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During his first day in office on Jan. 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders on immigration that would make it harder for refugees, asylum seekers and others to try to enter the U.S. – and for some immigrants to stay in the country.
Amy Lieberman, a politics editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with scholar Jean Lantz Reisz, co-director of the University of Southern California’s Immigration Clinic and a clinical associate professor of law, to understand the meaning of Trump’s new executive orders – and the challenges he could face in implementing them.
Vice President JD Vance applauds as Donald Trump gestures during the inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025.Kevin Lamarque-Pool/Getty Images
Will Trump be able to carry out these many executive orders?
When it comes to immigration and national security, the president has a broad range of powers. We are hearing that Trump is trying to end asylum. Migrants at the U.S. border today had their appointments with Customs and Border Protectioncanceled.
There will be litigation because asylum is a big part of U.S. law and only a Congressional act can end it. Using different kinds of national security and public health actions, like Title 42, an emergency health order that allowed the government to turn away migrants at the border because of COVID-19, has been successful in the past at making it harder for people to seek asylum – but a presidential action cannot end asylum.
If Congress wanted to end asylum, it would be a terrible thing in the world of international human rights, but it could still happen.
Trump announced he will reinstate the Remain in Mexico program, which requires people seeking asylum in the U.S. to remain in Mexico while they await their court date. It would require Mexico’s cooperation to do this, especially since this would apply to migrants who are not even from Mexico. Usually, this kind of announcement would have to first be published in the Federal Register for comment. This procedure has not been followed here and could leave this policy open to legal challenges.
What does it actually mean to shut down the border?
We don’t have the details yet, but it looks like shutting down the border means the U.S. government will no longer process any migrants coming to the border without visas for asylum or other kinds of humanitarian relief.
Up until now, if a migrant comes to the U.S. border and says they fear returning to their home country, they are supposed to be given a so-called “credible fear interview.” That would be suspended. People have the right to seek asylum under U.S. law, and by shutting the border down, the president is preventing people from exercising that right.
Now, under Trump’s orders, migrants who are crossing into the country and seeking asylum or humanitarian parole at a U.S. border port of entry will be denied the right to stay in the country, even temporarily. Everyone who crosses the border will be immediately expelled from the country.
That is an immediate impact that is already being felt at the border. But for people who already crossed the U.S. border and applied for asylum, their situations have not changed, according to these executive orders. This is also unlikely to affect people who have visas to enter the country or those conducting any commerce across the border.
Trump announced that he will use the Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants who are in the country illegally. Are there limits on his ability to do that?
But the U.S. government then has to prove that it is at war with the migrant’s country of origin, and that the drug cartels represent this entire country and government. In the immigration system, a president can deport someone who is suspected of supporting or belonging to a drug cartel or terrorist group, but Trump may be using the Alien Enemies Act to deport a targeted group of persons more quickly.
The Alien Enemies Act does allow a federal court to review whether or not a person being targeted by the U.S. government is actually an alien enemy. This hasn’t actually played out for almost 100 years, but someone could challenge the government’s designation that they are a foreign enemy and take the claim to a federal court, or all the way up to the Supreme Court.
What are some of the other big changes that you will be watching?
First, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration will end birthright citizenship, which gives U.S. citizenship to U.S.-born children of noncitizens. I think that would play out by Trump issuing orders to federal agencies like the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration to not process citizen’s applications for passports or Social Security numbers if they cannot demonstrate that the citizen’s parents were lawfully present in the U.S. at the citizen’s birth.
That would then be challenged with lawsuits because the president can’t just say there is no more birthright citizenship when it is part of theU.S. Constitution.
Finally, by declaring a national emergency at the southern border, Trump could use Department of Defense funding for immigration enforcement and allow the military and the National Guard to help patrol the border and build a border wall.
The National Guard has assisted in border security administrative work under Joe Biden’s administration, as well as Barack Obama’s and Trump’s, by doing things like mending fences and stocking warehouses. This freed up more Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection agents to go out and actually arrest immigrants. That is nothing new.
On Saturday, I joined more than twenty local people, some with prams and children, others with dogs on a leash, who had gathered to travel from South East London into Central London and Whitehall, to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, in what was then a war still 15 months on. We further wanted to protest at the duplicitous and biased BBC coverage of the war.
