President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend an indoor Presidential Inauguration parade event in Washington, on January 20, 2025.
| Photo Credit: AP

Donald Trump said Monday (January 20, 2025) he will issue a raft of executive orders aimed at reshaping how the United States deals with citizenship and immigration.

The 47th president will set to work almost immediately with a series of presidential decrees intended to drastically reduce the number of migrants entering the country.

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“First, I will declare a national emergency at our southern border,” Mr. Trump said minutes after his inauguration.

“All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”

He will send troops to the U.S.-Mexico border “to repel the disastrous invasion of our country,” he said.

Mr. Trump, who campaigned on a platform of curbing migration and whose policies are popular with people who fret over changing demographics, also intends to end the centuries-old practice of granting citizenship automatically to anyone born in the United States.

“We’re going to end asylum,” White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly told reporters, and create “an immediate removal process without possibility of asylum. We are then going to end birthright citizenship.”

The U.S. Constitution grants citizenship to anyone born on US soil.

Ms. Kelly said Mr. Trump’s actions will “clarify” the 14th Amendment, which addresses birthright citizenship.

“Federal government will not recognize automatic birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens born in the United States,” she said.

Appointments cancelled

The first effects of Mr. Trump’s stance became apparent minutes after his inauguration when an app unveiled under president Joe Biden to help process migrants went offline.

“Effective January 20, 2025, the functionalities of CBP One that previously allowed undocumented aliens to submit advance information and schedule appointments at eight southwest border ports of entry is no longer available, and existing appointments have been cancelled,” said a notice on the landing page.

U.S. media reported 30,000 people had appointments scheduled.

Mr. Trump’s key adviser and noted immigration hardliner Stephen Miller took to social media to announce that the doors were shut.

“All illegal aliens seeking entry into the United States should turn back now,” he wrote.

“Anyone entering the United States without authorization faces prosecution and expulsion.”

Ms. Kelly said the administration would also reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy that prevailed under Trump’s first administration.

Under that rule, people who apply to enter the United States at the Mexican border were not allowed to do so until their application had been decided.

Court challenges

Ms. Kelly said Donald Trump would seek to use the death penalty against non-citizens who commit capital crimes including murder.

“This is about national security. This is about public safety, and this is about the victims of some of the most violent, abusive criminals we’ve seen enter our country in our lifetime, and it ends today,” she said.

Many of Mr. Trump’s first-term executive actions were rescinded under Biden, including one using so-called Title 42, implemented during the Covid pandemic preventing almost all entry to the country on public health grounds.

The changes under Mr. Biden led to an influx of migrants, with images of thousands of people packing the border area.

Mr. Trump frequently invoked dark imagery about how illegal migration was “poisoning the blood” of the nation, words that were seized upon by opponents as reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

Court challenges

While U.S. presidents enjoy a range of powers, they are not unlimited. Analysts say any effort to alter birthright citizenship will be fraught.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said the 14th Amendment was “crystal clear” in granting citizenship to anyone born in the United States with the exception of children of foreign diplomats.

“We have had birthright citizenship for centuries, and a president cannot take it away with an executive order,” he told AFP. “We expect rapid court challenges.”

Cris Ramon, immigration senior policy advisor at civil rights group UnidosUS, said the administration was “using a ‘throw spaghetti at the wall’ approach.”

“We don’t care whether this is legal or not,” he said of the apparent attitude. “We’re just simply going to do it and see if it survives the courts.”

Panama is on the verge of a dramatic change to its immigration policy that could reverberate from the dense Darien jungle to the U.S. border.

President-elect José Raúl Mulino says he will shut down a migration route used by more than 500,000 people last year. Until now, Panama has helped speedily bus the migrants across its territory so they can continue their journey North.

Whether Mr. Mulino is able to reduce migration through a sparsely populated region with little Government presence remains to be seen, experts say.

“Panama and our Darien are not a transit route. It is our border,” Mr. Mulino said after his victory with 34% of the vote in Sunday’s election was formalised on May 9 evening.

As he had suggested during his campaign, the 64-year-old Lawyer and former security Minister said he would try to end “the Darien odyssey that does not have a reason to exist”.

The migrant route through the narrow isthmus grew exponentially in popularity in recent years with the help of organised crime in Colombia, making it an affordable, if dangerous, land route for hundreds of thousands.

It grew as countries like Mexico, under pressure from the U.S. Government, imposed visa restrictions on various nationalities including Venezuelans and just this week Peruvians in an attempt to stop migrants flying into the country just to continue on to the U.S. border.

But masses of people took the challenge and set out on foot through the jungle-clad Colombian-Panamanian border. A crossing that initially could take a week or more eventually was whittled down to two or three days as the path became more established and entrepreneurial locals established a range of support services.

It remains a risky route, however. Reports of sexual assaults have continued to rise, some migrants are killed by bandits in robberies and others drown trying to cross rushing rivers.

Migrants dead, missing after boat capsizes off Panama coast

Even so, some 147,000 migrants have already entered Panama through Darien this year.

Previous attempts to close routes around the world have simply shifted traffic to riskier paths.

“People migrate for many reasons and frequently don’t have safe, orderly and legal ways to do it,” said Giuseppe Loprete, chief of mission in Panama for the UN’s International Organisation for Immigration.

“When the legal routes are not accessible, migrants run the risk of turning to criminal networks, traffickers and dangerous routes, tricked by disinformation.” Loprete said the UN agency’s representatives in Panama would meet with Mr. Mulino’s team once its member are named to learn the specifics of the president’s plans.

If Mr. Mulino could be even partially effective, it could produce a notable, but likely temporary, impact. As with the visa restrictions that unintentionally steered migrants to the overland route through Panama, if the factors pushing migrants to leave their countries remain they will find other routes. One could be the dangerous sea routes from Colombia to Panama.

In a local radio interview on May 9, Mr. Mulino said the idea of shutting down the migration flow is more philosophical than a physical obstacle.

“Because when we start to deport people here in an immediate deportation plan the interest for sneaking through Panama will decrease,” he said. By the time the fourth plane loaded with migrants takes off, “I assure you they are going to say that going through Panama is not attractive because they are deporting you.” Julio Alonso, a Panamanian security expert, said what Mr. Mulino could realistically achieve is unknown.

“This would be a radical change to Panamanian policy in terms of migration to avoid more deaths and organised crime using the route,” he said.

Among the challenges will be how it would work operationally along such an open and uncontrolled border.

“In Panama, there is no kind of suppression with this situation, just free passage, humanitarian aid that didn’t manage to reduce the number of assaults, rapes, homicides and deaths along the Darien route,” Mr. Alonso said.

Mr. Mulino’s proposal is “a dissuasive measure, yes, (but) whether it can be completely executed we will see”.

It’s also unlikely that much could be accomplished without a lot of cooperation and coordination with Colombia and other countries, he said.

Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that “without considering the risk of returning migrants to dangerous situations, in mathematical terms I don’t know how they hope to massively deport” migrants.

“A daily plane, which would be extremely expensive, would only repatriate around 10 per cent of the flow (about 1,000 to 1,200 per day). The United States only manages to do about 130 flights monthly in the entire world,” Mr. Isacson said.