Hamed Aleaziz
The writer covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy in the US
Former president Donald Trump, who is seeking re-election on the same hard line against unauthorised immigrants that helped carry him to power in 2016, has said he is not opposed to legal immigration into the United States. But remarks this week by the former president and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, signal that a second Trump administration would again aim to curb the legal channels that allow people to enter the country or obtain protection from deportation once inside its borders.
Trump said he would revoke a programme that allows tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants to live in the country legally. The statement came as Trump has disparaged a Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, and falsely accused people there of killing and eating pets. At the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday, Vance suggested that a Trump White House would also eliminate a programme that allows immigrants who entered the country illegally to apply for asylum once they are in immigration proceedings in the United States. The programme allows migrants to use an app to secure legal status “at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand,” Vance said.
Biden administration officials and immigration lawyers argue that the initiatives help provide orderly pathways into the country at a time when global migration has hit record high levels and US immigration officers have grappled with large numbers of people arriving at the nation’s southern border.
Trump has not drawn distinctions between legal and illegal immigration as he pledges to revive, expand and toughen some of the hard-line policies he pursued while he was in the White House. He has also said he plans to reinstate a ban on travellers from some countries.
He and his allies argue that the legal immigration programmes created by the Biden administration are being abused and allow immigrants into the country who would otherwise be turned away. In an email, Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, defended Trump’s stance, saying the initiative that has given at least 200,000 Haitians legal status since 2010 — known as the Temporary Protected Status — had run its course.
The campaign pledges are a continuation of the policies that Trump tried to enact while in office. At the time, Trump administration officials tended to use executive orders and policy memos to make administrative changes, but their efforts were often blocked by the courts.
Trump’s allies have suggested they have learned lessons about how to use the regulatory process to enact those moves instead. Some federal judges might also be more receptive to such actions in the wake of several cases that have been decided by conservative-leaning courts and have altered precedent case law since Trump left office.
During Trump’s presidency, his administration banned travel from some countries, most with Muslim-majority populations; reduced the number of people allowed into the United States as refugees; narrowed legal paths to asylum; and tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, or DACA, which provides temporary relief from deportation for immigrants brought into the country illegally as children.
Trump administration officials also “made all kinds of small and low-level changes to increase vetting, increase denials and slow immigration,” said Julia Gelatt, an associate director at the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank. Temporary visa and green card applicants, for example, were asked to come in for more interviews and repeatedly photographed.
Trump and his allies see the hard-line stance on immigration as a winning issue in November, as more Americans, including many Democrats and Latinos, support restrictive measures on immigration, including mass deportations.
As the number of crossings reached records during the first three years of Biden’s tenure, his administration extended temporary protected status to more migrants, started allowing migrants to make appointments at border crossings through an app known as CBP One. They also began parole processes allowing Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to lawfully enter the country on commercial flights if they had financial sponsors.
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