Trump’s plans, including mass deportation and illegal immigration curbs, have been the subject of much debate as opponents and supporters await his actions starting Monday after he is sworn into office.
The American Civil Liberties Union vowed to target Trump and his forthcoming policies, having sued numerous times in his first term.
The Washington Examiner spoke with four officials personally involved in crafting homeland security policies on the transition team and in the new administration who divulged where Trump will strike first.
What to expect week one
- Restart Remain in Mexico (formerly the Department of Homeland Security’s Migrant Protection Protocols)
MPP was announced in 2018 and was implemented across the southern border in 2019. It allows Border Patrol agents who arrest illegal immigrants, as well as Customs and Border Protection officers at ports of entry, to return asylum-seekers to Mexico while they go through legal proceedings rather than releasing them into the United States to await hearings, which are normally years down the road.
The program was rolled out as a growing number of immigrant families arrived at the southern border in 2019, and attempts to meter how many people could apply for asylum at ports of entry per day and illegal crossings rose dramatically. Amid the surge, the government was unable to hear and decide initial credible fear claims in the 20-day limit that it is allowed to detain families in immigration custody, forcing them to release people into the country.
President Joe Biden rescinded it in January 2021, at which time 67,000 people were enrolled and made to wait in Mexico. Under the change, asylum-seekers who arrived anywhere along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border would be turned around and sent south of the border rather than released into the U.S. to navigate the court system for several years.
At a campaign rally in Wisconsin last September, Trump vowed, “On Day One of my new administration … I will restore Remain in Mexico.”
“Remain in Mexico is on the table. I believe it is one of the executive orders,” the first source familiar with the plans wrote in a message late this week.
However, behind the scenes, this one matter could take some time for U.S. and Mexican negotiators to come to a deal, sources said. While Trump is expected to cite Remain in Mexico in his executive order, action resulting from it is not likely to start immediately.
- ‘Largest-ever’ deportation operation
Biden halted deportations for 100 days after taking office in 2021 but was ultimately blocked in court, but Trump wants to exacerbate them and blow past historic norms when he moves into the White House on Monday. Expect a flashy executive action vowing to deport illegal immigrants.
To carry out a mass deportation the likes of which the nation has never seen before, Trump will have to build strong allies in Congress. Trump’s first-term White House adviser, Stephen Miller, who he is taking with him back to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. next week, said it would be among his top immigration priorities after taking his oath.
“The moment that President Trump puts his hand on that Bible and takes the oath of office, as he has said, the occupation ends. Liberation day begins,” Miller said. “He will immediately sign executive orders sealing the border shut, beginning the largest deportation operation in American history, finding the criminal gangs, rapists, drug dealers, and monsters that have murdered our citizens and sending them home.”
“Border czar,” Tom Homan told the Washington Examiner that these deportations would not start at random worksites in Washington, as NBC News said in a report earlier this month, but rather commence nationwide, all at once.
ICE officers who make the arrests have been at work for weeks since Trump won, determining who fits the bill for arrest, according to multiple sources familiar with the planning process.
Now, 1.4 million illegal immigrants have been ordered deported. However, they have not been picked up by ICE and removed from the country. That group will be a priority for Trump, as well as anyone with an estimated 700,000 illegal immigrants with a criminal background, including those without convictions.
- Expand detention facilities to make room for interior arrests
Trump’s transition team is zeroing in on how to carry out his promised, largest-ever illegal immigrant deportation plan, but major challenges stand in the way, namely making those arrests and detaining those individuals while they go before immigration judges who ultimately decide if they will be deported.
“Detention is going to be a key with deportations. Space will determine numbers. I would propose to use the existing ‘processing’ tent facilities as detention centers,” said a second source familiar with the plans. “Remember that not all illegals will go through the entire process of removal by a judge. Many will be removed with other authorities like expedited removal, voluntary return etc.”
However, do not expect an executive order on detention on Day One or any day. If one is issued, the same official said, it would only be to reinforce the law and policy.
“I don’t believe there is an ‘EO’ on detention. There is nothing there to write an executive order about. Detention needs to be increased, and that is a contracting issue. I believe we will see northward of 50,000 beds within the first 6 months,” said the first official.
As of last month, ICE has space for roughly 41,000 people but is shooting to increase that to 50,000 by using discretionary funds to cover the costs.
“It is a funding issue. Some money can be diverted as long as it was not congressionally appropriated for something else. However, the brunt of it will have to be voted on,” said the first official.
- Build the border wall again
Come next week, Trump will demand the resources necessary to finish the border wall through the National Emergency Act, but putting it in an executive order is still up in the air only because it may not be necessary, according to three officials.
The 2017 executive order on a wall did not coerce a GOP-led House and Senate into giving Trump the billions of dollars he requested, and this time, the White House knows how to work a deal better than it did eight years ago.
However, times have changed since 2017. Even Democrats crossed the line to support a conservative bill, the Laken Riley Act, last week — a show that some Democrats may even be willing to sign a check to better guard the nation’s borders.
The Trump administration promised to immediately construct a comprehensive physical wall between the United States and Mexico as part of its executive actions in 2017 to stop illegal immigration. Many complications, including multiple lawsuits, poor planning, challenges obtaining private land, and a cash flow shortage, kept that plan from becoming a reality.
