January 16, 2025

Dear John,

Once President-elect Donald Trump is sworn into office Monday, he has pledged to immediately issue a series of executive actions, orders, and policies related to immigration. The incoming administration has promised a return to a more restrictive immigration system, with higher barriers for accessing humanitarian protection and lower tolerance for migrants entering without authorization.

How successful will the new administration be? And what sort of challenges will it face?

Trump’s first term could be instructive. Migration Policy Institute (MPI) experts catalogued every Trump administration executive action on immigration—all 472 of them by MPI’s count—and compiled a sweeping report that is worth bookmarking: Four Years of Profound Change: Immigration Policy during the Trump Presidency. Some of the wide-ranging Trump immigration actions were undone by the Biden administration, so Trump is expected both to reinstate some first-term measures and terminate some of the more than 605 executive actions undertaken by Joe Biden.

The free monthly U.S. Policy Beat from our Migration Information Source magazine is well worth a follow to keep up with the significant changes ahead.

Past Policy Beats include analysis of:

• The deportations records of the Trump 1 and Biden administrations.
• The Title 42 border expulsions policy and whether it worked.
• Whether Trump cuts to legal immigration or the COVID-19 pandemic played a more significant role in declining immigration.
• The effects of the rising number of lawsuits from states and interest groups challenging federal actions on immigration.

Looking for more? Find in one place all of MPI’s research and other resources on Trump Actions on Immigration. Or a similar collection of Biden Actions.

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As you prepare for the changes on the way, we also encourage you to bookmark our Immigration: The Basics collection. The resources and explainers offer nonpartisan, straight-ahead information about the U.S. immigration system and the 47.8 million immigrants living in the United States.

Migration Policy Institute
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Migration Data Hub
Find the latest immigration statistics, maps, and numbers for the United States and other countries.

Migration Information Source
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