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Trump's immigration orders expected to deter migrants from coming to NY, despite legal fights
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Arya Sundaram
Published Jan 21, 2025
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By
Arya Sundaram
Published Jan 21, 2025
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While many of President Donald Trump’s new executive orders on immigration center on the U.S.-Mexico border, the policy changes could impede family reunification efforts, incite fear in immigrant communities, and hinder industries in New York City and beyond, notwithstanding challenges to enacting the changes, immigration, legal and policy experts said Tuesday.
Trump signed orders declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, seeking to end the admission of refugees and birthright citizenship as well as asserting that the United States can "promptly" deport all immigrants unauthorized to live in the United States.
New York City would also lose federal funding under an executive order calling for the U.S. attorney general and secretary of homeland security to punish "sanctuary" cities and states — that is, withholding federal funds and taking "any other lawful actions, criminal or civil."
But the orders, which in some cases amount to mere policy statements rather than policy blueprints, have already drawn legal challenges and still face logistical, practical and financial challenges, the policy experts told Gothamist.
“We see impediments, we see constraints,” said Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the director of the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program. “But we're also likely to see continuing and ongoing threats that generate fear and uncertainty that is already at a heightened level and that will heighten even further.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin and a coalition of 17 other state attorneys general are suing Trump over his executive order to end birthright citizenship.
James called Trump’s executive order “dangerous” and “unconstitutional” in a statement: “Our constitution is not open to reinterpretation by executive order or presidential decree.”
Separately, Make the Road New York is among three American Civil Liberties Union-backed groups that also suing Trump for the same order.
The right is enshrined in the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War and grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil.
Trump continued to make big promises on Sunday, telling supporters in a rally that “we have to set our country on the proper course. By the time the sun sets tomorrow evening, the invasion of our borders will have come to a halt, and all the illegal border trespassers will, in some form or another, be on their way back home.”
In a statement on Monday night, Gov. Kathy Hochul reaffirmed her support for birthright citizenship, saying it is “key to the fundamental promise of America.”
“New York is prepared to take any action within our power to ensure that those born in our state have all the rights and protections that prior generations of new Americans have been granted,” Hochul added.
At his weekly press conference, Mayor Eric Adams urged undocumented New Yorkers to continue using city services. The Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, in a report from two years ago, estimated that roughly 412,000 undocumented immigrants lived in the city as of 2022.
Adams added that city staffers have undergone "scenario training" for how to handle encounters with immigration officials, and would continue to do so.
The new Trump orders will likely add to the continued decline in the number of new migrants arriving in New York City, according to Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School's immigrants' rights clinic. Trump also ended a parole program that provided a pathway to legal status for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, and shut down an app used to schedule asylum application appointments along the U.S.-Mexico border.
He also reinstated a program, known as “Remain in Mexico,” from his first term requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their immigration hearings in the United States.
But Peter Markowitz, co-director of the Immigration Justice Clinic at Cardozo Law School, said some of Trump’s first-term threats against immigrants without legal status “turned out to be more bark than bite.” He said it could be the same this time around.
For example, eight years ago, Trump issued an executive order — similar to one he signed on Monday — calling for the restriction of funding to sanctuary jurisdictions. That order didn’t have “significant impact,” he said, in part due to legal challenges.
“Whether they're able this time to do what they couldn't do last time is something we need to keep our eyes on,” Markowitz said.
Mass deportations, as Trump has promised, would cost an estimated $88 billion a year, and a loss of 4.2% to 6.8% in the United States' annual GDP, according to an October report by the American Immigration Council.
Mario Russell, executive director of the Center for Migration Studies of New York, called the new executive orders an “enhanced but repeated playbook” from Trump, noting they echoed policies from Trump’s previous stint in the Oval Office.
“People will be terrified to go to work, to go to school, to go to church, to go shopping,” Russell said of the Trump administration’s latest orders. “All these things will have an effect, whether (or not) they're able to do enforcement sweeps or raids in different cities or communities.”
On Monday, acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman revoked a previous rule preventing immigration officers from entering "sensitive" areas, such as schools, churches and hospitals.
Trump’s orders ending birthright citizenship and refugee admissions could prevent family members of those living in New York from reuniting with them, the experts added.
Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, called the orders an “overview of things to come,” as some of the orders call for additional policies to be implemented, including ramped-up deportations and detentions.
The orders “ are intended to send a message about heavy immigration enforcement,” Gelatt said.
Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, decried the orders as unnecessarily cruel and unconstitutional.
“ President Trump does not get to decide who is American enough to deserve U.S. citizenship,” said Awawdeh. “This measure is going to create a generation of second-class citizens.”
Elizabeth Kim contributed additional reporting.
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Arya Sundaram
Arya is a reporter covering race and justice. Got a tip? Email: [email protected] or reach Arya on Signal at 512-650-8767.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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