki Accords of 1975.

Our domestic policies matched these agreements: the creation of the Agency for International Development and the Peace Corps in 1961; Civil Rights legislation; and the Immigration and Nationality Act (or Hart-Celler Act) of 1965. These actions served as an implicit declaration of commitment by the United States to global standards of human rights and welfare.