By Dan GoodingShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberThe Trump administration is coming under increasing pressure to clarify just what its immigration policies are, after mixed messages from the president and his team and a lack of clarity over a legal immigration system many see as broken.
As President Donald Trump reaches ten months in the White House for the second time, his efforts to deliver on promises of mass deportations and closed borders during the 2024 election are seemingly coming to fruition. But for some within his MAGA base, Trump and his team are not going far enough.
While Trump won, in part, on a promise of tackling illegal immigration, elements of his base want him to go further by restricting — or outright closing down — various pathways to legal immigration as well. This fracture within MAGA was made apparent when Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham this month that foreign talent, such as in the form of H-1B visas, is needed to fill certain jobs. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem also told the network she was working to speed up citizenship applications.
“The administration's somewhat schizophrenic approach to immigration stems not from corporate pressure but ultimately from the fact that the president is a transitional figure on the issue,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the low-immigration advocacy group Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) told Newsweek.
“He holds the old conventional Republican establishment view of ‘legal-good/illegal-bad’, while his voters, like the next generation of Republican leaders, have moved beyond that to a critique of mass immigration in general, legal or illegal.”
...How Did We Get Here?
During the 2024 campaign cycle, former President Joe Biden and his administration came under fire from Republicans for their handling of the border.
It was a problem that began during the tail end of Trump’s first stint in the White House, after a successful drop in border crossings in the early years. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived at and crossed the U.S.-Mexico Border, most without visas or legal status, between late 2020 and the end of 2024 – with the Biden administration unable or unwilling to address the crush of new arrivals until late in his term.
In that period, with the Covid pandemic ebbing, thousands were detained and sent home. Many more were dispersed across the country, waiting for their chance to appear before an immigration judge or have their asylum applications granted. Others were given temporary legal status if they met certain criteria set out by DHS – a program not unique to the Biden era, but one the current administration argues had been abused and expanded by its predecessors.
Trump promised to put an end to that – a promise which won over Anna Gorisch, a Texas-based immigration attorney who voted for him for the first time in 2024.
“He was very hard on legal immigration in his first term, but the campaign won me over, in part because of what happened at the border under Biden really was a crisis, it was a humanitarian crisis on all sides, and it was cruel to everyone involved, most especially the migrants,” she told Newsweek, saying that Trump’s messaging and the coalition he built in the lead-up to the election made her think he would correct that problem.
“I took a chance and went with the coalition, which crumbled within months,” she said. “Since then, I have been absolutely baffled by the shift in focus from correcting illegal immigration to attacking legal immigrants.”
Since January, Trump and Noem have sought to unwind the Biden-era policies that gave many immigrants protection from deportation depending on where they came from, while also promising to detain and deport millions more in the country without any legal status.
In seeking to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for several countries, essentially ending refugee and asylum programs, and encouraging immigrants without status to self-deport, some commentators have argued that the White House is trying to create as many illegal immigrants as possible in order to reach its mass deportation targets.
"The administration is clearly hostile to immigration overall,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told Newsweek. “It is celebrating the overall reduction in the immigrant population, illegal and legal.
“It has repeatedly closed off legal ways to immigrate and work in the United States, and it has created a hostile environment for all legal immigrants living in this country by threatening their free speech rights and profiling them for speaking Spanish in the streets.”
...While the Trump administration has insisted that its focus for immigration enforcement is known criminals, data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has consistently shown many in its detention centers do not have criminal convictions or pending charges.
As of September 21, the last time ICE released its data on detainees, 71.5 percent of those in ICE custody did not have criminal convictions. In Chicago – a city at the heart of ICE operations in recent months – just 16 of 607 people detained there had criminal histories, according to a list released by the administration's own Justice Department.
That isn’t to say that no dangerous individuals have been arrested or moved toward deportation. DHS frequently promotes details on these arrests, especially those who are in the U.S. illegally and have been previously convicted of violent crimes like assault, rape, and murder. Federal agencies have made strides in seeking to end the work of cartels and criminal organizations that operate along the border.
For Krikorian, who has long advocated for reduced immigration overall into the U.S., Trump is doing something right here.
“Of course, the president differs from his GOP predecessors in that he actually means the ‘illegal-bad’ part, and his administration is taking real, meaningful steps to restore integrity to the immigration system,” he told Newsweek.
One significant success has been Trump's ability to essentially halt all illegal southwest border crossings, with the Border Patrol reporting record lows and touting no releases of those arrested at the border into the U.S. interior.
“Even on legal immigration, the administration is moving to curb the fraud that pervades the entire system and to make various programs conform better to Congressional intent,” Krikorian said. “But the president's outdated views on the importance of legal immigration – whether foreign students, H-1Bs, seasonal H-2B workers in hospitality, and more – mean that mixed messages are inevitable.”
The Divide Between Trump and His Base
The president has been seen to be at odds with others within his party, and even within his own administration, on legal immigration in the past, telling reporters twice during the summer that he wanted to find a solution for American farmers reliant on migrant labor and facing the threat of ICE raids.