The journey to London was not as easy as usual, as both Charing Cross station and Cannon Street stations, the usual arrival points for trains going from SE London, were both closed. Finally arriving at Westminster, it was obvious that this was going to be a huge demonstration. There seemed to be no tourists in sight.
There were only going to be two elements to this day: the peaceful protesters and swathes of police, attired military-style, and nearly outnumbered by the police vehicles parked on the roadside. As we turned into the road, I was shocked to see a phalanx of police stretching across the width of Whitehall, almost as if no one was allowed to go further. But we did go further; we pushed between them and at this point they said nothing, just let us through.
We walked to the point beyond the large stage, parallel with the entrance to 10 Downing Street and at this point I had my first taste of what was to come. Large numbers of hi-viz clad police came over and started harassing people and telling one and all to move over to the pavement opposite 10 Downing Street.
One I had cause to challenge for his rude and aggressive behaviour was almost tempted to push me in that direction, but clearly stopped himself and instead threatened me with arrest if we did not move. He did not respond to my question, “for what?” and just moved off.
March route agreed between police and organisers months ago
Shortly afterwards, a collection of what looked like teenagers, kitted out in kilts and army attire, were marching down Whitehall. Apparently they had been marching up and down the street. It was quite funny that on a day that had been agreed with the police for a March to Whitehall, the stations into London should be closed, and that these young soldiers should feel the need to do some training in Whitehall. It almost seemed as antagonising as the attitude and behaviour of the Police.
Having agreed the march route with the organisers as long ago as October 2024, the police were clearly determined to renege on the agreement and and enforce a static event.
At the event there were many excellent speeches, none more so than from a Jewish Holocaust survivor. He had been a child at the time, and had lived through that horror and he was now witnessing again now. It struck me that what he was actually calling for today, to resolve this issue, was the dissolution of an exclusive ‘Jewish’ Israel and the formation of a secular state.
We have heard much from all of the Western colonialist powers continually claiming to support a two-state solution, but I wonder what most Palestinians want? Has anybody bothered to ask them, or will they be subject to having remedies forced upon them? Clearly one speaker knew what he thought was a valid solution, perhaps the Palestinians might agree ?
Once the speeches were done it was announced that the organising groups, including Stop the War and the Jewish Block and the MPs who had spoken, would march towards Trafalgar Square to place their list of concerns about the BBC at Portland Place, BBC headquarters, and to protest the BBC’s partial and biased reporting of the Gazan genocide.
Single file of police across Whitehall
The rest of the 200,000 attendees made way for them to proceed, and followed on behind. At that point there was single Police file across half of Whitehall. Not surprisingly, the just marchers moved around this line and proceeded to follow their leaders to Trafalgar Square. But this was where the real police lines were.
Every road entrance and exit to Trafalgar Square was block with huge numbers of police vehicles; there were large numbers of police togged out in their military style black overalls. On the left side of the Square both sides of that road were lined with Police vans and cars. It became rammed with police and protesters. The protesters, surprisingly, remaining calm, singing, dancing and chanting for a Free Palestine and a Gaza ceasefire. The police, howeveer, were totally and unnecessarily aggressive and bullying.
I had cause to have a fair and frank exchange of views with one snot-nosed policeman, who despite seemingly only a metre in height, felt it necessary to scream at me, that if I wanted to continue my protest I had to return to Whitehall or I would be arrested. He looked stunned and surprised and clearly didn’t understand my response, which, to be fair, was stated in assertive Anglo-Saxon. He looked shocked and a little blankly as I turned and strolled away.
I stayed in Trafalgar Square for another hour, watching as the cat and mouse of game between police and protesters carried on. At one point the steps to St Martin if the Fields was occupied. Three policemen in hi-viz jackets decided that this was unacceptable and went to the top of the steps to tell the protesters there, who were sitting down, that they had to move.
The police had to make arrests to justify their unnecessarily aggressive and confrontational behaviour.
But given that all the exits were blocked by police, this was somewhat problematic. Clearly neither these officers nor their leaders had bothered to think things through on this point.
