How the Trump Administration is quietly remaking U.S. immigration

While immigration story headlines have often been focused on arrests and the border, the Trump administration has been focused on something quieter and much larger. Since the start of President Trump's second term, there has been a coordinated strategy to fundamentally change the U.S. immigration system. The strategy has five parts. Historic federal funding for homeland security. Revoking legal status for millions already in the U.S. Reshaping the immigration courts. Using the immigration court calendar to encourage more deportations. And those headline-grabbing enforcement tactics. It's a policy of utilizing the whole government. There's a historic pipeline of money behind the Trump administration's policies. In order to understand this, I had to go talk to an expert. Doris Meissner worked for the Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton administrations. Today, she's one of the top minds of U.S. immigration policy. What this administration is doing is entirely different from anything that we've seen before. But it is also the case that a great deal has changed on the ground in the United States in the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 20-teens, in that immigration became a phenomenon that affects virtually all parts of the country. Immigration in the 1970s, 80s, even into the early 90s, was essentially a function of five places. I mean, New York, Miami, Houston, Chicago, L.A. The biggest difference is that this administration has, from the very start, adopted a whole-of-government approach. So the immigration situation in the country really has changed. And on the campaign trail, President Trump vowed to make mass deportations a top priority. It's going to be called a Trump mass deportation because we have no choice. One of the first things Trump did after being elected was pick Tom Homan, as his border czar. I don't care how long you've been here. If you're here illegally and enter this country illegally, you cheated. People want to say this mass deportation is a cruel term. And, you know, it's inhumane and it's cruel and racist. The reason we have a mass deportation is a response to mass illegal immigration, historic mass illegal immigration. To scale up enforcement to meet that mass deportation promise, congressional Republicans approved unprecedented funding last year, enough to make ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in the country. That has never happened before. Billions of dollars. And it's interesting because the amounts of money that were flowing into immigration in the 2000s were significant. Immigration enforcement had already been heavily, heavily funded, but it's now absolutely on steroids. This year, Congress approved another $70 billion for ICE and Border Patrol to fund them through With that much money flooding into the system, I had to go see where some of that was being spent. The Border Security Expo is taking place in downtown Phoenix. This is an expo where anyone that does anything related to border security comes. At events like this, private companies are ready to cash in and secure federal government contracts. From tactical gear to smart technology, there's a historic amount of investment in this field. I thank you to the vendors here for stepping up and helping us secure this nation. We can't do it without you. The men and women of Border Patrol and the men and women of ICE could not do their job without your support. But that support isn't just about gear and tech. It's about building an entire deportation infrastructure. I think that what we're going to be seeing now is a very heavy emphasis on infrastructure, building the deportation and removal transportation infrastructure that supports large, sizable numbers of returns, removals, deportations. That brings us to part two of the Trump administration's strategy, revoking legal status for people already here. Because while billions of dollars have been poured into the immigration system, the Trump administration has also been focused on the bureaucracy and rules of that system itself. Hours after being inaugurated, Trump signed an executive order slashing a program created by the Biden administration to temporarily allow 530,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to live in the U.S. The Homeland Security Department has ended temporary protected status for 10 countries, impacting another half a million people. And in 2025, the State Department canceled 85,000 visas, including more than 8,000 student visas. An NPR analysis showed that millions are stuck in this legal limbo. And the number of people being placed in immigration detention has skyrocketed. According to Brookings, about 400,000 people have been detained by ICE since the administration took power, and 2,000 people have been in detention for over a year. That's more than doubled since October. For a look at how this has been playing out on the ground, I needed to talk to an immigration attorney. So I reached out to Salvador Macias. Immigration attorneys can practice many different parts of immigration law. And he kind of has an eye on little bits of the corners of all of it. And so he has been able to see the way that this second Trump administration is approaching immigration policy. Can you explain why someone might be waiting in detention while their case plays out in immigration court? Before the summer of last year, anyone could request a bond hearing. And for those that don't know what a bond hearing is, basically a judge has to determine, are you a flight risk or are you a danger to the community? And a judge would evaluate those things. Well, as of last summer, they took that away from anyone who didn't enter with legal status, which means that a lot more people are detained. How far out