Trump’s immigration plans for 2025 are set to have an impact on millions of immigrants. President Donald Trump made immigration policy, notably illegal immigration to the US, a defining topic of his campaign when he was running for office in 2024. Trump has said that immigrants are criminals on numerous occasions. Trump is planning to deport millions of immigrants that make up the American population in order to, “Make America Great Again.” However, his plans on immigration just doesn’t impact legal and illegal immigrants it also impacts their families whether or not they are citizens. There are three major risks to immigrants, their families, and their communities in the United States.
The first is the fear of mass deportation: One of Trump’s key campaign promises in 2024 was to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” once he became president. Second, him and his surrogates’ proposals to undermine children’s and families’ fundamental rights, such as ending birthright citizenship, prohibiting undocumented children from attending school, and forcefully separating children from their parents at the border. Finally, the Trump administration’s strategy is to weaken our country’s asylum protection system and undermine human rights at the border.
Since this is Trump’s second term, his actions and words on the topic of immigration will not appear as a surprise. In his first term in office Trump deported “more than 1.5 million people” according to Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. Trump has made it apparent that he intends to continue doing what he did while in office the first time, regardless of the law, decency, or common sense. Trump will “unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller told The New York Times in November 2023. Also, this time around Trump’s has come into office with Project 2025, a detailed plan to overhaul federal agencies that includes more than 175 immigration actions.
Trump’s immigration policies can have a great impact on the population of New York City, since our city’s population consists mainly of immigrants. Meaning that our school’s population and community is also at risk of decreasing. This is because our school has always been a school with a very diverse population of immigrants of different cultures. In the past few years this diverse population has seen an increase, so if Trump’s immigration plans are fully realized, they have a detrimental impact on our school community, our immigrant students and their families. A second Trump government will claim the authority to set immigration policy based on xenophobia and racism, disregarding values of fairness, human decency, and the rule of law.