While the Department of Labor admitted immigration enforcement was having negative impacts, and has suggested it is working on a solution, long-term fixes still appear a long way off. Those further on the right want to keep it that way, believing American workers should be given priority for the jobs done by immigrants in the country illegally.
Then there is the H-1B issue, which has cleaved Trump's base as much as anything else over the last year. The work-based visa has become the poster child for legal immigration and the differing opinions on whether foreign workers are needed, whether they are being abused, and if Big Tech is ignoring a pool of American talent shut out of potentially high-paying jobs that are given priority to foreign workers, whom can often be paid less.
"We have plenty of talented people here," Fox's Ingraham told Trump in an interview this month. "No, you don't," he replied, in a back-and-forth that quickly went viral.
"We don't have talented people here?" she pressed, to which the president responded: "You don't have certain talents and people have to learn — you can't take people off an unemployment line and say 'I'm going to put you into a factory where we're going to make missiles."
Social media was then flooded with MAGA voters who said they felt betrayed by Trump, that he had failed his supporters and Americans by looking to bring in immigrant workers through the H-1B orogram.
But the Trump administration is looking to make the H-1B more restrictive with its $100,000 application fee for new visas, arguing that doing this will mean only the best and brightest are able to come to work here as they would require their employers to pay the fee on their behalf.
Even maintaining the H-1B program with new restrictions has not appeased many Trump voters, with a sharp rise in anti-Indian hate online aimed at visa holders.
“It's awful because I've met so many of these people, these clients,” Gorisch said. “They're human beings to me, they're not abstract ideas, and they do follow the law. They take great pains to follow our law. They have no legal standing in their own cases, so they're like a helpless group of people to attack, which makes this, frankly, bullying.”
The attorney said that if the administration wants to end the H-1B, or any other visas, then it just needs to ask Congress to codify the change into law.
What Does an America First Immigration System Look Like?
Trump successfully ran on an “America first” platform twice, but there now appears to be confusion – from attorneys, analysts, and his voters — over what he meant.
“No matter what the president said in his interview, or the contradictory things that have come out of the administration in terms of statements, the policies that have been implemented or initiated or announced are very harmful to legal immigration and reflect a view that legal immigrants are not welcome in America and that their presence here is harmful to America,” Debu Gandhi, senior director for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress (CAP), told Newsweek.
“Our argument is that that this set of policies and this viewpoint is going to harm the American economy, which is ultimately going to harm American workers.”
A CAP analysis released last week showed that companies are not necessarily reacting by recruiting American workers in place of immigrants. Instead, some are looking to offshore those foreign workers – to Canada, Asia or Europe – where immigrants often have easier pathways to legal status.
At a time when there is concern about the global race toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), CAP and other commentators have warned that Trump administration policies restricting work and student visas put the American economy at risk. (Others say the displacement of white-collar jobs by AI is more proof that the foreign labor pool should be restricted.)
“We need smarter immigration policies to create jobs for Americans. We need smarter immigration policies to secure America's economic future, our national security,” Gandhi said.
“I think that it’s America First to have a legal immigration system that works, and that works better, than trying to destroy our ability to attract talent from around the world or to keep people here who have studied here," Gandhi added. "I would argue that that it is not America First to pursue unwise policies that are damaging our economy and our ability to lead the world in innovation.”
...The White House told Newsweek that Trump’s immigration plan was working.
“The tremendous success on U.S. immigration policy – from closing the border to deporting criminal illegal aliens – is all thanks to President Trump’s vision, which propelled him to a landslide victory just over a year ago,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, told Newsweek.
She did not answer a question about what the longer-term plan looks like in practice, but added that Trump is "undoing the pro-illegal immigration policies from the Biden Admin that allowed countless dangerous, unvetted illegals into the country; we’ve secured the border; we’re consistently arresting and deporting the worst-of-the-worst from the country; and we’re implementing common-sense policy reforms that put American workers first. The President’s team will continue implementing his agenda on behalf of the American people.”
Those Newsweek spoke to agreed that the mixed messaging from Washington — including a range of efforts by Republicans in Congress to end all immigration, amend visa programs, or create easier pathways to citizenship — is not helping anyone, including American citizens.
“This is the same pattern as the first Trump administration,” Bier told Newsweek. “The president will say one thing about needing foreign workers and talent, but every lever of bureaucracy moves the other way."
Immigrants, legal and illegal, have been left uncertain about their futures in the U.S., while others are reconsidering coming in the first place. Attorneys do not know how to advise their clients. Employers do not have a clear path forward, when policy changes are announced suddenly – such as the H-1B fee change made public late on a Friday afternoon before a Sunday morning implementation.
For Gorisch, as an attorney who believed Trump could bring about meaningful change, she believes there needs to be meaningful conversations about the path forward, but does not know if that can happen while anti-immigrant rhetoric continues to flow on social media and from Republican lawmakers.
“It's like a fever dream. It's an emotional movement that has no reason behind it and there doesn't appear to be an adult in the room. There's nobody who's stepping up and saying, here's what we're doing about immigration,” Gorisch said.
“I think they do need to be clear about what they intend here and I think that what they say doesn't always match what they do.”
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