Lavanya Ramanathan: What were some of the themes you saw among voters on immigration during the 2024 campaign?
Nicole Narea: 2020 was a totally different environment. Biden was running on a pretty progressive immigration platform that immigrant advocates were instrumental in crafting. He campaigned on that actively, and at that point, that's what voters wanted.
But there has been a huge shift in voter perception over the course of the last four years, partially due to a changing situation on the border; there were record-high apprehensions on the border.
Those have since come down, especially throughout 2024, which I think is important to mention. But that helped fuel the Republican narrative of chaos, which is really nothing new, but I think it resonated with people in a way that it hadn't before.
Also, Republican governors were sending migrants to blue cities, and that made the issue perhaps more real to Democrats in a way that it hadn't been before. There were cities like Philadelphia and New York that suddenly were struggling to find housing for these migrants and provide them with the resources they needed.
All those things together have led to a decrease in support for immigration. But I think there's some level of conflict about this in the public mind. We do see rising support for mass deportations, but then at the same time, you see people support a pathway to citizenship for people who've been here for a long time.
In the first Trump administration, we definitely saw the left mobilizing against his policies. Some of the new policies of this second Trump administration promise to be just as bad in terms of human impact.
You’re talking about family separations. Can you remind us about what happened with that particularly controversial Trump administration policy? And you’ve written that we might well see separations happen again this term, if Trump carries out his mass deportations plans.
Over 5,000 families were separated over the course of a few years. This was seen as sort of a policy of deterrence because if families were being separated, maybe fewer people would want to come. We now know that was deliberate on their part.
There are still many families that haven't been reunited. There's a real human cost to that, like, obviously, huge psychological damage. There were studies that came out around the time that family separations were happening, showing the long-term trauma that it wreaked. So, 2018 America was appalled.
Would 2024 America be appalled by a similarly controversial policy? I think mass deportations is a perfect example.
We just don't know what mass deportations are going to look like, or if they are as invasive as perhaps they promise to be. JD Vance says that he wants to deport, at least initially, a million people a year. That’s not just criminals. We're talking about a much broader population. And there's a huge population of mixed-status families in the US: undocumented immigrants who have US-citizen children.
So there is a universe where these families are being broken apart because parents are being deported and the children stay in the US. Maybe they're cared for by a relative or they go into social services. We don't really know what that universe looks like. It's just how willing the Trump administration would be to go after these families.
Who are going to be the architects of Trump's immigration policy going into the next term?
The two big names are probably Stephen Miller, who's already been appointed to a senior role in the second Trump White House, and Tom Homan, who has been named the border czar. Miller was seen as the architect of the first Trump administration's immigration policies and has been working with America First Legal, which is a MAGA-adjacent legal organization, contemplating potential things he could invoke in the law. For example, there's the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, the authority that Trump is trying to use to enact mass deportations.
There are a lot of question marks ahead, but immigration is actually one area where I think we've seen Trump’s rhetoric and policy in action. We saw it in a very high-profile way during his first term. There's a little more clarity on what is possible, right?
When people think of the policies that really defined the first Trump administration, it was family separation, the travel ban, maybe the “remain in Mexico” policy, but there were also ways, through regulatory processes, that Trump sought to really reshape the way immigration works in this country. That’s something that I'm going to be trying to keep an eye on going forward. For example, there are a lot of people here who rely on worker visas, and there was a shift that Trump began in his first term toward "merit-based immigration" and not wanting to allow people to come through their families. Trump — and in a way that has been continued by Biden — also sought to make it harder to seek asylum in the US.
Another big question is, what happens to some of these temporary legal status programs like DACA, TPS, and other temporary humanitarian protections, because Trump has identified DACA as a target.
There are so many ways that Republicans could try to reshape the immigration system through regulations that may fall under the radar but really represent a kind of seismic shift in the way that America welcomes immigrants.
Finally, what are some of the checks and balances that could exist for these policies? And how effective do we think the 2024 courts could be in checking some of them and their constitutionality?
I think it's a big question mark in general with the Trump administration right now. In reporting on birthright citizenship, I ran up against this issue of legal experts saying, "Well, this is just totally out of step with existing precedent and the Constitution."
But there is a question of whether there are conservative judges who are willing to overturn that precedent and interpret the law in a new way. I don't think we know what the Supreme Court is going to be willing to do.
