The U.S. immigration system has reached a historic turning point that could fundamentally change what it means to live legally in America today. Donald Trump’s return to power – and the policies he dictates – aims at a more sweeping transformation than ever before: he does not only want to stop those who cross the border illegally, he also wants to rewrite the logic of the system itself in a way that can push masses of law-abiding, properly admitted residents into illegal status from one day to the next.
More than two million immigrants could be stripped of their legal status as the Trump administration pushes ahead with sweeping changes that may redefine who “belongs,” who is allowed to live in the United States. This was the focus of a press briefing hosted by American Community Media with experts Hiroshi Motomura, co-director of the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy, Adelys Ferro, Venezuelan American leader and activist, Laura Flores-Perilla, attorney at the Justice Action Center, Jeremiah Johnson, former immigration judge in San Francisco and vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, and Andrea, a “Dreamer” and DACA activist.
According to Hiroshi Motomura, the administration wants to return to a system similar to the one that existed around 1900, which overwhelmingly favored European immigrants. We must add that this means supporting white immigrants, with openly racist motives that were never really hidden. Trump seizes on any pretext to criminalize non-white immigrants.
This policy not only reinterprets the very concept of immigration, it also strikes at legal security, humanitarian obligations and the democratic foundations of the U.S. Constitution. A symbolic starting point of this process was the tragic case in Washington, where an Afghan immigrant shot and killed two National Guard members. According to the American press, the attack was an isolated crime, not an organized act of terror, and it had no connection whatsoever to the Afghan refugee community.
Trump, however, turned it into political capital and immediately announced consequences that went far beyond the scope of a single crime. The administration blamed refugees and imposed collective punishment: it restricted visa issuance for nineteen countries, including several with Muslim majorities, suspended the admission of Afghan refugees, and froze thousands of pending applications that the U.S. government itself had previously encouraged and supported.
This logic rests on the following principle: instead of holding an individual criminal accountable, an entire group is punished collectively, including those who cooperated with the U.S. government, were refugees, or helped U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Thousands of people who worked with American forces, served as interpreters, or supported intelligence operations now face the risk of removal or deportation because, in the Trump administration’s view, “immigrants are a risk regardless of what they have or have not done as individuals.”
The phenomenon does not stop with the Afghan refugee program. As the United States moves toward a potential military conflict with Venezuela, Trump is rolling back much of the legal status previously granted to Venezuelans and other Latin American communities. The so-called humanitarian parole program, which provided lawful entry, livelihoods, work authorization and taxpayer status for tens of thousands of Cubans, Venezuelans, Ukrainians and people fleeing Nicaragua or Haiti, is now in jeopardy.
Suspending or shutting down the program would mean that these people lose their residence permits and work authorization overnight and become outlaws in a country where they had been given the promise of a legal life. The mass revocation of legal status could affect more than two million people. That is how many refugees, people on humanitarian parole, DACA recipients, TPS holders and long-waiting visa applicants there are who have so far placed their trust in the promise of the American rule of law.
Under the DACA program, for example, more than 700,000 young people live in the United States who were brought here as children, went to school, earned degrees, work for American companies, pay taxes and have no connection to the criminalization of “illegal immigration.” Yet they could now lose their status and suddenly become removable.
TPS – Temporary Protected Status – was originally created to protect people fleeing natural disasters, civil wars and failed states. Several hundred thousand people from El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela or Ukraine live in the United States under this status, many of them for twenty years. Trump’s policy would criminalize them as well, pushing them into a situation where formerly legal residence instantly turns into “unlawful” status.
In doing so the system creates a kind of passageway, where people can slip not only from legal to illegal status, but from legal protection into punishability, from human dignity into a state of constant threat. Immigration scholars say this is the largest systemic transformation since 1965, when the United States abolished race-based immigration quotas.
The current turn, however, points in the opposite direction: it restricts immigration largely on racial grounds and criminalizes it. The criterion of lawfulness is no longer whether someone has complied with the law, but how the political regime in power chooses to categorize them. Someone who is a taxpayer today can be a defendant tomorrow. A refugee with protected status today can be an “illegal” slated for deportation tomorrow.
The administration has announced plans to review long-standing green cards as well, especially those issued through asylum or refugee pathways. It is also increasing denaturalization cases, reopening the files of people who became citizens years ago and canceling naturalization proceedings for applicants from certain countries deemed “high-risk.”
Most striking is Executive Order 14160, which seeks to end birthright citizenship. Under this order, a child born on U.S. soil would no longer automatically become a citizen unless at least one parent is already a citizen or a lawful permanent resident.
“Changing the interpretation of U.S. citizenship would be by far the most radical thing the Court could do,” Motomura said, after news broke that the Supreme Court had agreed to hear a case to determine whether Trump has the constitutional authority to restrict birthright citizenship.
“What I hear every day is terror, fear, exhaustion and betrayal,” said Adelys Ferro, executive director of the Venezuelan American Caucus. “Families have spent years complying with every requirement. They applied for TPS, obtained work permits, paid taxes and built small businesses. Now they are being told that six hundred thousand lives can collapse overnight.”
Ferro said Venezuelan community hotlines are flooded with the same questions: “What will happen to my children if I lose my work permit? … Should I stop driving because I’m afraid of being pulled over? … What will happen to my children who were born in the United States?” Hundreds of thousands, millions of families who live and work in America lawfully are living in fear.
Jeremiah Johnson, the former immigration judge removed from the bench in San Francisco, described the current situation as a deliberate weakening of due process. “By firing judges, they are getting rid of the people who review lawful status,” Johnson said. “They are turning people who at one time had lawful status into individuals who are suddenly deemed illegal. The judges who protect legality are being fired.”
He said floors of the immigration court where he worked now stand empty. Dozens of judges have been removed and only a handful have been replaced. “It is not hard to imagine a future where major courts are dismantled entirely,” Johnson said. “People will only get their day in court after they have been arrested, often after months in detention.” All this while their detention itself is unlawful.
He explained that detention and expedited removal have become tools used to coerce people into accepting deportation. “People are afraid to seek legal pathways or they are actively discouraged from doing so,” he said. “Removing judges does not bode well.” Along with them, he added, law and justice disappear. What Americans need to understand is that it is only a matter of time before the same thing happens to them.
This policy does not solve the real problems of immigration, but it perfectly serves an ideological narrative: that America can function as a closed, “pure” country free of “outsiders.” In reality, the opposite is true. The U.S. economy is built on millions of immigrants who keep agriculture, major parts of health care and a large share of small businesses running.
Many argue that dismantling legal pathways will not stop migration but will increase the number of people slipping into illegal status, because those who have no legal way to stay do not go home; they disappear “underground.”
To understand this process, political logic alone is not enough. It is also a cultural project. For Trump, immigration is a war over national identity, where the outside world is a threat, the other person is danger, and a refugee is a criminal. In this worldview, the immigrant is not a human being, not a neighbor, not a doctor, not a worker, but something that can be treated as an enemy.
For American democracy, the real danger is not just the number of deportations, but that respect for the law may be replaced by political will, and legal security may no longer protect anyone. That weakens the legal security of Americans themselves as well.
In this sense, what lies ahead of the United States is not simply an immigration debate, but a decision about whether the country will be built on legality and human dignity or on the logic of fear and punishment. The question is not who comes into America. The question is what kind of country will be left if the line is drawn by politics rather than law. And that is no longer just about immigrants or immigration.
It is about freedom and democracy, which are both in growing danger.
