Trump is waging a silent war on legal immigration

When the member states of the United Nations reviewed their Global Compact on Migration earlier this month, one country was conspicuously absent from the discussions: the United States. In a post on X explaining its reasoning, the State Department said it objects to global “efforts to facilitate replacement migration to the United States and our Western allies.” A subsequent post clarified that President Donald Trump’s administration supports “remigration — but not replacement migration.”

If “replacement migration” sounds like a dogwhistle, that’s because it’s one the administration’s loudest ones yet. Such allusions to the “great replacement” — a far-right conspiracy theory that a cabal of global elites is importing people of color to the US as a means of demographic warfare — and support of remigration, the notion that immigrants and their descendants should be returned to their countries of origin regardless of citizenship voluntarily or otherwise, were once limited to the fringes of the far right. Now they are coming from the government itself. (Elon Musk, a longtime proponent of the great replacement theory, applauded the State Department’s “banger thread.”) Eliminating “replacement migration” and pushing “remigration” are hallmarks of Trump’s second-term immigration policy, which has focused on deporting as many people as possible while preventing new immigrants from arriving here.

It’d be easier to ignore if it was just a post on X. But since returning to office, Trump has drastically slashed legal immigration and has worked to strip immigrants of their legal status in pursuit of his mass deportation policy. Where Trump once promised to go after the so-called “bad hombres” coming to the US illegally, Trump’s aggressive second-term immigration policies suggest that all noncitizens are fair game. For years, proponents of hardline immigration policies have said that the problem isn’t immigration itself, just the fact that some people come to America the “wrong” way. But Trump’s crackdown on legal immigration fulfills the far-right’s dream of racial exclusion.

A recent report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that Trump has cut legal immigration more than illegal immigration. Unauthorized migration fell by over 80 percent in the final year of Joe Biden’s term, the report found. By the time Trump was back in the White House, border crossings were already at historic lows — lower, in fact, than when he left office in 2021. The drop in legal immigration, on the other hand, is largely a product of Trump’s own making.

“When he came in, he was really able to do whatever he wanted, because the flows were already so reduced,” David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute and author of the report, told The Verge.

Bier found that 132,000 fewer people are being admitted to the US each month under Trump. And unlike Trump’s suspension of asylum at the border — which a federal appeals court recently ruled illegal — the sharp reduction in legal immigration isn’t the product of a single policy. While much of the public’s attention is on the Department of Homeland Security’s shock-and-awe raids in American cities, the Trump administration has waged a quiet war on legal immigration through a patchwork of executive orders and regulatory changes.

The first year of Trump’s second term in office saw a net decline in migration for the first time in decades. Population growth slowed as a result, according to Census Bureau data. The decline in net migration will weaken the economy, according to researchers at the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, both of which lean right. “Such weakness is the new normal under the current immigration policy,” the report found, “rather than weakness reflecting adverse business cycle conditions.”

Migration numbers will likely drop further in 2026. Last December, Trump banned the issuance of immigrant visas to nationals of 40 countries, including the Palestinian territories, to “prevent national security and public safety threats from reaching our borders.” The White House claimed that these nations, most of which were in Africa, had “deficient screening and vetting information” for prospective emigrants. The ban affected 20 percent of all visa applicants, and didn’t include a waiver for the spouses, minor children, or parents of US citizens and permanent residents. The White House also implemented a ban on non-immigrant visas — such as those issued to tourists or students — for nationals of some of the affected countries, including Nigeria and Venezuela.

In January, the administration suspended immigrant visas for 75 countries (some of which were already affected by the previous ban), claiming that people from them were “nationalities at high risk of public benefits usage” and would thus be a burden on US taxpayers. “We are working to ensure that the generosity of the American people will no longer be abused,” the State Department said in a post on X.

The administration’s rationale for this latter ban was the public charge rule, which originated in the 19th century. Since 1882, US law has denied entry to prospective immigrants deemed “unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” The statutory language has changed since then, but the practice remains — and has expanded under Trump, who has a habit of using very old legislation as threadbare justification for his new policies.

This ban affected nearly half of all applicants, according to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of organizations led by the Catholic Legal Immigration Network. They alleged that the visa suspension was “based on unsupported and demonstrably false claims that the nationals of the covered countries migrate to the United States to improperly rely on cash welfare.” In fact, many immigrants are ineligible for such benefits. The suit also claimed that the State Department implemented “new, discriminatory rules” regarding public charge that broke from established precedent.

More recently, the State Department ordered consular officers abroad to ask visa applicants whether they fear going back to their home country. This change was implemented after a federal court determined that the Trump administration’s shutdown of asylum at the southern border was illegal. To obtain humanitarian protections like asylum, a person must prove that they face persecution in their country due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.

