Trump’s first year back in office: Immigration crackdown

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00:00I'm joined by our international affairs editor, Keravan Gorgistani, to look at one of those key

00:06issues, and that is the issue of illegal immigration. Hi, Keravan, former Washington

00:12correspondent as well. I should point that out. It is important. He, Donald Trump, of course,

00:18campaigned very heavily on this idea of cracking down on illegal immigration in his campaign. It

00:23was a popular theme. Has he delivered? Well, look, there were two main aspects of cracking

00:29down on illegal immigration. One was to close the border. The other one was to deport those people

00:35who were in the United States illegally. So when you talk about closing the border, that has been

00:40pretty much a success. And that is something that overall Americans are pretty happy about because

00:46crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border particularly are at a historic low, 10,000 crossings on average a

00:54month in the last few months under Donald Trump compared to about 100,000 under Joe Biden in the

01:02last few months of his presidency. Then you have the idea of arresting and deporting the people who

01:09are in the United States illegally. Initially, the claim during the campaign was that the Trump

01:14administration would go after the worst of the worst. There has been, yes, the deportation of some

01:20criminals who are in the United States illegally, but not just. And that is partly because the Trump

01:28administration itself gave itself a goal that was unattainable by simply going after the worst of the

01:34worst. You had Stephen Miller saying, we're going to arrest 3,000 people a day in order to have this

01:41mass immigration crackdown. And right now, there is a record high of people who are in detention centers

01:49in the United States, about 73,000 of them. Seventy percent of those have no criminal history or

01:57criminal record. And most of those who do have a criminal record have criminal records for minor

02:03offenses like traffic violations. So not exactly the worst of the worst. And what the strategy was,

02:11was to make life so miserable for people who do not have actual legal status that they would either

02:18not come or leave by themselves. And there have been some incentives for people to self-deport.

02:26These are the numbers from the Department of Homeland Security that were given in December. So

02:31nearly a year into Donald Trump's term, 622,000 deportations and 1.9 million self-deportations.

02:41Those numbers could be huge, but a lot of people believe that these numbers are maybe very

02:47controversial because there's pretty much no information as to how these numbers were calculated.

02:53Some, like the New York Times, have done their own calculation and they believe that it's 500,000

02:59people deported and 40,000 who self-deported. So a total of 540,000. That's a far cry from what the

03:08administration is giving out. And it's also way lower than the number in 2024 under Joe Biden,

03:14which was about 650,000. And Americans increasingly, and we're seeing images of those ICE operations,

03:23Americans increasingly uncomfortable, not with the idea of cracking down on illegal immigration,

03:30but the tactics that are used and the heavy-handed tactics that are used, especially when it comes to

03:36those ICE operations that we've seen around the country. And that is why you have today the lowest

03:42approval of Donald Trump's approach to immigration since he has returned to office. Only 38% of

03:51Americans approved, that is Democrats and Republicans, down from 49% just last spring.

03:59And as well as all of this surrounding illegal immigrants, Trump has also considerably restricted

04:06legal immigration into the United States. Can you tell us about that?

04:10Absolutely, because really what the Trump administration wants to do is basically prevent

04:16all forms of immigration. And that means going also after legal immigration pathways. The first thing

04:24that they have done is to cap the number of refugees that can be allowed into the United States to 7,500 per

04:35year. That's a historic low cap. The last year's cap was 125,000. Then you have the pause on

04:43all immigrant visas. That means whether it's a working visa, green card for 75 countries. That's 40% of the

04:53countries in the world. They've also terminated temporary protected status for 12 of the 17 countries that were

05:01under those temporary protected status, including countries like Somalia just recently, Ukraine or

05:08Afghanistan. And that jeopardizes the status of people of about 1 million people in the United States,

05:16people who came with that status legally and who are now realizing that they may need to leave very

05:24quickly at the United States. You also have a near total pause on all new refugee and asylum claims to

05:31the United States. And those revocations of visas that we talked a lot about at the beginning of Donald

05:38Trump's terms, 8,000 at least, according to the Trump administration. Donald Trump has also suspended the

05:46green card lottery, which allowed around 50,000 people to get that green card through a lottery

05:53every year. That said, they're not blocking everyone from coming into the United States. There are new

06:00immigration pathways that have opened up if you have a lot of money. The gold card, if you have one

06:06million dollars, you can get the gold card. It's a green card, but for people with a lot of money. And

06:11there are the H-1B visas. Those are for skilled workers. Those existed before, but now there is

06:17a price tag of $100,000 for companies who want to bring in foreigners to work for them. And when I

06:26talked about the refugees being capped, those 7,500, well, there's going to be a focus for those

06:32refugees. We talked about this on air, too. The white South Africans, if you remember that time,

06:40a period of time where Donald Trump was focused on the genocide that he called against white South

06:45Africans, those are the people who have priority to come to the United States. According to an analysis

06:51by the National Foundation for American Policies, all of these policies restricting legal access to

06:58the United States could reduce legal immigration by 50 percent by the end of Donald Trump's term.

07:05Really interesting. Thanks very much, Kadavan. Kadavan Gorjastani.

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