Trump Takes Aim at Legal Immigration

The former president and his allies, who often decry undocumented immigrants, are targeting programs that allow millions of people to enter the country lawfully.

Former President Donald J. Trump, who is seeking re-election on the same hard line against undocumented immigrants that helped carry him to power in 2016, has said he is not opposed to legal immigration into the United States.

But remarks this week by the former president and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, signal that a second Trump administration would again aim to curb the legal channels that allow people to enter the country or obtain protection from deportation once inside its borders.

In an interview with NewsNation on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump said he would revoke a program that allows tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants to live in the country legally.

The statement came as Mr. Trump has disparaged a Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, and falsely accused people there of killing and eating pets. At the vice-presidential debate a day earlier, Mr. Vance suggested that a Trump White House would also eliminate a program that allows undocumented immigrants to apply for asylum once they are in immigration proceedings in the United States.

The program allows migrants to use an app to secure legal status “at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand,” Mr. Vance said.

Biden administration officials and immigration lawyers argue that the initiatives help provide orderly pathways into the country at a time when global migration has hit record high levels and U.S. immigration officers have grappled with large numbers of people arriving at the nation’s southern border.

Mr. Trump has not drawn distinctions between legal and illegal immigration as he pledges to revive, expand and toughen some of the hard-line policies he pursued while he was in the White House. He has also said he plans to reinstate a ban on travelers from some countries with Muslim-majority populations and to broaden it to include refugees from the Gaza Strip.

He and his allies argue that the legal immigration programs created by the Biden administration are being abused and allow immigrants into the country who would otherwise be turned away. In an email, Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, defended Mr. Trump’s stance, saying the initiative that has given at least 200,000 Haitians legal status since 2010 — known as the Temporary Protected Status — had run its course.

“Temporary Protected Status is by definition a TEMPORARY program. Under the Trump Administration, Haitian ILLEGAL immigrants will be returned to their home country,” Ms. Leavitt said.

The campaign pledges are a continuation of the policies that Mr. Trump tried to enact while in office. At the time, Trump administration officials tended to use executive orders and policy memos to make administrative changes, but their efforts were often blocked by the courts.

Mr. Trump’s allies have suggested they have learned lessons about how to use the regulatory process to enact those moves instead. Some federal judges might also be more receptive to such actions in the wake of several cases that have been decided by conservative-leaning courts and have altered precedent case law since Mr. Trump left office.

“It is going to be a real mixed bag in how courts respond to these kinds of lawsuits,” said Sharvari Dalal-Dheini, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, citing one Supreme Court case in particular that has given courts more power over federal agencies to interpret immigration law.

During Mr. Trump’s presidency, his administration banned travel from some countries, most with Muslim-majority populations; reduced the number of people allowed into the United States as refugees; narrowed legal paths to asylum; and tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which provides temporary relief from deportation for immigrants brought into the country illegally as children.

As the coronavirus pandemic shut borders around the world, Mr. Trump intensified the crackdowns on immigration, using a little-known public health rule to immediately expel nearly all people arriving at the nation’s southern border and reducing the numbers of people who could obtain green cards and some temporary visas.

Trump administration officials also “made all kinds of small and low-level changes to increase vetting, increase denials and slow immigration,” said Julia Gelatt, an associate director at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. Temporary visa and green card applicants, for example, were asked to come in for more interviews and repeatedly photographed.

The Trump administration tried to cut Temporary Protected Status for migrants from Haiti and other countries like Nicaragua, Sudan and El Salvador before. But courts temporarily blocked the effort. The Biden administration renewed the Haitian immigrants’ status and greatly expanded the program’s use after he took office in 2021.

Supporters of the status for Haitians say conditions in Haiti have only continued to deteriorate. Terminating the protections would strip more than 100,000 people of lawful status and work authorization, including many who have lived in the United States for decades and have American spouses and children, lawyers said.

“There is no justification for inflicting such cruelty on that community, but it is consistent with Trump’s long history of racism against Haitians and other immigrants,” said Ahilan T. Arulanantham, a director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, which brought the lawsuit against Mr. Trump’s attempt to end the status for Haitians.

Mr. Trump’s denigration of Haitians is part of a longtime pattern that appears to have its roots in the early 1980s, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stigmatized Haitians as a threat in the spread of AIDS, which was a newly discovered disease.

Mr. Trump and his allies see the hard-line stance on immigration as a winning issue in November, as more Americans, including many Democrats and Latinos, support restrictive measures on immigration, including mass deportations.

Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, has also backed tougher measures on more recent migrants arriving at the nation’s southern border. She has pledged to sign legislation that would pour more money into border enforcement and has said she would keep in place Mr. Biden’s far-reaching restrictions on asylum that have led to a significant drop in illegal crossings into the United States.

On Friday, the Biden administration made clear that migrants who arrived through the temporary entry program would need to find another way to stay in the country long-term, such as obtaining asylum or legal status through family.

Mr. Trump and his allies have escalated their criticism of temporary protections and entry programs for migrants as President Biden has expanded their use.

As the number of crossings reached records during the first three years of Mr. Biden’s tenure, his administration extended temporary protected status to more migrants, started allowing migrants to make appointments at border crossings through an app known as CBP One. They also began parole processes allowing Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to lawfully enter the country on commercial flights if they had financial sponsors.

Current and former federal officials say the Biden administration’s actions have helped ensure more migrants are properly vetted. U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures show the total number of people removed and returned to their home countries over the past year has been more than in any fiscal year since 2010.

Through the end of August, nearly 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans had been granted temporary entry through the new processes.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance have continued to criticize the policies. In another interview with Fox News last week, Mr. Trump promised to revoke the app and the entry programs, claiming that planes “loaded up with illegal migrants” were going to the Midwest and other places.

“Because everything is now a border state,” he said.