Trump's Bureaucratic War on Immigrants

DRAMATIC SCENES HAVE come to define the second Donald Trump administration's immigration policy: federal troops patrolling the streets of American cities, agents snatching international students on video, hundreds of Venezuelan migrants disappeared to a brutal Salvadoran prison.

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Behind those scenes, Trump is reshaping the country’s immigration bureaucracy. In just its first 100 days, the second Trump administration had “taken 181 immigration-specific executive actions,” found the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI), “a sixfold increase over the fewer than 30 actions during the same period in Trump's first term.” Visa processing and bureaucratic rulemaking don’t grab as much attention as harsh, highly visible enforcement actions, but they're making it harder for immigrants to work, learn, and live in the United States.

De-Documenting Immigrants

IN OCTOBER, THE Trump administration ended the automatic extension of employment authorization for certain immigrants. "For nearly a decade," U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) "automatically extended work permits for 180 days, which was later increased to 540 days, to provide relief from massive backlogs and delays in government processing," noted American Immigration Lawyers Association President Jeff Joseph. The rule change means that "individuals who have already been deemed legally authorized to work will lose their jobs for no other reason than the government choosing not to process their paperwork in time," argued over 70 members of Congress in a letter to USCIS.

The Trump administration has terminated temporary protected status (TPS) designations meant to help people from several ailing countries, including Venezuela, Nepal, Honduras, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Syria, and South Sudan. That leaves nationals of those countries vulnerable to deportation, and it also effectively turns them into undocumented immigrants without work authorization. Some of those revocations are tied up in the courts. But as of October, over 680,000 individuals living in the U.S. saw their legal status jeopardized by the administration's TPS revocations, according to the National Immigration Forum.

Removing Relief