In his first 100 days, President-elect Donald Trump plans to begin the process of deporting hundreds of thousands of people.
He is expected to end parole for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. And he is likely to undo a policy that significantly constrained deportations for people who weren’t deemed threats to public safety or national security.
Trump’s team is already thinking about how to craft executive actions aimed to withstand the legal challenges from immigrants’ rights groups — all in hopes of avoiding an early defeat like the one his 2017 travel ban targeting majority-Muslim nations suffered. This time, Trump may have friendlier arbiters. These fights will be refereed by a federal judiciary that he transformed during his first term, including by appointing more than 200 federal judges himself. And at the very top — the ultimate decider of these questions — is the Supreme Court, to which he appointed three conservative justices.
Editorial cartoon by Paco Baca.