Trump's Inauguration

What to expect on Don's first day in office

- T K VINEETH @Kochi

Donald Trump is all set to hit the ground running by signing a flurry of sweeping executive orders on his first day as the 47th President of the United States. Policy experts and lawyers in his team are reportedly ready with the drafts of a plethora of orders to be signed by him on January 20, when he will legally take charge as president.

The most disruptive among the first batch of orders to be inked is the fiat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. The drastic plan, reiterated by Trump multiple times and confirmed by incoming White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt as recently as last week, envisages "the largest mass deportation of illegal immigrants in American history". The proposed action would dwarf the so-called Mexican Repatriation executed during the Great Depression in the 1930s by the then president, Herbert Hoover, when nearly 2 million people of Mexican descent, half of them born in the U.S., were rounded up and driven out.

If Hoover then blamed the immigrants for the economic downturn that set off severe unemployment and poverty, Trump now associates the undocumented with rising crimes and social unrest in the country.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, there were around 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. without legal status in 2022. Immigration analysts believe that number would have grown significantly by now due to the record number of border crossings in the past four years under the Joe Biden administration. Some of the recent immigrants were found to have criminal antecedents. It is them that Trump is expected to target first. Declaring a national emergency on border security is also on the cards.