Shortly afterwards, marching up the right hand side of the Square and up to those seated on the steps, there was a Roman-style phalanx of police, five wide and twenty deep. They seemed to be part marching and part jogging, aiming to disperse the protesters peaceful seated on the steps of St Martin’s.
Drummers disrupted by another phalanx of police
My attention was drawn back towards Whitehall where there was a circle of Palestinian drummers making some very loud rhythmic noises, and they too were rapidly approached by a similar-sized phalanx of police, again jogging into and breaking up this group. The police behaviour was wholly aggressive, and completely unnecessarily so: like a band of bullying thugs in unifiorm. They have clearly no perception of the idea of Policing by Consent. There was no consent today.
This kind of nonsense was going on all around Trafalgar Square. Normally, I would arrive at one of these peaceful protests at midday, and by 4pm it would be mostly over, and I would make my way home. But this disgraceful police conduct meant that there were more delays all around London, and the event went on much longer. As a consequence of the unnecessary aggression of the police, they no doubt felt they had to justify themselves by making arrests.
On my way home I saw many social media posts captured by other protesters, even some showing police arresting children. They even arrested the head steward of the march, Chris Nineham of Stop the War.
The way the police behaved, most people thought had Keir Starmer’s fingerprints all over it. The police had been saying, apparently that the route of the march went “too close” to a synogogue, and there was a threat to “Jewish safety”. This would have come as a surprise to the Jewish Boc on the march!
It is dissappointing, but sadly not surprising, that London Mayor Sadiq Khan has said and done nothing in regards to this event. Maybe he is leaving it so all of the political fallout falls on Starmer. But you would expect that either Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Mark Rowley, or Khan would have understood that it would be safer and less disruptive simply to allow a peaceful march to go ahead. Clearly the authoritarian Starmer, had a different view.
Only the far right confronted the police with violence
And so we saw unnecessary arrests and police violence and aggression, where even on the Armistice Day Palestine march they had been able to exercise some calm common sense. On that day they were confronted, as ever, with the violence and confrontational behaviour of the far right. On Whitehall that day, it ended up with a few hundred fascists fighting with the police whilst hundreds of thousands marched peaceably through other London streets.
This Saturday, the Police were guilty of reneging on an agreement previously made with march organisers. The clear implication is that they had been subjected to political pressure and ordered to forget ‘policing by consent’. There are clearly huge questions of accountability for Starmer, Khan and Rowley to answer. It was another very bad day for the ‘authorities’ in London.
The Navy proudly draws its newest, most devastating fighter, the McDonnell F4H Phantom II past the applauding President of the United States John F. Kennedy as he reviews the Inaugural Parade, in Washington, DC, on January 20, 1961. / Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images.
Like most Americans, I applaud the recent ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas that was approved today by the Israeli security cabinet, and I was glad to learn that the incoming Trump administration was directly involved in support of the Biden team in the most positive way: by telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that a deal had to be made.
I did not like much of the Biden administration’s foreign policy, and I worried a lot, as a journalist and a citizen, about what Donald Trump’s new team would do. But I learned long ago that you cannot tell a presidency by its cover.
In late 1967 I was a freelance journalist in Washington and totally hostile to the ongoing American war in South Vietnam. I was persuaded to join the then nascent staff of the only Democratic member of the Senate, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who was willing to take on President Lyndon B. Johnson, a fellow Democrat, then running for second term, who had escalated the war he inherited with mass bombing campaigns. I would be the press secretary and, while traveling with the candidate, draft daily policy statements and work on speeches.
McCarthy, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, was far from a shining star. But, as a devout Catholic, he saw the Vietnam War in moral terms and was troubled by the Pentagon’s decision to lower the minimal acceptable scores on the Army’s standard intelligence tests in an effort to enlist more young men from the ghettos and barrios of America, where educational opportunities were fewer, as they still are today. McCarthy publicly called such action “changing the color of the corpses.” He quickly became my man.
