In his second term in the White House, president-elect Donald Trump will likely take a similar approach to immigration as his first, this time with a clearer playbook and more levers of power under his control.
It’s hard to know exactly what will happen until he takes office in January, according to local immigration experts. They worry about the potential impact on Minnesota’s immigrant communities — from undocumented immigrants to asylum-seekers to those on work or student visas to green-card holders.
Trump’s immigration promises mirror those of his first term, including the mass deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants and a tightening of the border. He has also said that he would cap immigration, limit asylum claims, require loyalty tests at the border and roll back President Joe Biden’s immigration decisions.
Michele Garnett McKenzie, advocacy director at The Advocates for Human Rights, expressed concern that the return of Trump’s immigration policies could happen “very quickly” because going back to the same set of procedures could be “fairly easy to reinstate.”
The Advocates for Human Rights provides legal representation in the Upper Midwest for people seeking asylum, those detained by U.S. immigration authorities, unaccompanied minors and trafficked victims.
Some of his plans for his next term include hiring thousands more Border Patrol agents, using the military for border security, raising the bar for those seeking asylum, and ending citizenship given to children born in the United States of undocumented immigrants, among other proposals.
Here is an overview of Trump’s promises on immigration and what it could mean for immigrants in Minnesota:
Temporary protected status and asylum seekers
During Trump’s second term, he would have the authority to decide whether to renew temporary protected status (TPS) for immigrants from 16 designated countries, allowing them to legally stay in the U.S. for at least six months at a time. TPS is granted when the Department of Homeland Security deems it too dangerous for individuals to return to their home countries.
Countries with TPS include Somalia, Sudan, Haiti, Honduras, Venezuela and Burma/Myanmar. Minnesota, which has the largest Somali and Karen communities in the country, could see hundreds of people lose their status.
Ana Pottratz Acosta, a clinical law instructor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, said that one of Trump’s first priorities might be to end TPS for some of these countries.
During his first term, he tried to terminate TPS for six countries, including Haiti, El Salvador, Nepal, and Honduras, but was blocked by legal challenges and administrative delays. When Biden took office, he reversed Trump’s actions by extending or redesignating TPS for these countries, temporarily restoring protections.
Trump has also tried to end other temporary relief programs. In 2017, Trump attempted to end a program that allows young adults protection from deportation and gain work authorization for two years — which can be renewed. But his decision was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But the current U.S. Supreme Court could be more favorable to Trump’s actions because of his appointments in his first term, Pottratz Acosta said.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to reinstate several of his previous policies that could narrow the eligibility criteria and increase barriers for some seeking to change their immigration status or gain asylum, a form of protection from persecution or human rights violations in another country.
For example, he plans to reinstate the “public charge rule” which means that if an individual is likely to rely on public benefits, like food stamps, their application for a green card or visa could be denied.
Another policy he plans to reinstate is the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which requires those seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border to stay in Mexico as they wait for their U.S. court hearings.
Garnett McKenzie said the policy changes limited access to asylum, but also caused harm to the many migrants stranded at the border in unsafe conditions.
“It was the situation [where] people were left in this precarious waiting limbo, and human suffering and misery would be expected to be expanded if Remain in Mexico was put back into place,” she said.
Mass deportations
Trump has pledged in all three of his campaigns to deport millions of immigrants from the U.S. His plans to do so fell through during his first term; U.S. deportations hit their highest point in 2013, under then-President Barack Obama.
But this time around, Trump has more specifics on how he plans to carry out the deportations.
Trump tweeted last month that when he takes office, he plans to carry out “Operation Aurora” which will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that gives presidents the authority to detain or deport noncitizens from a hostile nation during times of war or conflict.
He didn’t name a specific group as a target in his tweet, besides “every migrant criminal network operating on American Soil.”
But immigration legal experts say that any attempt to invoke blanket laws targeting immigrants can be challenged through the court system.
Abigail Wahl, attorney at Puerta Grande Law Firm in Minneapolis, said Trump has repeatedly said he wants to conduct mass deportations, but he knows that he’ll be facing legal barriers, lack of manpower, and would inflict harm to the economy by removing undocumented workers, who fill many jobs Americans have rejected.
“So I think that’s an intimidating measure,” she said.
Trump has said he plans to use the National Guard and local police to carry out his deportation plan. But it is possible that local elected officials and pushback from the community can stop the Trump administration from deputizing and involving local law enforcement in his deportation plan, Garnett McKenzie said.
In his first campaign for president in 2016, Trump made the same promise to deport all undocumented immigrants in the nation. Deportations during Trump’s first term actually dropped compared to the Obama administration, and the Biden administration deported similar numbers of immigrants as Trump. Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan has promised more deportations this time compared with Trump’s first term.
