President Donald Trump returned to office last month with a major show of force on immigration, issuing numerous orders and directives to dramatically crack down on enforcement.
They’ve sparked glee from his supporters, condemnation from his opponents, fear from immigrant communities amid nationwide raids — and also plenty of false alarms.
The flurry of new policies — some pushing long-held legal boundaries — are part of a “shock and awe” strategy meant to amplify the promises of a military-assisted mass deportation, experts said. Among the administration’s goals is for fearful immigrants to “voluntarily depart.”
“The big issue is this basically full-court press (from the administration) on immigration enforcement and the fear it’s generated,” said UC Davis immigration law professor Kevin Johnson. The fear "probably is the biggest impact of all.”
The uncertainty over immigrants’ futures has led communities to question whether workers should continue to show up to businesses, children to school and patients to doctors’ offices — and whether there will be economic disruptions and school funding consequences as a result.
Many immigrants are staying home. Others have little choice but to continue their routines.
In Kern County, an immigrant citrus picker who spoke on the condition that her name not be used because she fears deportation said like many of her coworkers, she stayed home for a day in the wake of a Border Patrol operation last month — conducted before Trump took office — that seemed to target farmworkers.
But she has bills to pay, so she’s continued going to work and sending her child to daycare. Rumors of immigration authority sightings have also continued to spread, including one that prompted the contractor she works for to keep her crew in the orange grove at the end of a recent workday. The contractor didn’t release them to go home until checking that the roads were clear, she said.
“Everybody goes out with fear,” she said. “But one has needs. And my needs are bigger than the fear.”
Trump’s actions have the potential to drastically remake the immigration landscape. Here’s what’s changed so far and how California is responding.
Targeting birthright citizenship
One of Trump’s first-day executive orders sought to end the century-plus-old practice of granting citizenship to all children born on U.S. soil even if their parents are undocumented. Courts have affirmed the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship since 1898, in the case of a San Francisco man whose parents were from China.
Two federal judges, responding to separate lawsuits, quickly halted the order.
A third lawsuit, brought by 18 states including California and the city of San Francisco, was heard in a Massachusetts federal court last Friday. Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office says the executive order would strip citizenship rights from about 24,500 children who are born in California each year.
Expanding ICE’s reach
The administration has directed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to expand use of a process called “expedited removal”: deportations that are allowed to bypass immigration courts, where a judge would normally decide the merit of allowing someone to stay in the country. In the past, immigrants without legal status and who did not make an asylum claim could be placed in this process if they were arrested within 14 days of entering the country, and within 100 miles of the border.
That already covered most of California. The new order expands the process to the entire country, and to immigrants arrested within two years of entering.
“That could have a huge effect” on the number of people authorities can arrest and put in the fast-tracked deportation process far from the border, said UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham.
Immigration courts have a longstanding backlog that in late 2024 rose to 3.5 million cases.
Other Trump actions could also dramatically increase those cases:
- He revoked a policy prohibiting agents from making arrests in “sensitive locations” such as churches, schools and hospitals;
- And he signed the Laken Riley Act, a GOP bill that had some Democratic support, directing ICE to detain and deport immigrants who are charged — not just convicted — with certain crimes.
Experts say much of how this is carried out still depends on how much Congress is willing to allow ICE to spend. The agency, which operates on about $9 billion a year, estimates it needs $27 billion to carry out the Laken Riley Act, NPR has reported.
The reach of ICE’s recent activity is also unclear. The agency in the last week of January posted daily arrest numbers on the social media platform X, showing nationwide an average of about 800 arrests a day. That’s far higher than daily arrests during the Biden administration, which averaged about 300 in 2024, according to ICE.
But it’s not clear how many people have been held in detention, released with immigration court cases pending, or deported: ICE spokesperson Richard Beam said those figures aren’t available, nor was a state-by-state breakdown.
