Trump said he would immediately halt all illegal entry at the border, adding that he would invoke an 18th-century law to carry out his plan to rid the country of people here without authorization.

“We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders but refuses to defend American borders or, more importantly, its own people,” Trump said in his inauguration address in the Capitol rotunda.

In the months leading up to his election and inauguration, Trump promised to overhaul the immigration system and border security on “Day 1” through executive orders in a sidestep of the regular legislative process. At his noontime inauguration ceremony, Trump said he would sign the executive orders later Monday.

The executive branch has expansive authority on matters of immigration, but many of the president’s orders are certain to face swift legal challenge.

Trump has pledged the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, to be carried out under the direction of Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, architects of his first administration’s zero-tolerance policy that led to thousands of migrant parents being separated from their children. Trump’s attempts will be hampered without substantial additional funding from Congress, where Republicans hold slim majorities.

Illegal border crossings have fallen sharply over the last year, with current levels the lowest they’ve been since Trump left office. The emergency declaration allows Trump to unlock federal resources to fund construction of the border wall, as he did in 2019.

In June, the Biden administration began effectively blocking most migrants from seeking asylum along the U.S.-Mexico border. The restrictions didn’t apply to those who waited for appointments to enter legally at official ports of entry.

On Monday, hundreds of asylum seekers learned that use of CBP One, a phone app through which they made the appointments, had ended and their scheduled interviews had been canceled. Tens of thousands of migrants, some of whom had waited more than six months for an interview, are now stranded in Mexico. In recent months, more migrants had entered legally with CBP One appointments than those who were arrested after entering the U.S. illegally.

“As commander in chief, I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and invasions, and that is exactly what I am going to do,” Trump said. “We will do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

Another order would designate drug cartels and gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.

Other orders will bring back policies from Trump’s first term that Biden had discontinued, such as Remain in Mexico. Under that policy, asylum seekers must stay across the border as their asylum cases are being adjudicated.

Trump said he would end what conservatives refer to as “catch and release,” the practice of releasing migrants from custody while they await conclusions to what are often years-long cases in immigration court.

There is not enough space for federal authorities to detain all those in deportation proceedings. Last fiscal year, Congress funded 41,500 beds at a cost of $3.4 billion. As of Dec. 29, more than 39,000 immigrants were being detained pending deportation proceedings.

Trump said he would use the U.S. military for border security efforts.

“By invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil,” Trump said.

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, last used during World War II to send people from Japan, Germany and Italy to internment camps, allows the president to arrest, imprison or deport immigrants from a country considered an enemy of the U.S. during wartime. Trump could use it to conduct rapid deportations without the typically required legal processes. But legal experts say courts would probably strike down Trump’s interpretation as beyond what the law allows.

Brad Jones, a political science professor at UC Davis, noted that many executive orders during Trump’s first term withstood court challenges, including those on the border wall and Remain in Mexico. With a conservative Supreme Court majority, challenges to him overstepping permissible powers may ultimately be knocked down, Jones said.

“These executive orders are, in my view, essentially setting the stage to think of the border as a war zone,” he said.

During a second speech in Emancipation Hall, Trump praised Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who has supported a crackdown at the border and bused migrants to liberal states such as New York and California. Trump repeated unfounded claims that nearly every country in the world was sending criminals to the U.S., saying Abbott had to deal with them himself. But, bragging about his promised border wall expansion, Trump signaled that soon Abbott’s situation would change.

“That wall will go up so fast,” he said.

The Trump administration has been planning a large immigration raid in Chicago this week, but Homan told news outlets that officials are reconsidering their plans because the leaked details put agents at risk. Other large immigrant communities, including Los Angeles, could be targeted in future raids.

In California, a 2018 law enacted in response to Trump’s first administration limits state and local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The California Values Act prevents local police from holding someone for extra time for transfer to immigration custody, but allows them to notify federal agents of a person’s release if they have certain felonies or high-level misdemeanor convictions.