In the final days before the 2020 presidential election, the Washington Examiner toured all four southern border states to see just how many projects had been completed with the $15 billion in funding that the White House acquired through legitimate and backdoor means.
Roughly 700 miles of the 2,000-mile border had some sort of wall when Trump took office, and when he left, he had installed 400 miles of barrier, including large portions that replaced short and shoddy rusting barriers.
However, an additional 300 miles of funded border barrier were not completed by the time he left office, and just 740 miles of the entire border remain walled off as of January 2025, leaving a significant portion open and possibly setting up a fight to get billions of dollars to finish the 8-year-old project.
Biden shut down all wall construction after taking office in 2021, leaving billions of dollars worth of 18- and 30-foot steel beams rusting away at construction sites up and down the border.
- Shutter the CBP One app
Trump will immediately make good on his promise to do away with the Biden administration’s CBP One app, which allows immigrants to apply for admission to the country through programs that circumvent normal means.
“CBP one app is gone day one,” said the first official.
The Biden-Harris administration added two functions to the app in early 2023 that allowed immigrants to apply from outside the country for admission or to meet with a U.S. customs officer. The move was intended to give immigrants a way to seek admission without illegally coming over the southern border between ports of entry, but Republicans have criticized it as a backdoor to admit hundreds of thousands of people into the country in less than two years.
The CBP One app permits immigrants from four countries, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, to apply to enter the U.S. on parole, which allows an individual to remain for two years and receive a work permit. Recipients must have a sponsor in the U.S. and pay for their international commercial flight. Since the process was fully rolled out in January 2023, more than half a million people have been admitted.
The app’s second function allows immigrants in Mexico to schedule an appointment at a land port of entry on the southern border to meet with U.S. customs officers. Up to 1,450 appointments can be scheduled daily, for a total of more than 43,000 per month. Immigrants who schedule appointments wait months to be seen at one of eight ports of entry used for appointments and are overwhelmingly admitted.
“Termination of the program could threaten that deal, limiting the ability of the U.S. to address migration from countries such as Venezuela which limit deportation flights,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council in Washington, in a previous story.
- End birthright citizenship for would-be Americans
Trump vowed in a recent interview with Kristen Welker of NBC News’s Meet the Press to walk back the 14th Amendment, which automatically gives any person born on U.S. soil American citizenship.
“If we can, through executive action. I was going to do it through executive action [during the first term], but then we had to fix COVID first, to be honest with you. We have to end it. It’s ridiculous,” Trump.
However, the fight against birthright citizenship may not be as easy or straightforward as expected, given that it was a matter Trump attempted and did not succeed at tackling during his first term in office.
In October 2018, the then-president insisted that birthright citizenship “will be ended one way or the other,” opening the door for congressional action one day after then-House Speaker Paul Ryan said that doing so by executive action was unconstitutional.
Trump did not answer Welker’s follow-up questions about the “inevitable” legal challenges.
“We have to get rid of this system. It’s killing our country,” Trump finished.
- Returning to the term “illegal alien” instead of “undocumented immigrant”
One of the first actions that Trump will put in writing, though not expected on Day One, is rescinding the Biden administration’s ban on the term “illegal alien,” a move that he views as undoing the Biden administration’s politically correct immigration language to talk about illegal immigrants.
Regardless of when the order or internal memo at the Department of Homeland Security comes through, federal police are not expected to continue by the Biden standard past Monday.
“I don’t see anyone at [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] or [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] using any euphemisms for illegal aliens after Jan. 20,” the official said.
- Sanctions against countries that won’t take back deportable citizens
A third source involved in transition conversations regarding homeland security policy said sanctions are not a matter of if but when and how many.
“Expect that to be something big because there are those countries that are going to say, ‘Nope, we’re not taking our people back,’” the official said. “There can be sanctions, State Department sanctions. If you don’t take back people from your country of origin.”
Cuba, a fourth official said, will be a definite recipient of sanctions come Monday.
Venezuela will have a period of days to weeks to decide if it will allow the Trump administration to send back its own citizens.
“As soon as ICE has a handful or more of Tren de Aragua gangsters in custody with removal orders,” the Venezuelan government will have a serious decision to make, according to the fourth official. One of the gang’s members was convicted in the rape and murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley last February.
Texas has already rounded up four Tren de Aragua gang members that Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) would likely be fast to turn over to the police to be deported out of his state and the country.
Sanctions out of state could come in the form of ceasing to issue visas, even tourist and visitor visas — moves that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Trump’s secretary of state nominee, is said to support.
“Think of the threat to China and how it would impact if they don’t start taking people back and all the tourists that want to come here and all the other ones want to come here for espionage reasons and all that other stuff. So really expect that to be a big focus,” said the third source.
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If Venezuela refuses to cooperate, housing Venezuelan deportees at Guantanamo Bay is still an option, the second official said.
What Trump did in the past
Within days of taking office in January 2017, Trump signed three executive orders that each included half a dozen or so actions to enhance public safety within the U.S., as well as improve border security and immigration enforcement and protect the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the U.S.
