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Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 on a promise to launch the “largest mass deportation in history” of undocumented immigrants. It was one of his more popular promises, too, though polls show varying degrees of support for this effort depending on how sweeping it is and how much collateral damage to rights (and to the economy) is involved.
For all the noise and heat ICE raids are generating, large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants are rolling out slowly because they will require both significant new dollars that Congress has yet to provide, along with major requisitions of state and local law-enforcement resources. But at the same time, the administration is also challenging legal immigration, and those who have benefited from it in the past. Here are the four different avenues the administration appears to be pursuing to go after people legally in this country.
Canceling Temporary Protected Status
The Trump administration is targeting people who have Temporary Protected Status, which protects them from deportation, because they are refugees from war-torn or tyrannical countries. During the campaign, Trump talked a lot about Venezuelan and Haitian migrants who were supposedly terrorizing American cities. But it still came as a surprise to Venezuelans — many of them avid Trump supporters — who at one fell swoop lost their TPS status when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem canceled it on February 1. This action stripped 348,000 Venezuelan refugees of their right to stay in the country as of April.
The exposure to mass deportations of previously legal Venezuelan refugees has been fuzzed up significantly by the administration’s claims that the people ICE is rounding up and flying to prisons in El Salvador are all members of violent gangs (claims that have produced a potentially catastrophic collision with the federal judiciary). But the TPS revocation applies to everyone, criminal or noncriminal, and represents a major restriction in legal immigration.
Venezuelans are just the first group to lose TPS status; a previous extension for this group happened to expire earliest. On February 20, Noem also canceled TPS for Haitians beginning in August. That will expose about 300,000 legal immigrants to deportation.
Deporting visa and green-card holders
In recent weeks there have been reports of the Trump administration deporting immigrants who have permanent-residence status (known as a “green card”) or are in the country legally on various visas. The deportations have mostly been justified on national-security grounds, though nearly all of them are being challenged in federal courts. As my colleague Chas Danner explained, legal or illegal immigration status appears to have been disregarded entirely in such cases:
These incidents have come as President Trump cracks down on all kinds of immigration and as international tourists are reportedly canceling or reconsidering their U.S. travel plans in response to various administration policies. But it can be difficult to determine whether these are isolated cases of routine enforcement or whether they presage a new era of arbitrary punishment. Last week’s arrest of green-card holder and former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was clearly political — which he is now calling attention to — while other cases seem more happenstance.
Recent deportees have included those holding student visas, “high-skills” H1-B visas, and even tourist visas. Again, these are not the “undocumented” immigrants Trump promised to deport; they are fully documented. It doesn’t seem to matter.
Revoking birthright citizenship
On his very first day in office, Trump issued an executive order that purportedly ended “birthright citizenship,” though the 14th Amendment says quite clearly, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The administration is advancing a fringe argument that the children of undocumented immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Trump’s order would also deny birthright citizenship to anyone whose parents weren’t at least permanent residents. As NPR explained, this is a deliberately provocative decision:
Already, three federal judges in three different states have blocked Trump’s executive order voiding birthright citizenship, and three separate appeals courts have refused to unblock those court orders. Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee in Washington state, was the first judge to block Trump’s executive order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
But Thursday, in three separate — but nearly identical — filings, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to narrow the lower court orders, which apply nationwide, so that the administration could begin planning to put into effect its new policy against birthright citizenship.
The administration may have put a toe in the water on this issue via the deportation of a 10-year-old citizen who was in the country to secure life-saving medical treatment, as NBC News reports:
A family that was deported to Mexico hopes they can find a way to return to the U.S. and ensure their 10-year-old daughter, who is a U.S. citizen, can continue her brain cancer treatment.
Immigration authorities removed the girl and four of her American siblings from Texas on Feb. 4, when they deported their undocumented parents.
Denaturalizing U.S. citizens
Still another frontier in restricting legal immigration was initially broached during the first Trump administration: revoking naturalizations. This harkened back to a Cold War–era drive to denaturalize communist citizens, as USA Today explains:
The Supreme Court put an end to politically driven denaturalization campaigns in 1967, ruling that the government could only revoke an immigrant’s citizenship in the case of fraud or “willful misrepresentation.”
In the quarter century before Trump first took office, from 1990 to 2017, the U.S. government targeted an average of 11 naturalized citizens per year, according to Frost’s research.
Most of those had committed war crimes or other atrocities, then lied about their past to obtain citizenship.
“In the first Trump administration, we saw quite a large increase in the number of denaturalization proceedings,” Burke Robertson said. “It’s clear his (new) administration seems to be starting where they left off.”
Now Axios reports that denaturalization is back on the front burner:
What’s going to be on the horizon are denaturalization cases,” said Mike Davis, a close White House ally and founder of the conservative Article III Project.
“You’re going to have Hamas supporters who have been naturalized within the last 10 years, and they are eligible to lose their status as citizens and get deported,” Davis said. “It’s worth it.”
Given what we know about this administration’s rather broad definition of “Hamas supporters,” a lot of people are probably going to lose their citizenship along with their First Amendment rights.