Some local law enforcement leaders, including Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, have signaled a willingness to circumvent the law to help immigration agents carry out deportations. Attempts to circumvent the law will not be tolerated, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said. “We’re prepared to take action against any law enforcement agency that doesn’t follow the law,” Bonta said Friday.

Bonta said he also stands ready to fight Trump in court. The California Department of Justice sued the first Trump administration more than 100 times.

“If he tries to invoke the National Guard or the military to participate in his mass deportations, if he seeks to end birthright citizenship — a constitutional right — and that harms U.S. citizens, if he tries to attack sanctuary jurisdiction and status on the immigration side, we’re ready to act on day one,” Bonta said.

Some California immigrants are already on edge after Border Patrol agents carried out dozens of arrests around Bakersfield this month, questioning people at Home Depot, gas stations and on their way to work on farms.

Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, said the organization has organized a vigil Tuesday night to create a safe space for immigrants to gather and learn more about Trump’s initial executive orders. She emphasized that because Los Angeles is considered a natural disaster area, immigration agents should not be conducting enforcement operations there.

“The community of Los Angeles is concerned by what is coming, but we’re not cowering in panic,” Salas said.

The post Trump plans to combat immigration with troops and a state of emergency appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

By Miriam Jordan and Jazmine Ulloa

It was just days into his first term when President Trump issued an order banning the entry of people from several predominantly Muslim countries. An SOS went out to immigration lawyers across New York to head to Kennedy Airport, where arriving passengers were already being detained.

By noon, hundreds of lawyers were interviewing relatives and friends of travelers who were being held, challenging their detention and drafting petitions for their release.

The mobilization that morning in 2017 spawned a network of hundreds of lawyers who are now ready to fight the crackdown on immigrants that Mr. Trump promised to carry out in a second term in office.

After his decisive victory over Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump is expected to name key cabinet choices in the coming days and weeks, including his nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security.

The Supreme Court upheld a version of the ban on travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries, which the Biden administration eliminated in 2021. But earlier this fall, Mr. Trump said he would “bring back the travel ban.”

During his campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to undertake the largest deportation effort in the nation’s history, though he skirted questions about whether the sweeps would target undocumented immigrants who had long lived in the country, people who had more recently crossed at the southern border or both. About 11 million undocumented people resided in the United States as of 2022, according to the Pew Research Center, with nearly two-thirds having been in the country for at least a decade.

While deporting millions of people would be all but impossible with current enforcement resources, Mr. Trump has said he would consider stationing American troops at the border with Mexico and working with governors to deploy the National Guard into the interior of the country.

In his victory speech early on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that voters had handed him “an unprecedented and powerful mandate” to pursue his agenda.

Indeed, the immigrant advocacy community will face a very different political landscape when Mr. Trump returns to the White House in January. Voter sentiment has shifted markedly, with far more Americans expressing concerns about immigration and a willingness to support tougher policies.

Unlike in 2016, when he won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote, Mr. Trump won both in this election, the first Republican to prevail in the national vote in two decades, after campaigning on harsh immigration policies. And he will enter office with a Supreme Court that counts three of his first-term nominees among the nine justices.

“We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that,” he said on Wednesday.

Lawyers for immigrants said they have been preparing for months for the possibility of large-scale workplace raids, roundups in immigrant enclaves, new restrictions on asylum, the expansion of detention and the termination of programs temporarily shielding some people from deportation.

“The Trump team might think they are ready,” said Camille Mackler, chief executive of Immigration Arc, who sent an SOS email that brought hundreds of lawyers to Kennedy Airport that day in 2017. “But so are we.”

Becca Heller, founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, which sued the government over the Muslim ban, said that winning the popular vote was not a license to ignore the law. “He can’t act outside the bounds of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” she said.

Having battled one Trump administration, she and her allies are ready for a second, Ms. Heller said. “We literally have a blueprint of what they are planning to do, and so we had months and months to figure out how to protect people,” she said.

“Trump has told us what to expect — hate and persecution and concentration camps,” she said, referring to his team’s plans to use military funds to build “vast holding facilities.” “None of us have any illusions about what we are up against this time.”