Since April, consular officers have been instructed to ask all visa applicants two questions: “Have you experienced harm or mistreatment in your country of nationality or last habitual residence?” and “Do you fear harm or mistreatment in returning to your country of nationality or permanent residence?” If a person says yes to either, their visa is denied. If they say no and later ask for asylum in the US, their previous statements can be used against them in deportation hearings.

“They’re trying to systematically demolish any means by which a persecuted person could seek protection and safety in the United States,” Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International, told The Washington Post, which first reported on the new policy. Refugee admissions are also down, dropping by 90 percent in Trump’s second term, according to the Cato report. Trump set the cap on refugee resettlement for the 2026 fiscal year to just 7,500 people. The administration is reportedly considering doubling that number — but only for the benefit of one group. According to documents obtained by The New York Times, the Trump administration is hoping to resettle more white Afrikaners in the United States. Since Trump’s return to office, members of the white South African minority are effectively the only group to be resettled in the United States.

Trump’s attacks on legal immigration don’t just affect people seeking to travel or migrate to the United States. The first visa ban, which was issued under a national security rationale, has also led to the pausing or reversal of work authorizations for some immigrants already living in the United States. One cancer researcher from Myanmar, who has lived in the country since 2016, told NPR she is now unable to work as a result. A medical student originally from Nigeria who has been in the US since 2011 can no longer fulfill her surgery residency. Like the fee increase for H-1B visas to $100,000, the travel ban is preventing immigrants from working in key industries, many of which are facing labor shortages.

The administration has also stripped immigrants of their legal status. In April, the Supreme Court heard arguments over Trump’s decision to rescind Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Syria and Haiti. TPS is a conditional shield from deportation issued to nationals of certain countries after emergencies, such as armed conflicts or natural disasters. For example, after the Obama administration designated TPS for those affected by the Syrian civil war, Syrians already present in the US could apply for TPS to obtain a work permit and be shielded from deportation. Unlike asylum and refugee status, TPS doesn’t lead to a green card or path to citizenship. Like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — another policy the Trump administration has sought to end — TPS is a sort of legal limbo, albeit one that provides a modicum of stability for immigrants who would otherwise be undocumented.

Trump’s efforts to rescind TPS and terminate DACA are part of a broader effort to expand the pool of who is deportable. “The narrative that has been put forth by the administration is, ‘We’re going to go after criminals, we’re going to go after people who are here without authorization,’” Astrid Liden, a communications officer at the Hope Border Institute, told The Verge. In reality, she said, the policy is, “We’re going to go after those without authorization, but if you have authorization, we’re going to take it away to make you deportable.”

Asylum agents with US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles legal immigration, has been instructed to find evidence of rampant fraud within the asylum system, one former employee told The New Yorker — and were chastised when their research proved the opposite. Under Trump, the budget for USCIS’s Fraud Detection and National Security division more than doubled. USCIS has indefinitely frozen green card processing for nationals of countries subject to travel bans, and the agency has begun retroactively stripping refugees of their status once they apply for permanent residency.

Administration officials have signaled that these policies will soon expand beyond noncitizens. At the recent Border Security Expo in Phoenix, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the administration will aggressively pursue denaturalization cases. The New York Times reported that the Department of Justice is aiming to strip 200 people of their citizenship each month. Trump’s attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship via executive order was taken up by the Supreme Court last month. If the administration succeeds, it would leave hundreds of thousands of children essentially stateless upon birth — and immediately eligible for deportation.

Bier, of the Cato Institute, said that eliminating birthright citizenship would also make it easier to deport immigrants who can no longer ask for relief because they’re the parents of US citizen children. And it would make it harder for anyone to use their birth certificate as proof of US citizenship. Even now, proof of citizenship isn’t enough to prevent Americans from being arrested by ICE. Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a US citizen who was born in Florida, has been detained by DHS three times in the past year, according to ProPublica. Garcia Venegas, who has since filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration ordering ICE to stop raids in his area, is reportedly considering moving to his family’s home in Mexico. “I just want to live in peace,” he told the outlet.

The administration has acknowledged that DHS occasionally arrests US citizens — and officials have doubled down. “I’m not going to do anything to not arrest US citizens,” Customs and Border Protection chief Rodney Scott said at the border security conference. “Because we arrest criminals, period.”

That’s the crux of remigration: to make life so unbearable for immigrants and their children that they “choose” to leave.

“It’s all connected. They don’t want people to come here legally, because if they come here legally, then they won’t be able to be deported as easily. And getting rid of people’s legal status — whether it’s Temporary Protected Status or parole, or whatever temporary visas they have — that’s an essential component of increasing the number of arrests and deportations,” Bier said. “That is the core of their strategy: ramping up these arrests and making it more difficult for people to stay here.”