What to watch for as Trump takes office
A Border Patrol operation in Bakersfield and a run down of Project 2025 projections
Immigrant communities around Bakersfield, California, have been on edge since Border Patrol conducted a large-scale operation there last week.
According to Oliver Ma, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California based in Bakersfield, agents used racial profiling to approach people at gas stations and in other public places.
“They're just pulling random people over on the roads who are brown,” he said.
Ma said roughly 300 community members were taken during the operation based on information he had received from their families. Many were still trying to find their loved ones on Friday. He likened the situation to a mass kidnapping.
“For two days, no one knew where anyone went,” Ma said. “It's shocking for the people in this community.”
Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency to the U.S. Border Patrol, did not respond to a request for comment.
A video reposted by a local Instagram account shows several Border Patrol agents in a Home Depot parking lot while a helicopter flies overhead. A local news outlet reported that a U.S. citizen was among those arrested and that agents had slashed his tires after they pulled him over.
Chief Patrol Agent Gregory K. Bovino, who runs the El Centro Border Patrol Sector, celebrated the operation, which he called Return to Sender, on social media.
“We go the extra mile—or 500 of them—to protect our nation and communities from bad people and bad things,” he wrote on X, adding that among the arrests were two people with previous criminal convictions for rape and one person with an unspecified felony conviction who had a warrant related to a weapons charge.
Immigration attorneys told the Los Angeles Times that it took an unusual amount of time to get information about clients who had been arrested.
According to Ma, some community members have since reported that their loved ones ended up at a facility in El Centro, California.
Ma said many community members are now afraid to leave their homes to get groceries, go to work or take their children to school.
“We suspect this is a test run for the incoming administration,” Ma said.
What we know about Trump's plans
Mass deportation is one facet of incoming President Donald Trump's promises on immigration. It's not yet clear exactly how ramped up deportations will take shape.
What we do know is that the last time he was in office, Trump deported fewer people than former President Barack Obama did in either of his terms, according to ICE data, though the agency did make nearly 550,000 arrests during Trump's first term. Some of the moves that his administration made further bogged down already backlogged courts, slowing down the deportation process.
To figure out what might be coming this time around, I spent part of the holidays reading the sections relevant to potential immigration policy changes in Project 2025, the conservative policy proposal published by the Heritage Foundation. Although Trump distanced himself from the project on the campaign trail after public backlash, since the election, he has chosen people involved in the document's creation to be a part of his second administration.
The project appears to be an indicator of what might be in the works just as three immigration-related executive orders he signed in his first week in office in 2017 signaled much of what was to come over his first four years.
Project 2025 calls for three new executive orders on immigration on the first day of the Trump administration's second term. Axios reported that Stephen Miller recently said immigration executive orders will in fact be coming on day one, but it's not yet clear what those will contain.
In Project 2025, one of the first day executive orders, referred to simply as “Enforcement,” would ramp up interior enforcement and make changes that affect people already living in the United States. For example, it would take away ICE attorneys’ ability to use discretion in which cases to pursue and which cases to close. The Trump administration similarly limited this ability in its first term, a move that contributed to a ballooning immigration court backlog.
The enforcement executive order would get rid of an ICE memo about “sensitive zones,” which currently restricts immigration officers from conducting enforcement operations in hospitals, schools and churches as well as in emergency zones such as shelters from the Los Angeles fires. The project’s order would also require any employer working with the government to use e-verify to check employees’ permission to work in the U.S.
A second executive order planned in Project 2025 would make changes to border policies that would affect asylum seekers and other migrants. That executive order, which the project calls “Pathways for Border Crossers,” would bring back several programs that together dramatically restricted asylum seekers’ access to U.S. soil and chances of success in the screening process, including the “Remain in Mexico” program, known officially as Migrant Protection Protocols. That program required asylum seekers to wait in northern Mexico border towns while their immigration court cases proceeded in the United States.
The pathways order would also bring back asylum cooperative agreements with countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador that allowed the United States to send asylum seekers to those countries to be screened and resettled there instead even though those countries do not have robust asylum programs. And, the order would reintroduce two policies which quickly put asylum seekers through initial screenings while in Customs and Border Protection custody and just as quickly deported those who did not pass.
Additionally, that order would make several changes to require the government to keep more people in immigration custody for the duration of their cases, and it would take away federal funding for helping migrants released from border custody reach their destinations around the country. Notably, many shelters along the border, including where I'm based in San Diego, receive federal funding to help migrants released from border custody reach their loved ones elsewhere in the U.S.
The third executive order planned for day one in Project 2025 would grant special authority to the head of the Department of Homeland Security to respond to “a mass migration event.” It says that the DHS secretary should be able to make any rules necessary to prevent people from crossing onto U.S. soil during an “actual or anticipated mass migration,” which goes back to the first Trump administration's fixation on migrant caravans, particularly two that arrived here at the San Diego-Tijuana border in 2018.
It adds that rules made by the DHS secretary during these moments would not be subject to the Administrative Procedures Act, a law that immigrant rights advocates frequently used to challenge the Trump administration's policy changes during the first term.
Beyond the proposed executive orders, Project 2025 calls for expanding the reach of expedited removal, a process typically reserved for people who have recently crossed into the United States that allows a border officer instead of an immigration judge to order a deportation unless the person makes an asylum claim. The Trump administration attempted this in its first term, but a court battle blocked the implementation for most of his time in office.
The project suggests codifying a version of Title 42, a pandemic policy that instructed border officials to turn away asylum seekers at ports of entry and expel anyone caught crossing without giving them a chance to request protection. During Trump's first term, the Remain in Mexico program and Title 42 together empowered criminal organizations in the region to take advantage of migrants stranded in vulnerable situations, which led to rampant kidnappings and extortion among other harms.
To further its agenda, Project 2025 also pushes for changing detention standards so that people in immigration custody — either caught at the border or picked up in the interior — can be held in tents to allow the administration to detain more people during the lengthy immigration court process. The ACLU told the Border Report that it had received documentation showing that the federal government is also exploring ways to expand ICE's detention capacity at existing facilities.
Other stories to watch
Cardinal Robert McElroy, who has been a powerful voice on immigration coming out of San Diego's Catholic community for years, was recently promoted by the Pope as the new archbishop of Washington, D.C. Given the stances McElroy took from his position at the border, it appears that the Vatican is sending a message early on to the incoming Trump administration.
Undocumented immigrants, including a group led by a woman who cleaned houses in one of the Los Angeles neighborhoods that burned in the recent and ongoing fires, are showing up to help save what they can in the areas that are still smoldering, Adrian Florido reported for NPR.
I wrote for Capital & Main last week about how Salvadorans who are fighting their cases in ICE detention centers are terrified of being sent back to their home country because of an ongoing policy there that suspends due process rights and indefinitely imprisons people believed to be gang members. Because of that policy, anyone with tattoos or a criminal history in the United States could go straight to torturous conditions in Salvadoran prison after getting off a deportation flight even if that person has never committed a crime in El Salvador.
What to expect from this newsletter
Thank you for reading the first official newsletter from Beyond the Border. I was overwhelmed in the best kind of way by all of the support that I received when I announced the launch back in December. Seriously, thank you.
As we go forward, I will be experimenting with different formats and styles to find the right way to tell the stories that I think are important to share with you. As part of that process, I very much welcome your feedback.
My intention starting out is to publish on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month, but I'm also open to the fact that this beat will be changing rapidly in the coming months, so I might not always stick to that schedule. I welcome your feedback on that as well.
Take care and stay well.