The agency also would not provide figures of how many of those arrested have the criminal convictions the administration says it’s targeting. An NBC News report in late January found for one of the days, nearly half of those arrested were nonviolent offenders or had no criminal record.
Cancelling legal immigration paths
In addition to targeting immigrants without legal status, Trump is revoking pathways for immigrants to arrive legally, often on humanitarian grounds.
Trump suspended refugee admissions in one Day One order. In other actions, he’s gone after the temporary legal statuses of immigrants whom the Biden administration allowed to enter. Trump’s administration has called those statuses another way to allow illegal immigration under the guise of government support.
For example, his Homeland Security department canceled the temporary status of about 300,000 Venezuelans that had allowed them protections from deportation and work permits. That status, intended to protect people from tumultuous home countries, expires in April, and another 250,000 protected Venezuelans’ status expires in September.
The administration also is preparing, according to the New York Times, to strip the temporary legal status of immigrants from four countries (Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti) that the Biden administration had allowed to enter — and gain work permits — if they found American sponsors, as a way to curb illegal border crossings.
Similarly, on Day One, Trump ended a Biden-era program allowing migrants at the border to schedule appointments to be temporarily allowed into the U.S. with work permits while they wait for immigration cases to be decided.
Because many of those immigrants are newer arrivals, Kathleen Bush-Joseph, policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute said, they’re particularly likely to be put in the fast-tracked deportation process.
Trying to secure local cooperation
The administration is again trying to overturn local and state sanctuary laws, meaning we’re likely to see a return to the California-versus-federal showdown from the first Trump administration on how much the state can be required to help immigration agents.
Those fights, Arulanantham said, “really are fundamental to balance of power between the federal government and states with respect to how immigration enforcement plays out on the ground.”
From the arresting immigration agents to the detention bed space to the judges considering whether to order deportations, the Trump administration doesn’t have nearly the capacity to carry out the level of crackdown he vows.
So his orders seek to sign on more local police as partners in the effort. The administration is also suing Chicago and Cook County over their non-cooperation policies, accusing the cities of “thwarting” enforcement, and has threatened to prosecute local officials who fail to cooperate with immigration agents.
On her first day as attorney general, Pam Bondi ordered the Justice Department to once again pause grants for sanctuary cities and states. That could include California, which in 2017 passed a law barring police and sheriffs from arresting or detaining immigrants on behalf of federal agents.
In the previous iteration of this standoff, California won in court when the federal government tried to withhold funding. On Friday, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties renewed the fight, suing Trump over his latest threats.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Friday said he hadn’t seen any interruptions to grants yet, but “if that happens, we will sue.”
California conservative sheriffs are now in an odd position between a blue state and a red federal administration. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, in a video Thursday, sought to quell fears and “misinformation” among constituents that his agency was involved in immigration enforcement. Yet in the same video, he said he hoped to assist ICE “within the confines of the sanctuary state laws” with arresting undocumented immigrants who are being held in his jails.
California’s response
The Legislature recently passed $50 million in a special session Gov. Gavin Newsom called to help “Trump-proof” the state — $25 million for the state Department of Justice to sue the federal administration on a variety of matters including immigration, and $25 million toward legal aid to represent immigrants in deportation proceedings.
Democratic lawmakers have introduced a series of bills seeking to discourage the presence of immigration authorities near or at schools.
Newsom has scaled back his own criticisms of the president in recent weeks as he seeks to secure federal wildfire aid.
Bonta has continued to push back with a series of press statements encouraging immigrants to know their rights, and advising school employees they don’t have to assist immigration agents in apprehending immigrant students.
California notched some big wins in court opposing many policies during the last Trump administration, including halting the Muslim ban and Trump’s efforts to undo temporary legal status for immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
But Bush-Joseph noted the Supreme Court in 2023 limited the states’ powers to challenge presidential immigration policies when Texas and other red states tried to sue Biden.
“The inverse can be true under the Trump administration if blue states try to bring lawsuits,” Bush-Joseph said.