The new president’s immigration agenda will have battle-tested allies in some of the country’s state capitals. A coalition of Republican attorneys general, led by Ken Paxton of Texas, have systematically challenged the Biden administration on key immigration policies.

The results have been mixed, with some challenges temporarily blocking President Biden’s efforts but others being turned back by the courts. The challenges have kept the fight over immigration in the news and on voters’ minds, and given the Biden administration even more to worry about.

While the states that have been mounting those legal fights are not likely to be challenging the incoming Trump administration, they could play a crucial role in carrying out some of the expected federal efforts on immigration, said Lenni Benson, a professor of immigration law at New York Law School.

After extensive civil rights litigation, Arizona’s attorney general opined in 2016 that sheriffs could enforce “a show-me-your-papers law,” as long as they asked for documents from every person arrested.

Mr. Trump, who made immigration his calling card again this campaign, is expected to issue a spate of executive orders on his first day in office, such as to seal the border and arrest undocumented immigrants, including ones in the interior of the country.

Mr. Trump’s immigration advisers have said that, while criminals would be prioritized in making arrests, no one unlawfully in the country would be spared, a shift from Mr. Biden and other presidents, who focused resources on targeting serious criminals.

Lawsuits are expected to pile up.

“We have spent the last nine months planning for this, and are prepared to go to court as often as necessary, just like the first time,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who argued many immigration cases, including one to halt the policy of separating migrant families at the border.

The A.C.L.U. filed many legal challenges against Trump policies during his first administration. It defeated his attempt to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census at the Supreme Court and won a settlement for the families split up at the border. In a full-page ad published in The Times’s print paper on Friday, the organization wrote an open letter to Mr. Trump, saying it planned to defend people’s rights “in the courts, at state legislatures and in the streets.”

Tom Homan, a senior immigration official in the last Trump administration who is expected to return to government, said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last month that large-scale worksite raids would resume. Such operations, which can lead to the arrest of hundreds of unauthorized workers, are costly and complex, and have not been conducted under Mr. Biden.

Bruna Bouhid-Sollod, senior political director for United We Dream Action, a national group led by youngimmigrant activists, said the organization has been crafting plans for a second Trump presidency.

Those strategies include “know-your-rights” training, letter writing campaigns to encourage elected officials and public art and vigils to show support for undocumented immigrants.

One of the biggest concerns is the fate of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program known as DACA, which has shielded from deportation and granted work authorization to hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.

Ms. Bouhid-Sollod said she was among many DACA recipients who joined United We Dream after Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, out of fear that Mr. Trump would kill the program. He tried to, but the Supreme Court kept the program in place in a 5-4 ruling, saying the Trump administration hadn’t followed proper procedures for ending it.

Since then, Texas and several other states have sued to end DACA, and a federal court ruling in their favor is under review by an appeals court that has several Trump-nominated judges and has embraced some of the most aggressive conservative arguments in American law.

And of course, the incoming Trump administration itself could try again to end DACA.

“We are cleareyed about the challenges ahead,” Ms. Bouhid-Sollod said. “That is the big difference between 2016 and 2024.”

Benjamin Johnson, the executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the organization has long been analyzing Mr. Trump’s immigration promises, preparing litigation to challenge policies they believe would violate their clients’ rights to have their cases heard and fairly processed under the law.

In his campaign, Mr. Trump spoke of using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to carry out mass deportations, a law under which people of Japanese descent were held in internment camps during World War II.

Mr. Trump also has said the deportations would be modeled after those under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose administration used sweeps, raids and blunt forms of racial profiling in the 1950s to round up and expel mostly Mexican and Mexican American laborers.

“He has threatened to use powers — some that haven’t been used in a century, since World War II — to arrest, detain and imprison people without any judicial review,” Mr. Johnson said, referring to Mr. Trump. “We are going to have to find ways to meet the moment.”

The post Immigration Lawyers Prepare to Battle Trump in Court Again appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.