WASHINGTON — A day after President Trump issued 11 executive orders cracking down on illegal immigration, advocates and a coalition of states led by California are preparing for court battles against an administration that appears to have learned from previous legal missteps made during his first term.
Among the many sweeping changes in Trump’s orders were the declaration of a national emergency at the southern border, the revocation of birthright citizenship and the designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
Immigrants and those who hoped to immigrate to the U.S. are reeling from the news. Thousands of migrants are indefinitely stranded in Mexico after Trump ended use of a phone app and canceled long-standing appointments by asylum seekers for legal entry. Afghan refugees who had been cleared for travel to the United States are now in limbo after Trump paused refugee resettlement. Undocumented immigrants in Chicago and other cities across the country stayed home out of fear of planned immigration raids.
Legal experts said subtle modifications to some of the orders reflected attempts by the Trump administration to beat back legal challenges preemptively.
“Some of this stuff they have done is to try and preempt a lot of the issues that they bumped into last time,” said Amy Fischer, director of the refugee and migrant rights program at Amnesty International USA.
Opponents of Trump’s orders wasted no time in challenging them. A coalition comprising California, 17 other states, the District of Columbia and the city of San Francisco sued the federal government Tuesday over Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, calling it unconstitutional and asking the court to block it from taking effect.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued Monday night over the birthright citizenship order and submitted a legal filing in an ongoing case over the cancellation of appointments for asylum seekers at the border. Nayna Gupta, policy director at the left-leaning American Immigration Council, said the organization is also planning a lawsuit this week against Trump’s use of executive authority to “suspend the entry” of certain immigrants when doing so is deemed to be detrimental to national interests.
The ability to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border is suspended, according to Trump’s order, “until I issue a finding that the invasion at the southern border has ceased.”
“Trump’s barrage of executive orders is calculated to create fear, create chaos, induce anxiety and drive our elected officials to capitulate and collaborate in a mass deportation agenda,” said Naureen Shah, deputy director of government affairs at the ACLU. “If we let Trump exert this kind of death grip over our communities now for immigration enforcement, we fear it will embolden Trump to come again and again for our civil rights.”
Longtime critics of illegal immigration hailed the president’s actions. “Thanks to Donald Trump, America’s borders are about to get a lot more secure,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) said in a post on X. Issa’s district runs along the border east of San Diego.
Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement that “nothing exemplifies a new day in America more than President Trump’s unwavering commitment to border security and restoring enforcement of our nation’s laws.”
Some of Trump’s orders are predicated on what opponents contend to be legally dubious claims. Birthright citizenship, for example, is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
“He cannot unilaterally change that,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said Monday night on CNN. “But that’s the conversation — the chaos — he wants to create.”
And in designating drug cartels as terrorist groups, Trump is preparing to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against them. But utilizing the law would require courts to agree that criminal groups can be considered a nation at war with the United States. The Alien Enemies Act allows the president to arrest, imprison or deport immigrants from a country considered an enemy of the U.S. during wartime.
“Whether this is a war or there’s an invasion is going to be subject to litigation, and there is good law on the side against the president on this,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
But challenging some of Trump’s policies will be a challenge in itself. Fischer, of Amnesty International, said it’s harder to cleanly pick apart policies that are laid out in executive orders that overlap and rely on one another.
Other aspects of the orders have less conclusive legal precedent. Fischer pointed to the pause on refugee admissions, something Trump did during his first presidency. This time, the executive order calls for a report to be sent within 90 days to the president by immigration officials detailing whether resumption of refugee processing “would be in the interests of the United States.”
Tom Jawetz, a former senior attorney at the Homeland Security Department under the Biden administration, said Trump’s new administration is being both more cautious and more aggressive than last time. The policies he implemented before, such as Remain in Mexico, could be carried out more quickly and possibly more effectively. Under that policy, asylum seekers must stay across the border as their cases are being adjudicated.
But the more “exotic” provisions of some executive orders are largely legally untested, Jawetz said. Trump said during his inaugural address that he would deploy the military to the border region to combat illegal immigration.
“Aligning the mission of the U.S. military to border security, combined with a national emergency declaration and all of this invasion rhetoric, taken to the extreme, could be completely unprecedented and transformative,” Jawetz said.
Trump’s opponents are waiting to see the written policies that emerge from the executive orders. Litigation strategy will come down to how the orders are implemented, Jawetz said.
Some of those policies started trickling out Tuesday. In a news release, the Homeland Security Department announced that acting Secretary Benjamine Huffman had issued a directive ending the broad use of temporary humanitarian programs, which under then-President Biden were expanded to give legal protection to 1.5 million immigrants. Another directive rescinds long-standing guidelines that prevent immigration enforcement in sensitive locations, such as hospitals and churches.
“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest. The Trump administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense,” the release states.
Times staff writer Rachel Uranga in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