“Moving the government toward a particular policy change takes time and effort,” said Julia Decker, a policy analyst at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. “It’s not something that can necessarily happen overnight.”
Immigration courts and detention
At Minnesota’s only federal Immigration Court located in Fort Snelling, there are 42,000 pending cases and it often takes years for some cases to move through the system. Since the Immigration Court is a part of the U.S. Department of Justice, Trump has the authority to nominate the person in charge of the Department of Justice that will put in place policy changes that influence the outcome of cases.
Some of these policies could be caseload quotas to speed up case resolutions and changes to performance review standards for immigration judges. The head of the U.S. Department of Justice would also have the authority to implement stricter interpretation of existing laws on immigration.
During Trump’s first term, Garnett McKenzie said local immigration judges were “fairly resilient” in making their decisions on a case-by-case basis, but she warned that court policies “can really affect how they can do their jobs.”
Wahl said she saw an increase in people held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers without bond and that detainees had fewer exceptions for release on their own recognizance in Trump’s first term.
In his second term, Trump has promised to expand the use of expedited removal, a process that allows immigration authorities to quickly deport non-citizens without a formal court hearing before an immigration judge. This would apply to noncitizens arrested within a 100 miles of a land or sea border who cannot prove they’ve continuously lived in the U.S. for two weeks or more.
He also said he intends to remove the 100-mile limitation and extend the two-week time period to two years.
Sanctuary cities
St. Paul and Minneapolis have passed ordinances that prohibit city employees, including police, from asking people their immigration status. Last year, the North Star Act that would have made Minnesota a sanctuary state, preventing police from cooperating with ICE, did not pass.
“It simply means that if you go to the police as a crime victim, you’re not questioned on your immigration unless you disclose that,” McKenzie said. “It’s designed to make sure that our communities feel safe in accessing our public safety system.”
Sanctuary cities could have federal funding threatened as a tool to urge them to work with immigration authorities, she said. In 2017, Trump did make an attempt to block federal funding to sanctuary cities, but he was unsuccessful.
Birthright citizenship
Trump has pledged to issue an executive order redefining birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed through the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The 14th Amendment states “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 birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment has been widely interpreted to apply to anyone born in the United States, regardless of the citizenship or immigration status of their parents.
This right is strengthened by a landmark 1898 Supreme Court ruling that found that Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to Chinese nationals, was guaranteed citizenship under the birthright citizenship clause, Acosta said.
Yet in his most recent campaign for the White House, Trump promised to issue an executive order that would require one of the parents to be a citizen or permanent resident before their children can be considered citizens.
Acosta said she believes the strategy of the incoming Trump administration is to force the issue back to the Supreme Court in hopes that the court sets a new precedent in interpreting the birthright citizenship clause.
Ideological screening of immigrants
Trump has promised to enforce “strong ideological screening” for any immigrant entering the U.S., with a particular focus on “automatically disqualifying” those who show “sympathy for jihadists, Hamas, or Hamas ideology.”
His administration will have an ability to do so, Acosta said.
The laws allowing the federal government to do so are already on the books. One of them is the Patriot Act, which went into law after the September 11 attacks and greatly expanded the government’s ability to surveil all of those living within its borders.
Immigration forms also already ask questions that try to gauge a person’s ideological leanings. The current form for asylum, for example, asks applicants if they or their family members have ever been associated with “a political party, student group, labor union, religious organization, military or paramilitary group, guerrilla organization, ethnic group, human rights group, or the press or media.” It then asks for a detailed description of the applicant’s association with any of these types of organizations.
“You can see that it’s a broad, sort of amorphous thing,” the Immigrant Law Center’s Julia Decker said.
Workplace raids
Homan, Trump’s incoming “border czar,” has promised raids on workplaces that employ undocumented immigrants.
Workplace raids in Minnesota and Iowa made headlines during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.
In particular, Acosta remembers the Swift raids conducted in 2006 by ICE against Swift & Company meatpacking plants under Bush. ICE agents conducted one of the raids in a Worthington, Minnesota-based plant that left 239 workers detained and several kids in the city without caregivers.
ICE also conducted workplace raids under the Obama administration, usually going after employers who hired people without work authorization, Acosta said.
The first Trump administration didn’t focus much on workplace raids, she said, although it did engage in “fear-mongering” on the issue.
“There was a lot of fear in those communities about workplace raids,” she said. “Fear, I think, is like a huge element of what they’re going to do.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated who is affected by the “public charge” rule.
