President-elect Donald Trump has a raft of immigration policy initiatives he could implement on his first day back in the White House, although full implementation of his campaign promises will have to come later within the administration and could be limited by law.

The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants was a key part of Trump’s vision to reverse the immigration trend after millions of migrants entered the United States under the Biden administration.

Karoline Leavitt, press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in an interview with Fox News that Trump’s victory “gives him a mandate to govern during his campaign, to keep the promises he made, which include, from the first day, the launch of the greatest mass.” operation to deport illegal immigrants that Kamala Harris allowed into this country.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, predicted that Trump, after being sworn in on Jan. 20, would sign an executive order directing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to begin planning for deportations, but ” there will be no people detained.” a plane because of Trump-related policies from day one.

“That’s simply not how the federal removal system works,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “You can’t arrest someone and put them on a plane in three hours, with a few exceptions.”

Large-scale withdrawals are likely to be scaled up over time. Reichlin-Melnick said increased deportations would also likely mean more workplace raids, as happened during Trump’s first term, but that raids on this scale “take time to plan” .

Under Trump’s first term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement would send agents to pursue a specific target, Reichlin-Melnick said, and arrest everyone else found with that target before checking their immigration status, rather than the Biden administration’s policy of arresting only those scheduled. target in the raid.

Other administration actions would be more immediately available to Trump upon taking office.

Eric Ruark, research director for NumbersUSA, a conservative group that wants to reduce immigration, said Trump could immediately eliminate the CBP One appwhich allows migrants to make appointments at border ports of entry between the United States and Mexico to present their asylum application. Critics say the app has provided a template for migrants to enter the United States illegally.

Ruark also said Trump would end the Biden administration. program which allowed up to 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the United States under a mechanism known as parole.

Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, said that on his first day, Trump would take action in the form of executive orders directing U.S. agencies to take “drastic action on immigration.”

“The new Trump administration would likely issue a series of executive orders that would make life much more difficult for immigrants in the United States,” Mukherjee said.

Mukherjee said Trump could quickly end Temporary Protected Status, which gives some migrants exemption from deportation due to instability in their home countries.

Trump could also take swift action on a travel ban on majority-Muslim countries imposed during his first administration and validated as legal by the Supreme Court, or a policy banning visas from people from certain countries of Africa, as was the case during the first term of Trump, Mukherjee. said.

Reichlin-Melnick said that under the new Trump administration, “the biggest immediate changes will be to legal immigration,” which he said will include restrictions targeting low-income immigrants.

But the most drastic change, Reichlin-Melnick said, would be heavy restrictions or even outright elimination of the number of people eligible. refugees be able to enter the United States.

“Trump has promised to immediately halt refugee resettlement, as he did the first time, after which we expect it to be cut to the bone and potentially halted altogether,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

Reichlin-Melnick said the Obama administration set that number at 100,000 per fiscal year, but Trump, during his first term, reduced it to 50,000 and then reduced it further to 15,000 per fiscal year. year, which is the lowest in U.S. history.

“We know he’s going to suspend it from day one, and he’s probably going to reduce the numbers to 15,000 like last time, or I wouldn’t be surprised this time if they set it at zero,” said Reichlin-Melnick.

Biden in September announced his administration’s figure of 125,000 refugees in the 2025 fiscal year.

Other actions would come later, either because they would require changes in the law, or in the process of modifying administrative rules, or in a reinterpretation of the law by the courts.

Ruark placed in this category Trump ending birthright citizenship, which is the concept that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen, even if the child is born to foreign or immigrant parents without legal status. .

“You could put some things in place that would be challenged in court and ultimately go to the Supreme Court,” Ruark said.

Other subsequent elements identified by Ruark would be the expansion of workplace crackdowns on employers illegally hiring immigrants, as well as funding restrictions for “sanctuary cities”, which have local policies prohibiting them from cooperate with U.S. agencies to deport undocumented immigrants. Restrictions on funding, Ruark said, could come through executive action or Congress.

“You could target funding to sanctuary jurisdictions, which I think would be very effective,” Ruark added. “A local sheriff can say on principle that he doesn’t agree with the law, but when it comes to whether or not funds are going to be withheld, I think those principles probably break down quite a bit quickly in the face of loss of necessary financing or funding.”

Current legal restrictions may be a last resort for immigration advocates. For example, Trump has said he would use the National Guard — and even the U.S. military — to carry out migrant expulsions, but that would run counter to restrictions on federal use of the National Guard and Posse Comitatus, the 1878 law that prohibits the U.S. military from being used to enforce domestic policies in the United States.

And many changes will be challenged in court.

Mukherjee identified several laws in these books that would prevent Trump from implementing his sweeping immigration plans, many of which she said “are blatantly illegal and at odds with federal constitutional law.”

Among these laws, Mukherjee said, are the Administrative Procedure Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Refugee Act of 1980, in addition to the protections provided by the Constitution.

“These laws prohibit many of the actions that the future head of the executive branch has been talking about on the campaign trail for months,” Mukherjee said. “So I think we can look at federal law as a safety net against the worst abuses of executive power.”