WASHINGTON — (AP) — President Donald Trump signed executive orders Monday to beef up security at the southern border that began taking effect hours after he was inaugurated, making good on his defining political promise to crack down on immigration and marking another wild swing in White House policy on the divisive issue.
Some of the orders revive priorities from his first administration that his predecessor had rolled back, including forcing asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico and finishing the border wall. Others created sweeping new strategies, like an effort to end automatic citizenship for anyone born in America, pulling the military into border security and ending use of a Biden-era app used by nearly a million migrants to enter America.
Actual execution of such a far-reaching immigration agenda is certain to face legal and logistical challenges. And few details have been released so far.
But in a concrete sign of how the changes were already playing out, migrants who had appointments to enter the U.S. using the CBP One app saw them canceled minutes after Trump was sworn in, and Mexico agreed to allow people seeking U.S. asylum to remain south of the American border while their court cases play out.
"I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places in which they came," Trump said in his inauguration speech to thunderous applause.
The online lottery system gave appointments to 1,450 people a day at eight border crossings to enter on "parole," which Joe Biden used more than any president.
It was a critical piece of the Biden administration's border strategy to create new immigration pathways while cracking down on people who enter illegally.
Supporters say it brought order to a chaotic border. Critics say it was magnet for more people to come.
By midday Monday, it was gone.
Migrants who had scored coveted appointments weeks ago found them canceled.
That includes Melanie Mendoza, 21, and her boyfriend. She said they left Venezuela over a year ago, spending more than $4,000 and traveling for a month, including walking for three days.
“We don’t know what we are going to do,” she said in Tijuana, Mexico, just on the other side of the border from San Diego.
The Trump administration is reinstating its “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forced 70,000 asylum-seekers in his first term to wait there for hearings in U.S. immigration court.
Mexico, a country integral to any American effort to limit illegal immigration, indicated Monday that it is prepared to receive asylum-seekers while emphasizing that there should be an online application allowing them to schedule appointments at the U.S. border.
Immigration advocates say the policy put migrants at extreme risk in northern Mexico.
“This is déjà vu of the darkest kind,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge. She said policies like “Remain in Mexico” have exacerbated conditions at the border while doing little to address reasons migrants leave home in the first place.
Anyone born in the United States automatically becomes an American citizen, including children born to someone in the country illegally or in the U.S. on a tourist or student visa. It’s a right enshrined in the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War and assured citizenship for all, including Black people.
Trump’s effort is certain to face steep legal challenges. He called that idea “ridiculous” as he signed the executive order in the Oval Office.
“We have very good grounds. People have wanted to do this for decades,” Trump said.
Trump is moving to realize his pledge of mass deportations of at least 11 million people in the country illegally.
He reversed several Biden immigration orders, including one that narrowed deportation priorities to people who commit serious crimes, are deemed national security threats or were stopped at the border. It returns to Trump’s first-term policy that everyone in the country illegally is a priority.
Trump “border czar” Tom Homan has repeatedly said the administration wants to target criminals first but it won’t hesitate to arrest others.
Rocio, a 43-year-old single mother from Mexico who lives in South Florida, said she’s worried about her 13-year-old son. His father was deported when the boy was an infant, and he’s afraid the same thing could now happen to her.
Rocio, who asked to be identified only by her first name over fears about being detained, said she worries about driving without a license but needs to work to survive.
“We have to be very careful,” she said.
Erlinda, a single mother from El Salvador who arrived in 2013, has signed over legal rights to her U.S.-born children, ages 10 and 8, to Nora Sandigo, who has volunteered to be guardian for more than 2,000 children in 15 years, including at least 30 since December.
“I am afraid for my children, that they will live the terror of not seeing their mother for a day, for a month, for a year,” said Erlinda, 45, who asked to be identified by first name only due to fears of being detained.
Trump will order the government, with Defense Department assistance, to “finish” construction of the border wall and will send military troops to the border, said an incoming White House official.
The official did not say how many troops Trump was planning to send, noting that would be up to the secretary of defense, or what their role would be when they get there.
Both Trump and Biden have sent troops to the border before.
Historically, they have been used to back up Border Patrol agents, who are responsible for securing the nearly 2,000-mile border and not in roles that put them in direct contact with migrants.
Critics say using troops this way signals that migrants are a threat.
The Trump administration designated criminal cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and specifically aims to crack down on the gangs Tren de Aragua and MS-13 and remove their members from the U.S.
MS-13 is a transnational gang that originated in Los Angeles and has since gained a grip on much of Central America. Tren de Aragua was a street gang was born in Venezuela but has become a menace even on American soil. It exploded into the U.S. presidential campaign amid kidnappings, extortion and other crimes throughout the Western Hemisphere tied to a mass exodus of Venezuelan migrants.
Trump is also temporarily suspending refugee resettlement for four months, the official said. For decades, the program has allowed hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and persecution worldwide to come to the United States.
Trump similarly suspended the refugee program at the beginning of his first term, and after reinstating it, slashed the numbers of refugees admitted to the country. Under Biden, the program was rebuilt to the point that last year about 100,000 refugees were resettled in America — a three-decade high.
The refugee program is the type of legal immigration that the Trump administration says they’re for, said Mark Hetfield, president of HIAS, one of 10 resettlement agencies helping refugees start new lives.
When the first Trump administration suspended the program, it said it needed more vetting. This time, it says American communities are straining from immigration, Hetfield said.
“This is a complaint that I have heard nobody raise,” he said. “It’s going to be devastating for people who followed the rules and are waiting to get out of danger and be with their families.”
The incoming administration also will order an end to releasing migrants in the U.S. while they await immigration court hearings, a practice known as “catch-and-release,” but officials didn’t say how they would pay for the enormous costs associated with detention.
Trump plans to “end asylum,” presumably going beyond what Biden has done to severely restrict it. It is unclear what the incoming administration will do with people of nationalities whose countries don’t take back their citizens, such as Nicaragua and Venezuela.
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Salomon reported from Miami and Spagat from San Diego. AP writer Julie Watson in Tijuana, Mexico, contributed to this report.
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