A few weeks into the job, I was traveling with McCarthy on a fundraising tour in California and found myself outside a Hollywood mansion where McCarthy was making a money pitch to the rich and famous. Such events were always boring, and I found myself hanging around outside the mansion with a few of the local and national reporters tagging along. One of those outside was Peter Lisagor, then the brilliant Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News. He had joined our antiwar campaign out of curiosity, I suspected, since the chances of forcing Johnson to change his aggressive Vietnam policy seemed to be nil amid relentless US bombings. As I later learned, Lisagor had been one of the few journalists invited to fly in 1966 on Air Force One with the president on one of his early trips to Vietnam. The flight was kept secret until Johnson arrived in Saigon.
Lisagor told me a story—most likely he meant to cheer me up, since we were polling at 5 percent at the time—about time he had spent in 1961 at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I do not recall whether he was on a reporting project there—he had been a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 1948—but there he was on inauguration day of 1961, while in Washington the glamorous John F. Kennedy was being sworn in as president by Chief Justice Earl Warren.
As Lisagor told it, he was watching the swearing in with a bunch of MIT students and faculty members at a cafeteria that had a TV, and just as Warren pronounced JFK president a young faculty member named Noam Chomsky stunned the small crowd by saying, of Kennedy and his Harvard ties: “And now the terror begins.”
Chomsky’s point, as would become clear in his later writings, was that Kennedy’s notion of American exceptionalism was not going to work in Vietnam. As it did not. And Lisagor’s point to me, as I came to understand it over the years, was that one cannot always tell which president will become a peacemaker and which will become a destroyer. Lisagor died, far too young at age 61, in 1976.
Joe Biden talked peace—and withdrew US forces from Afghanistan—but helped put Europe, and America, into a war against Russia in Ukraine and supported Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against Hamas and, ultimately, against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Donald Trump is always talking tough but one of his first major foreign moves after winning the presidency was to order his senior aides to work with Biden’s foreign policy people to perhaps end a war in Gaza and save untold thousands of lives. And I hear serious talks are underway to bring an end to the Ukraine War.
Next week US president Joe Biden finishes his term of office, to be replaced by the Donald. Biden would have been extremely popular with the American public and probably would have run and got a second term as president, if US real GDP had increased by 4.5-5.0% in 2024, and if during the whole of his period of office since end 2020, real GDP had risen 23%; and if per American, real GDP had risen 26% over those four years. And he would have been congratulated if the Covid death rate during the 2020-21 pandemic had been one of the lowest in the world, and the economy avoided the pandemic slump in production.
Above all, he would have been feted if the inflation of prices in goods and services after he came into office was just 3.6% in total over four years. That would have meant that, with wages rising at 4-5% a year, real incomes for average American households would have risen significantly. At the same time, strong growth would have allowed the financing of important new infrastructure spending in the US that could have led to an extensive rail network across the country using super fast trains; and with bridges and roads that did not collapse or crumble along with environmental projects to protect people and homes from fires and floods, and the introduction of cheap electric vehicles and renewables. How Biden would have been popular.
And with extra revenue from strong growth, the Biden administration would have been able to balance the government budget and curb or reduce government debt. And with zero to low inflation, interest rates on borrowing would have been near historic lows, enabling households and companies to afford mortgages and finance investment in new technologies.
And what if US companies had sold a record level of exports of goods and services to the rest of the world, running up a sizeable surplus on trade, despite various tariffs and sanctions against American companies from other trading nations. In running trade surpluses, American banks and companies would have been able to build up foreign exchange reserves and invest in projects abroad, strengthening America’s influence in the world in a beneficial way.
Unfortunately, none of these things happened to the US economy in the four years of Biden’s presidency. Instead these were features of China’s economy. In 2024, China’s real GDP rose about 4.5%, while the US was up 2.7% (faster than anywhere else in the top G7 economies, but still only 60% of China’s growth rate). And throughout Biden’s term, China growth rate outstripped the US.
Moreover, the gap betweeen China and the US on real GDP growth per person was even greater.
US annual inflation has been way higher than in China. Indeed, US prices rose a cumulative 21% since 2020 compared to just 3% in China.
Interest rates set by the US Fed are still at 4.5%, while the People’s Bank of China has a 3% rate. And interest rates on mortgages and corporate debt in the US are well above 5% compared to 1.5% in China. Average real disposable income in the US has been flat since 2019, while it has risen 20% in China. Under Biden, bridges fall down, roads crumble and rail networks hardly exist. Far from running a trade surplus of $1 trillion as China does, the US runs a sizeable trade deficit of $900bn.