are your individual hearings being scheduled? Before we would have six to seven months to prepare for an individual if they were detained. I'm seeing them apprehended within a week. So that means that we have to prepare for the equivalent of a trial in the span of a month and a half, two months. And that is not only taxing on my staff and me as an attorney, but I can only imagine what that does for the family. How many of your clients are at risk of losing status? All of them until they're citizens. I think everyone, even as a lawful permanent resident, you have the risk of losing it because that's what we're facing right now. And even the ones that are citizens, there's talk about denaturalization. So at what point can you actually exhale? Stripping away those legal protections should mean being ready to process the fallout. But that leads to part three of the Trump administration's strategy, reshaping the immigration courts. That has been made even more complicated this year as the courts themselves have changed. The Trump administration has fired over 130 immigration judges and several more have resigned and retired. Some former judges say that sends a clear message to greenlight mass deportations and get rid of the judges they think stand in their way. We are on our way to go visit Sarah Torres. Sarah Torres was an immigration judge at the Concord Immigration Court. There are about 70 immigration courts or adjudication centers across the country. This is where people go in order to fight their deportation cases. Now it is a little complicated because although they are called immigration courts, they are not like the judiciary branch courts that we all know about as one of the three branches of government. Immigration courts are housed in the Justice Department, which means it is under direct authority of the President of the United States. I'm Sarah Torres. I am 44 years old. I am a former immigration judge. Torres was brought on as an immigration judge at the Justice Department in spring of 2024. She was terminated in April 2026. You could feel a shift immediately because it was either the day of or the day after the inauguration, people in leadership were cut. And then very quickly, memos started to come out. There was at least one that came out reminding judges of our responsibility to be impartial. It was a not-so-subtle way of saying, you know, don't favor the respondents, essentially. Other Justice Department memos encouraged judges to not hold asylum hearings if they didn't think the application on paper was enough. Another criticized the hiring decisions made by the Biden administration. But the changes weren't just on paper. Why do you think you were terminated? I won't try to guess why I was terminated. What I will say is there were patterns that I saw in people who were terminated before me. In fact, an NPR investigation of the first 70 judges fired by the Trump administration found that judges with backgrounds defending immigrants and no prior work history at DHS made up about 44% of the terminations, more than double the share of those who had only prior work history at the Department of Homeland Security. Some have been left wondering if their firings were retribution for the decisions they made on the bench. This particular administration and Department of Justice has not only politicized our immigration courts, but has weaponized our immigration courts. Amina Khan was the assistant chief immigration judge in Manhattan's 26th Federal Plaza. She, along with six judges she supervised, were all fired the same day in December. What this agency has done by the firing is they've placed judges in a position where they're now making decisions with the thought of, well, if I don't rule in this way, I may lose my job. That should never take place in any judicial system. What you end up having is a system whereby the judges are rubber stamping the administration's decisions. These are not decisions that are being rendered by the court. I reached out to the DOJ about this, and they told me, DOJ doesn't target or prioritize immigration judges for any personnel decision one way or the other based on prior experience. But as sitting judges have been terminated and others resigned, the administration has been starting to rehire for the roles. To that end, they've been running ads looking not for immigration judges, but for what they're calling deportation judges. Judges are not deportation judges. We are immigration judges. We do not, going into a hearing, have a determination that this individual will be removed. We go in with the understanding that we are a neutral arbiter, and we will allow the individual to have their day in court. The Trump administration says they're reestablishing an immigration judge court that is dedicated to restoring the rule of law. But these terminations also come at a time when the administration has closed the main court in San Francisco, one of the largest courts in the country. It will impact thousands of immigrants across the Bay Area. The federal government is officially closing San Francisco's 100 Montgomery Street immigration court. That courtroom is now expected to go dark for good in about a year. They say the court closure is to save money. But at the same time, the system is facing a historic backlog of cases. And that brings us to the fourth pillar of the Trump administration's strategy, reducing the capacity of immigration courts. Over the past year and a half, as a part of its broader immigration policy agenda, the Trump administration has really reshaped these immigration courts. I am outside of the Concord immigration court in Concord, California. This is an immigration court that opened in January of 2024 by the Biden administration. And it opened with the goal of having 21 immigration judges. At the time, the