President-elect Trump has promised sweeping changes to immigration policy under his new administration starting on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025.
The following article was published in the January - February 2025 issue of NewsNotes.
Some of the second Trump Administration’s proposed immigration policies risk severe consequences, including the separation of families and the emotional and physical trauma for immigrants and their families. These policies also stand to hurt the nation’s workforce and economy.
Below is an inexhaustive list of policies proposed by the incoming administration that stand to cause significant harm.
Elimination of DACA
In the first year of his first term, President Trump announced an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program (also known as DACA.) The program offered employment authorizations protections against deportation for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children and who passed thorough background checks. The Supreme Court blocked President Trump’s effort to end DACA at the time, but left open the possibility that the program could be ended if other legal justifications were offered. Since then, President Trump appointed two new Supreme Court justices.
DACA was established by executive order by President Obama due to Congress’ decades-long failure to pass an alternative solution into law. Congress has yet to codify any of the protections DACA offers, and the legality of the program is now being litigated in the court system.
If President Trump succeeds at ending the DACA program, over half a million Dreamers would no longer be protected from deportation. The average Dreamer arrived on U.S. soil at seven years old and knows no other country as home. These individuals willingly supplied their names, addresses, and personal information when they joined the program and are therefore easy targets should deportation protections expire.
DACA recipients came to the United States as undocumented children, but enough years have passed that, as a group, they are parents to over 250,000 U.S. citizens, contribute roughly $420 billion to the GDP, and $12.3 billion in taxes to Social Security and Medicare.
Restrictions on humanitarian protections
President-elect Trump expressed his intention to end Temporary Protection Status (TPS) for certain countries and greatly reduce or even zero-out the number of refugees and asylees admissions to the United States. Temporary Protected Status is a designation the executive branch can make for migrants coming from countries that are too dangerous for repatriation. Though not a pathway to citizenship, TPS allows immigrants to live and work in the United States legally, if temporarily. All TPS designations expire after two years, guaranteeing President Trump the chance not to renew these protections. Among the 17 countries currently on the TPS list, Trump named Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela as countries for which he would not extend TPS. Haiti, in particular, poses a severe threat to the lives of those forced to return.
For those currently living in dangerous countries, would-be immigrants have the chance to apply for Humanitarian Parole. For example, Afghans and Ukrainians both received HP en masse after the Taliban takeover and the Russian invasion. Humanitarian Parole is usually limited to a year and subject to renewal.
The number of U.S. residents currently protected against deportation for humanitarian reasons subject to the president’s discretion amounts to 2.7 million.
Reinstatement of “public charge” policy
Current immigration law, passed in 1882, allows the president to set policy that would prevent persons who could pose a “public charge” from entering the country. While this has been generally understood to bar those who would be eligible for direct cash benefits, President Trump in his first term expanded the definition to include individuals in households that have received noncash assistance such as Medicaid and children’s health programs.
Reinstatement of President Trump’s 2019 policy would result in an undue burden on families with mixed immigration statuses—comprised of citizens and noncitizens. These families will face the choice of accessing public benefits at the risk of creating grounds for a case of inadmissibility on “public charge” grounds. Nationwide, over 13.5 million Medicaid and CHIP enrollees, including 7.6 million children, live in a household with at least one noncitizen.
Elimination of birthright citizenship
President-elect Trump affirmed in an NBC interview after his 2024 election win his intention to end birthright citizenship via executive order, allowing him to deport people currently recognized as U.S. citizens. While birthright citizenship was enshrined in a constitutional amendment over a century ago, this challenge to the law is novel territory, and the outcome of litigation far from certain. President Trump may be vindicated by the Supreme Court judges, a third of whom he appointed. Ending birthright citizenship will allow the government to revoke rights afforded to people born on U.S. soil and has the potential to leave individuals stateless.
Reinstatement of “Remain in Mexico”
The first Trump administration implemented the “Migration Protection Policy” in 2019, which required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting immigration court hearings. The policy left asylum seekers vulnerable to organized crime that preys on desperate people through kidnapping, extortion, and sexual violence.
President-elect Trump has said he will reinstate Remain in Mexico and as a policy that was implemented last term, it will be relatively easy to re-implement.
Mass deportation
President-elect Trump promised to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to carry out mass deportations of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. President Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan, who oversaw Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the first Trump administration, assured the public this is not mere rhetoric.
“We’re going to start right here in Chicago,” Homan said in remarks at a holiday party hosted by donors in Illinois on Dec. 11. Homan has endorsed the detention or separation of families with U.S. citizen children, aggressive enforcement of immigration laws in sanctuary cities, prosecution of officials who “knowingly harbor” undocumented immigrants, and the withholding of federal funds from states that refuse to cooperate.
Homan has also proposed deputizing local and military forces to arrest undocumented immigrants, as well as using military bases to detain them and military planes to transport them out of the country. He characterized such operations as a years-long project with “no price tag.”
The United States has never deported more than half a million people in a year, and it is hard to imagine what mass deportation would entail. What is known is that mass deportation entails mass detentions. The total capacity of current immigration detention facilities in the United States (when empty) does not amount to more than two million. The federal government would need to build and establish detention centers and hire agents to process and deport large numbers of people. A conservative estimate of the cost of a largescale deportation program by the American Immigration Council (AIC) is $350 billion dollars—more than what the U.S. government spent on veterans in 2023.
Mass deportation would negatively affect not only those deported but also the communities they leave behind. Entire industries would be hobbled by labor shortages, particularly agriculture, where an estimated 50 percent of farm laborers are undocumented.
Ending sanctuaries
Anonymous sources told major news outlets that President Trump plans to revoke the longstanding policy of restricting arrest of undocumented immigrants at “sensitive locations” including schools, hospitals and places of worship, as part of his mass deportation plans.
Such a change in policy will communicate the message that no place is safe. While the number of apprehensions in sanctuary spaces are likely to be small, the psychological effect of such a policy is likely to be chilling.
In response to a flood of questions from Catholic institutions, the USCCB issued a three page explanation of current policy and constitutional rights as of January 2, 2025, with the caveat that it would be updated in the event of any changes and made available at www.usccb.org/migrationpolicy.
Ten Christian leaders in Arizona—including Catholic Bishops Edward Weisenburger of Tucson and John Dolan of Phoenix—spoke out against revoking the sensitive locations policy in an op-ed column published in the Arizona Republic on December 28, 2024.
“We find it unacceptable that undocumented persons might be intimidated from going to a church and thereby exercising their right to the practice of religion. We also assert that the disruption of any religious gathering for deportation purposes is equally an assault on our own right to the free exercise of our religion. We also acknowledge that the stability of our society is under grave threat when undocumented persons are too fearful to seek necessary health care for themselves or their children, access basic education or contact law enforcement when being victimized or observing criminal activity. We stand in solidarity with members of federal agencies, state agencies and local law enforcement personnel who may choose not to participate in deportation raids deemed unjust by their conscience. In accord with long-standing humanitarian principles, these conscientious objectors must be respected.”
Faith in action
Use these resources from the USCCB:
- Catholic Social Teaching on Immigration Parish Discussion Guide https://mogc.info/CST-I
- Catholic Elements of Immigration Reform https://mogc.info/CEIR
Photo of border wall razor wire courtesy of Markus Spiske via Unsplash.