On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump issued more than a dozen Executive Orders (EOs) that seek to sow fear in immigrant communities. These orders seek to militarize our borders and immigration enforcement more broadly, massively expand the existing deportation and detention machinery, punish organizations that care for immigrants as well as local governments that prioritize protecting their residents, and misinterpret the U.S. Constitution and immigration laws. They attempt to do everything from effectively ending asylum and birthright citizenship to teeing up immigration bans and expansive indefinite detention. They are steeped in white supremacist ideology and criminalizing narratives about immigrants. Together, the EOs create a web of entanglement among immigration, military and criminal law enforcement at federal, state, and local levels.
This explainer outlines portions of the EOs that use contact with the criminal system and immigration detention to further criminalize, detain and deport immigrants. This was written jointly by IDP, DWN, ILRC, AAJC, SEARAC, NIPNLG and IJN.
Trump’s Day 1 EOs ExplainerLast modified January 23, 2025