only immigration courts in this area were the one in San Francisco and the one in Sacramento. And so this was supposed to alleviate some of that backlog. But having 21 judges in this building never really came to fruition. And they are preparing to get 100,000 more cases from the San Francisco court, which is expected to close by the end of this year. They've already stopped hearing cases there and cases are being moved over to this court. When you create a court that has sort of like a conveyor belt of processing hearings, no one is afforded the justice at all. And the messaging from this administration is, speed it up, speed it up, speed it up. Now, how do you speed it up? By rubber stamping decisions? Or do you afford individuals their day in court? With fewer judges and courts to hear them, immigrants are seeing their cases pushed back as far as the year 2030. And many of these immigrants have already waited years for their chance to make a case before a judge. Lawyers say the delays make their clients more vulnerable to arrests and deportations. Finally, part five of Trump's immigration strategy, those headline-grabbing enforcement actions. While delays and detentions can pressure families into self-deporting, aggressive enforcement actions are having the same effect, especially as arrests began to happen inside courthouses, a place immigrants are legally required to appear. What I saw, which I had never seen in my 15 years on the bench, was that our court space, our hallways and our courtrooms, were turned into a battleground. There was an incident that occurred where a young woman, distraught because her husband and father of her children had been arrested, and she interacted with one of the ICE officers, and she was pushed against the wall into the ground. Well, when she hit the ground, that sound reverberated. You could hear it, and you could hear the anguish of individuals and then the cries of their children. Although I may have thought initially that this administration didn't want transparency, I was quickly disabused of that notion because I knew that they did, and I knew that there was a messaging that was going out to the communities. And that messaging was, if you come to court, you risk getting arrested. And so individuals that were coming to court were now being placed into a catch-22 situation. That catch-22 is come to court and be arrested, or skip court, and be issued a final order for deportation. According to an NPR analysis, the number of these orders, called in absentia orders, increased at around the time arrests in courts began last summer. And these new tactics didn't just stay in the courts. Crowds protesting the immigration crackdown in Minnesota have become a daily occurrence. ICE raids happening in several locations across LA. ICE is coming back to Boston to make more arrests. Protesters clashing with federal agents in Chicago as ICE steps up President Trump's immigration crackdown. The administration, including new DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen, justifies their approach by saying that they are enforcing the laws already on the books. We're a nation of laws. If ICE can't do their job, then who's supposed to be getting the legals out? That's what they are stood up to do. That's what Congress passed and gave them the authority and created the agency to do. In fact, it's been two decades since Congress tackled significant immigration reform, leaving much of immigration policy and enforcement in the hands of the executive branch. What Trump is doing is an entirely extreme, extreme version of what we've seen now for 30 years, which is that the Congress is what's been missing in action. Our immigration laws are completely out of date with who we are as a country and what we need. And so the executive branch has had to resort to tools. We're seeing them now on steroids, but it's preceded by executive branch actions going back and back and back because the Congress has forced an immigration system to be practiced that simply does not align with our economy, our demographics, our future needs. Lawmakers have been deadlocked for years as control of Congress shifts back and forth between parties, each gaining control with only a narrow margin, and there seems to be little appetite for bipartisan consensus. Recently, funding for ICE and Border Patrol came in front of Congress again, and Republicans resorted to a tactic called reconciliation to pass complete funding for three years without any support from Democrats. On this vote, the yeas are 214, the nays are 212. The bill is passed. President Donald Trump ran his campaign on a promise of limiting illegal immigration to the country, but his administration's policy has been increasingly focused on limiting and removing legal immigrants. Officials have reworked the immigration courts, dramatically changed legal pathways, canceled visas, slowed down court hearings, expanded enforcement agencies, and made the bureaucratic system so burdensome that it has encouraged many to self-deport. I reached out to the White House for a statement on this. They wrote back and said that President Trump's top priority is doing what's best for the American people, and that includes, quote, stopping aliens from exploiting and abusing our immigration system. Ultimately, though, this highlights a fundamental tension of the American immigration system. While the Trump administration says it's simply enforcing laws passed by Congress, policy experts like Doris Meissner argue that these measures by the executive branch are a direct result of a failure of Congress to pass new legislation that brings the country's immigration systems up to date. Without updated laws from Congress, the system remains exposed to dramatic shifts in policy as we swing from one presidential administration to the next.