The Trump administration is waging a concerted pressure campaign against undocumented immigrants — as well as hundreds of thousands here legally whose status it is trying to revoke. The measures threaten to make daily life more untenable for millions as President Donald Trump aims to carry out the immigrant purging he promised during his campaign.
Trump has escalated his clampdown on immigrants beyond what was done during his first presidential term, which included separating children from their parents at the border, working to build a border wall between the United States and Mexico and curbing legal immigration through fewer visas and refugee admissions.
This time around, on top of immigration raids and arrests, the administration is inflicting hardship on immigrants by pulling multiple levers of government to undercut their day-to-day lives.
The administration is threatening criminal charges against immigrants without legal status who do not register with the government. It has given Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to previously confidential taxpayer information to locate immigrants and canceled Social Security numbers of thousands of immigrants by marking “illegal immigrants” as being dead. Officials have canceled parole that the Biden administration granted to some groups. A federal judge has blocked the revocations temporarily.
“What we are seeing now is this full-court press by the government on immigration,” said Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, a nonprofit immigrant rights advocacy organization whose funding to provide legal help to unaccompanied immigrant children Trump cut.
The many actions are all parts of the administration’s strategy to subtract as many immigrants from the United States as possible without having to go through more cumbersome deportation processes. The Trump actions build on an “attrition through enforcement” strategy tried in 2010 with state anti-immigration laws, a strategy pushed by Kris Kobach, a former attorney general of Kansas who has championed conservative causes.
Data obtained by NBC News shows that the Trump administration’s deportations are running slightly behind deportations under President Joe Biden at the same time last year, even though Trump has made mass deportations one of his main priorities since he assumed office.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem made it clear recently what level of departures the administration wants to see. At a recent Cabinet meeting, she said, “We got 20, 21 million people that need to go home.” Republicans and conservatives have long used about 20 million as the number of undocumented people in the country, though longtime analyses have pegged the number at closer to 11 million to 12 million.
As is evident in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a Maryland man who a Justice Department official said was mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador — the administration is willing to push the edge of the legal envelope to meet its mass deportation goal. At a contentious hearing Tuesday, a U.S. district judge ordered the administration to provide evidence of any steps it has taken to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.
“Over 77 million people delivered a resounding Election Day mandate in November to secure our borders, mass deport criminal illegal migrants, and enforce our immigration laws,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told NBC News in a statement. “The Trump administration is aligned on a whole-of-government approach to deliver on this mandate to once again put Americans and America First.”
He did not respond to questions about criticism of the administration’s actions or about any spillover effects on U.S. citizens.
‘Taking people’s legal status away’
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Tuesday that Trump would sign an order preventing undocumented immigrants from getting Social Security benefits.
But undocumented immigrants, and many people legally working, are already prohibited from receiving Social Security payouts or Medicare, said Marielena Hincapié, a distinguished immigration fellow and visiting scholar at Cornell Law School.
She said Trump’s latest order is “continued fearmongering and disinformation because, in fact, undocumented immigrants pay into Social Security but are never eligible to get those benefits.”
“On the one hand, the rhetoric of Trump has been about focusing on the undocumented immigrants and the worst ‘criminals,’ etc., but what we’ve actually seen from a policymaking perspective is they are actually taking people’s legal status away,” Hincapié said.
There are immigrants in the United States with different forms of legal status, such as Temporary Protected Status or work authorization that was granted while they were awaiting asylum claim outcomes, which makes them eligible to apply for Social Security numbers. But getting Social Security numbers does not mean they are eligible for benefits, Hincapié said.
“There are separate laws dating all the way to the 1996 welfare reform law that indicate who is eligible for what program, and for most people, you have to have been a legal permanent resident — a green card holder — for at least five years to be a qualified legal immigrant that is eligible for certain benefits,” she said.
The administration has threatened penalties against undocumented immigrants 14 and older who fail to register with the government and carry proof they registered with them.
To register, they must fill out a form that asks them not only about any crimes they may have been arrested for or charged with, but also any they committed but for which they were not prosecuted, said Bill Hing, founder of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
The law to register has existed for decades but had not previously been enforced.
Hing questioned how Trump would enforce the required registration, because, he said, trying to get someone indicted for not carrying registration papers would complicate and lengthen a deportation process. He acknowledged that the administration might try to make an example of a case or two. But the requirement “is a mechanism to induce people, to coerce people, into exposing themselves,” he said.
In addition, Hing said, if he were representing people arrested for failing to register, he would argue they have a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, since they are asked to admit to crimes when they fill out the forms.
“I don’t know about you, but I’ve jaywalked. I’ve sped,” he said. “I think someone being prosecuted has a very good Fifth Amendment argument not to register.”
While the immigration crackdown actions are aimed at immigrants, they are affecting citizens, too.
In early April, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner posted on social media that he had directed HUD offices to ensure HUD programs do not benefit undocumented immigrants. People here illegally cannot get federal subsidized housing. But an estimated 25,000 families in public housing include at least one U.S. citizen and at least one person without legal immigration status, according to the National Housing Law Project, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization. The citizen would be eligible for the housing.
Marie Claire Tran-Leung, an attorney for the National Housing Law Project, said Trump and Turner are trying to deploy HUD “to scare immigrant families into self-evicting.”
Whether the administration’s measures will force out enough immigrants to satisfy Trump and his base is unknown.
But Hincapié said that with the administration moving “so rapidly” and in a “chaotic way,” some U.S. citizens may get caught in the immigration dragnet. For instance, some could end up wrongly classified as dead and their Social Security numbers put in the agency’s death file, she said.
“Are they going to do the same thing they are doing with Kilmar [Abrego Garcia] of saying, ‘Oops, sorry, we made a mistake and we can’t do anything about it now’?”
