U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and federal officers detain a migrant as he walks out from a hearing during targeted detainment at a U.S. immigration court in New York City, U.S., October 27.David Dee Delgado/Reuters
U.S. President Donald Trump is expanding his crackdown on foreign nationals, announcing a series of measures that would further limit legal immigration and make it harder to visit the country as a tourist.
Mr. Trump has frozen all asylum applications, shut down immigration from 19 countries and promised to review cases of people who have already received asylum, after last month’s arrest of an Afghan national in the killing of a National Guard member and critical wounding of another.
This week, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled a proposal to oblige citizens of 42 countries in a U.S. visa-waiver program – including Britian, France and Australia – to submit five years’ worth of social-media activity and the addresses of family members before entering the U.S.
The administration is also continuing its steady rollback of temporary protected status, signalling Friday that Ethiopian citizens will be the next group to lose the designation.
While Mr. Trump has mostly focused his immigration clampdown and rhetoric on those who entered the country illegally, the recent moves represent a sweeping effort to also curb those trying to come to the U.S. lawfully.
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At a congressional hearing this week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem doubled down on Mr. Trump’s promise to roll back humanitarian parole, which has allowed people potentially vulnerable to persecution to come to the U.S.
“Millions more in our country were exploited and were brought in under parole programs without even basic vetting,” during Joe Biden’s presidency, she said.
At the hearing, of the House committee on Homeland Security, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, suggested that the administration aims to deport everyone who entered the U.S. under parole programs during Mr. Biden’s time in office.
“We simply cannot go back and retroactively vet these millions of folks who came in under Joe Biden. We have to locate them, and we have to deport them as soon as we possibly can,” he said.
Mr. Kent indicated that “2-to-2.7-million folks from Muslim countries” who entered the U.S. during that time are of particular concern.
In a series of reports, the Office of Inspector General, a U.S. government oversight body, found gaps in the screening of Afghans who came in under the 2021 program. But it did not find that there was no vetting and, earlier this year, lauded the FBI for screening Afghans for potential national-security threats.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the 29-year-old Afghan accused in the National Guard shooting case, is a former member of an Afghan counterterrorism unit that worked with the CIA. He came to the U.S. in 2021 under a Biden administration parole program and was granted asylum this year under the Trump administration.
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In the wake of the shooting, Mr. Trump announced that the U.S. would indefinitely pause the immigration process for everyone from any of the 19 countries he had already placed under a travel ban. These include Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Haiti, Venezuela, Somalia and Cuba. This blocks anyone from these places from applying for asylum, a green card, work permits or any other form of immigration.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also stopped all processing of asylum claims from all countries. And the administration has floated reopening the cases of people already granted asylum or refugee status.
Anam Petit, a Virginia-based immigration lawyer, said the U.S. government currently doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle everything the administration is proposing. Both the departments of State and Homeland Security are involved in processing cases, while the Department of Justice adjudicates deportation requests. They already face backlogs that mean cases can take years to complete.
“All of these different departments and systems are implicated by the sweeping changes this administration is making. All of them would need to increase their resources, their personnel, their budget to still be able to adjudicate cases in a way that doesn’t result in a black hole or a crazy backlog,” said Ms. Petit.
Ms. Petit was one of nearly 100 immigration judges fired by the Trump administration this year, adding further delays. There are currently nearly four million deportation cases pending in court, plus more than 11 million cases being decided by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration.
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This week, Homeland Security published the proposed rule change for citizens of the 42 visa-waiver countries. In addition to social-media history, it would require them to give the U.S. government every e-mail address and phone number used in the past decade.
The list includes most European countries, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. Canadian citizens, who are under a different visa-free entry policy, would not be affected. The department is currently gathering feedback on the rule.
On Friday, Ms. Noem issued a draft decision that, when published officially, will take away temporary protected status for people from Ethiopia. Over the past year, the administration has already ended it for nationals from Haiti, Venezuela, Myanmar, South Sudan and Syria.
Hidetaka Hirota, an immigration historian at the University of California, Berkeley, said Mr. Trump’s country-specific restrictions resemble U.S. policies from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
He pointed to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Immigration Act of 1917, which barred immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and most other parts of Asia; and the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited immigration from Italy, Greece and Eastern European countries.
It was not until 1965 that the U.S. abolished these country-based quotas.
“The core concept here is the racial hierarchy of desirability. Some immigrants are more welcome than others and some immigrants are more undesirable than others,” Prof. Hirota said.
At a rally this week, Mr. Trump lamented that too many immigrants to the U.S. come from African countries and not enough from Nordic ones.
“Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden,” he said. “But we always take people from Somalia. Places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”