Welcome to Trump’s Dystopian Border Fantasyland

A “national emergency” at the border, assault on birthright citizenship, and cartels and gangs as terrorist organizations

Mexican migrant Eric, 5, prepares to turn himself in to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers after crossing over a section of border wall into the U.S. on January 05, 2025 in Ruby, Arizona. Eric and his brother Elieso, 12, traveled alone to the U.S. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

DONALD TRUMP’S SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS, and the subsequent executive orders on immigration he issued Monday, paint a picture of the border that is detached from reality.

The newly sworn-in president cast the nation’s outgoing leadership as having failed to defend American citizens when it provided sanctuary for (what he deemed) dangerous criminals, many of whom arrived from “mental institutions” across the border. Trump then declared a national emergency, allowing the secretary of defense to send military forces to the southern border, which his aides said was necessary to protect the sovereignty of the United States.

But Trump wasn’t done there. He said he would reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy, despite Mexico saying it will not agree to take back migrants from other countries. Then he declared that drug cartels and gangs like MS-13 and Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua would be designated as foreign terrorist organizations, and that he would employ the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to hunt down members. All of this was being done, Trump argued, to restore America's greatness.

But that vision of restoration relies on what might as well be a Stephen Miller ghost story: It sounds very scary, but it’s not actually real.

The New York Times reported Saturday that unauthorized border crossings were at their lowest level in years, migrant shelters in Mexican border cities were far below capacity, and movement through the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama—which migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, and other countries cross through—had fallen sharply.

“Just to inject some reality into Trump’s massively magical fantasy speech, the border today has less illegal crossings today than when Trump left office,” wrote Democratic strategist and CNN commentator Maria Cardona.

Or course, no one expected Trump to suddenly declare that the country’s immigration system—the central topic to his ten years of dominance in politics—no longer required a Trumpian-type fix. And, sure enough, his administration undertook a fusillade of actions to change policy on everything from border enforcement to, potentially, immigration law and constitutional rights.

Chief among them was an audacious and legally dubious attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship. Though immigration and civil rights groups largely blanched at Trump’s expected but unprecedented executive order, they did respond swiftly. As first reported by The Bulwark, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the administration on Monday night. The ACLU was joined by Make the Road, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Legal Defense Fund, and the Asian Law Caucus in defending the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship against Trump’s order.

“This move is an example of the new administration’s lack of regard for the constitution,” Kica Matos, the head of the National Immigration Law Center, told The Bulwark. “Attempting to repeal birthright citizenship via executive order is both absurd and unconstitutional.”

The executive order argues that the Fourteenth Amendment was never meant to extend citizenship universally to everyone born in the United States. It specifies that the “privilege” of U.S. citizenship does not automatically extend to people born in the country when their mother was “unlawfully present” or their mother was lawfully present but in a temporary way (in other words, through a student, work, or tourist visa) while the father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident in either case.

That last provision, in particular, struck lawyers and immigration experts as both extreme and extra-judicial. Some dubbed it the “Kamala Harris clause” because it would, if implemented, have denied the citizenship of the now-former vice president, whose mother was here legally, but temporarily.

In addition to the ACLU suit, Democrats moved to condemn the effort with a swiftness that they did not employ for every executive order Trump issued.

“If you’re a textualist or an originalist, it’s clear the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship, so this is blatantly illegal,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) told The Bulwark, warning that it was “highly doubtful” this “full frontal assault” on birthright citizenship would survive judicial scrutiny.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom offered just a three word statement on the order: “This is unconstitutional.”

But the non-politicians on the front line of the immigration policy debates didn’t focus strictly on the legality of the order. They also attacked it for representing an abandonment of conservative principle. Steven Brown, a Houston-based immigration attorney who focuses on business and investor immigration, noted that conservatives have long held that the constitution “protects” God-given rights, rather than conferring them. But the executive order states that U.S. citizenship is a “priceless and profound gift.”

“Yet somehow now citizenship is a gift from the government,” he told The Bulwark.

Though the frontal assault on birthright citizenship generated the most outrage and coverage, it was not the executive order from Trump that engendered the greatest concern. For many, that distinction was given to the president’s plan to use the more-than-225-year-old Alien Enemies Act, which he said would unlock the full power of federal and state law enforcement to go after foreign gangs and criminals on U.S. soil, “including in our inner cities.”

One Washington immigration leader said the act could give Trump “huge” legal powers, including to arrest U.S. citizens from countries where a gang might be from, like Venezuela.

There were pockets of relief in some corners that Trump didn’t go even further. For example, Trump officials made clear that while military forces could now be deployed to the southern border, they would steer clear of American cities, with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) task forces aiding local enforcement efforts in the interior.

But in Trump’s new immigration world, changes made during the cover of night can also send shockwaves. Late Monday, DHS rescinded a 2021 Biden memo which stopped ICE from making arrests inside or near sensitive places like churches, schools, and hospitals. That guidance has been replaced with instructions to use “commonsense,” Fox News reported.

Advocates who had expected a deluge of executive orders were nonetheless dazed when I spoke to them. They expressed that the totality of the administration’s actions were horrifying, but their job was to sift through the orders to figure out which ones they were going to prioritize to respond to first. Meanwhile, Democrats traditionally friendly to immigration are still cowed by a November election in which, as they see it, Trump and his team successfully used the false specter of a dystopian hellhole as a basis for aggressive, legally dubious action—and everything that follows, including the demonization of migrants in subhuman terms, stemmed from this distorted view of the border. Adjusting to the new political reality—as opposed to the reality on the border—many Democrats supported the controversial Laken Riley Act, which passed the Senate Monday.

“Today we honor the legacy of Dr. King and this is antithetical to everything he stood for,” Matos said Monday, referring to efforts to dehumanize immigrants and clamp down on people who just want to live their lives. “Some of these narratives were shared decades ago on white supremacist websites and now they’re being manifested by the president of the United States. That should trouble all of us.”

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One More Thing

Flashback: As we dive deep on birthright citizenship now, Priscilla Alvarez from CNN had a good look at Trump administration strategy on it back in December. As she wrote last night, “the legal challenges are the point.”