While China runs a surplus on payments and receipts with other countries or around 1-2% of GDP a year, the US runs a current account deficit of 3-4% of GDP a year. At the same time, US industry and banks have huge net liabilities with the rest of world at 76% of GDP. Such a net liability would put all other countries vulnerable to a run on their currencies – but the US escapes this because the US dollar remains the world reserve currency. In contrast, China has a net asset position of 18% of GDP.
And yet, despite all this, we are continually told by Western ‘expert’ economists and the media that China is on the brink of financial meltdown (George Magnus); or alternatively going into permanent stagnation like Japan has done over the last three decades (Michael Pettis); and that China is producing too much that it cannot sell ie. it has overcapacity (Brad Setser). And China has a corporate debt crisis that will eventually bring the whole economy down (said by just about everybody). And China will stagnate because of a ‘lack of demand’, even though wage and consumption growth is way faster than in the US.
The Western consensus is that China is mired in huge debt, particularly in local governments and real estate developers. This will eventually lead to bankruptcies and a debt meltdown or, at best, force the central government to squeeze the savings of Chinese households to pay for these losses and thus destroy growth. A debt meltdown seems to be forecast every year by these economists, but there has been no systemic collapse yet in banking or in the non-financial sector. Instead, the state-owned sector has increased investment and the government has expanded infrastructure to compensate for any downturn in the over-indebted property market. If anything, it is America that is more likely to burst a bubble than China.
And as for ‘Japanication’, this is also nonsense. In 1980s Japan, companies used property and land to lever up and buy more commercial property or expand into other economically unviable projects. When the bubble collapsed, the corporates and the banks carried the weight of the downturn. In contrast, the problems In China are in residential property, not in commercial.
Hence, China’s real estate prices never went up as much as during the land speculation frenzy in Japan in the 1980s. Average residential sales prices per square meter have risen 7.3% annually since 2007, well below the increase in annual nominal GDP of about 12% over that same period. In Tokyo, home prices grew 13% annually, well above nominal GDP growth of about 8% in the 1980s.
While Japan’s productive base declined from the 1990s, that is not happening in China. China is now the world’s manufacturing superpower. Its production exceeds that of the nine next largest manufacturers combined. It took the US the better part of a century to rise to the top; China took about 15 or 20 years. In 1995, China had just 3% of world manufacturing exports, By the beginning of Biden’s term, its share had risen to over 30%.
Then there is China’s so-called demographic challenge of a declining workforce and population. But this decline is nowhere as severe as in Japan. China’s birth rate has been comfortably higher than those of Japan and the Asian tigers. China’s population under 20, at 23.3%, is still considerably higher than its Asian counterparts (16-18%) and not so far behind the US (25.3%) and aboce Europe (21.9%). The country’s 65 and older population, at 14.6%, is also lower than that of the developed world (20.5%).
As for so-called overcapacity, this is another myth broadcast by Western experts. China’s export success does not mean that China depends on exports for growth. China is growing mainly because of production for the home economy.
Remember, China’s economy has never suffered a decline in national output since 1949. And as John Ross has pointed out, if the Chinese economy continues to grow 4-5% a year over the next ten years, then it will double its GDP – and with a falling population, raise its GDP per person even more; ie more than two and half times as fast as the US.
Why is China exceptional? It is because it is an economy that is planned and led by state-owned companies, so it can ride most obstacles way better than a privately owned system of capitalist production as in the US. (Compare the US COVID death rate at 3544 deaths per million to China’s 85 (latest figures). China’s most important industries are run by SOEs: finance, energy, infrastructure, mining, telecommunications, transportation, even some strategic manufacturing. The total capital of companies with some level of state ownership in China is 68% of total capital of all firms (40 million). The vast majority of Chinese companies in the Fortune Global 500 list are SOEs. SOEs generate at least 25% of China’s GDP in the most conservative estimates, and other studies have found them to contribute to 30-40+% of GDP.
Donald Trump takes over next week in the US. He wants to make America great again. He wants to make America ‘exceptional’. But that adjective best describes China, not the US.
