Aliya Rahman is carried by federal agents after being pulled from her vehicle following an immigration raid that led to the detainment of two Hispanic youths and multiple observers, days after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US, 13 January 2026. REUTERS/Tim Evans

To achieve its immigration agenda, the Trump administration is making significant changes to the legal framework. Global Insight reports on the consequences.

President Donald Trump’s administration is overhauling the legal framework of the US immigration system to accelerate the arrest, detention and deportation of millions of migrants. Administrative courts, intended to be forums for fairness and due process, have been converted by policy directives into processing mills for rapid deportations. Migrants are being stripped of their human dignity and basic rights.

Critics say it’s a calculated subversion of the rule of law by the Trump administration – one that’s enabling a growing humanitarian crisis. More than 500,000 people are estimated to have been deported from the US over the past year, many of them with no criminal record and including some who were lawfully in the country under refugee status. Most were flown to Mexico. Others were sent to Cameroon, El Salvador, Peru, South Sudan or other countries where their fates are largely unknown.

‘The US has always put itself out as the example and tried to encourage more countries to set up refugee programmes,’ says Greg Siskind, Co-Chair of the IBA Immigration and Nationality Law Committee. ‘Now, others are looking at it and questioning the example. [They’re saying] “this is what you’re doing to these people? It is worse than if you never took them in the first place.” The damage being done to the global refugee system is considerable.’

President Trump campaigned in 2024 on a vow to stop what he characterised as an ‘invasion’ by migrants he alleges are criminals. He promised the largest deportation programme in US history and is delivering on that.

As of 2024, there were an estimated 14 million undocumented immigrants living in the US following a surge in migration after the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020–2021. President Trump vowed to deploy the military and federal police to deport virtually all of them and his first budget bill passed by Congress – the One Big Beautiful Bill Act – allocated $170bn to immigration enforcement over the next four years.

‘The bottom line is it’s about numbers,’ he says. Immigration enforcement agents are rewarded primarily for making arrests rather than ensuring legal procedures are followed. ‘They get credit for making the arrest, and if they didn’t follow procedures, it becomes somebody else’s problem down the road,’ says Siskind.

Enforcement surge

Beginning in December, ICE carried out a large-scale enforcement campaign in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area, in Minnesota, with some 4,000 ICE and Border Patrol officers deployed to the state at the height of the operation. More than 4,000 people were subsequently arrested; most had no criminal history. Violent arrests led to injuries, while US citizens Alex Pretti and Renée Good were both killed by immigration enforcement agents.

In February, Todd Lyons, ICE’s Acting Director, told the House Homeland Security Committee that agents were working in the ‘deadliest operating environment’ since the organisation was created. At the hearing, ICE officials couldn’t comment on any investigations or disciplinary proceedings involving its agents.

Facing a growing backlash, in January Trump sent White House Border Czar Tom Homan to Minnesota to take charge of the operation. Homan announced in mid-February that the deportation crackdown would be brought to an end. ‘The surge is leaving Minnesota safer,’ Homan said, but added that President Trump’s promised mass deportations would continue.

Meanwhile, more than 40 people have died in ICE custody in the past 12 months. Many of these deaths have been tied to a lack of oversight, medical neglect and overcrowded, unsanitary conditions in hastily organised detention centres, critics say. ‘This rapidly increasing number of deaths is a clear byproduct of the Trump Administration’s dangerous and poorly executed mass deportation agenda – one focused on detaining as many immigrants as possible,’ a group of Democratic senators wrote in a February letter to top DHS officials. ICE officials say its detention standards and medical care protocols are adequate, and that it’s committed to ‘safe, secure and humane’ detention. Tricia McLaughlin, who at the time was Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the DHS, denied in December that there had been a ‘spike’ in deaths.

Public reaction to the ICE enforcement surge was negative, particularly following the killings of Pretti and Good, which were recorded and widely shared on social media. On average, by early March, around 55 per cent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 41 per cent approved. Amid mounting controversy over the policy rollout, President Trump dismissed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and named Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma to replace her. Stephen Miller, the architect of the deportation plan, remains White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and one of the administration’s more influential figures.

Mullin acknowledged that previous comments disparaging Alex Pretti as a domestic terrorist were a mistake. He said ICE would obtain judicial warrants before entering homes and businesses, a reversal of previous policy in which the agency simply used administrative warrants, which critics argued was unconstitutional.

Tom Homan, the Border Czar, endorsed Mullin as ‘the right guy, at the right time, in the right position,’ adding that ‘he gets what needs to be fixed. We have frank conversations. He welcomes my judgment.’

Democrats in the Senate, who have demanded fundamental reforms to ICE, received Mullin’s nomination with scepticism. Most voted against his confirmation while raising pointed complaints. ‘In 2024 [a] lot of people supported the President’s immigration agenda, but then they watched with their own eyes, not filtered through a news source [...] American citizens killed in their streets for protesting […] children caught in the crossfire and being tear gassed [...] people randomly being pulled out of their cars or walking down the streets because they happened to look like they could be an immigrant and checked for their papers,’ said Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat.

92,600 beds

Beyond the visible deployment of heavily armed agents in US cities, the government has quietly expanded detention capacity to keep up with the pace of arrests. Federal documents reportedly show leases and office expansions in more than 150 locations nationwide. These sites place ICE personnel deep within American communities, including near schools, health centres and places of worship.

What has occurred so far represents only an initial phase. An internal ICE memo from February, released by New Hampshire’s governor, outlines a plan to spend $38.3bn on an ‘ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative’. The plan would double detention capacity to 92,600 beds by September 2026. Regional processing centres would serve as staging locations for 1,000 to 1,500 detainees for short stays of three to seven days, while larger hub facilities would house 7,000 to 10,000 people for up to 60 days prior to ‘international removals.’

ICE has purchased at least seven warehouses in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Texas, land records show. Other acquisitions have been blocked by local resistance amid widening social opposition to President Trump’s deportation agenda.

Civil rights advocates and immigration lawyers say the expansion raises particular concern that the warehousing of people will take place largely outside legal safeguards and with limited oversight or institutional checks.

That prospect is not going unchallenged. A series of lawsuits have been brought against the administration’s policies and federal judges have issued rulings reinforcing procedural requirements, while, in some cases, criticising government misrepresentations.

Sandra Grossman, Refugee Officer of the IBA Immigration and Nationality Law Committee, says the Trump administration is creating procedural barriers that significantly undermine the legal right to seek asylum in the US, leaving large numbers of applicants effectively trapped in legal limbo.

Grossman, a founding partner at Grossman, Young & Hammond in Washington, DC, worked with Catherine Walker, an attorney at the firm, to identify a series of administrative measures that have made asylum increasingly difficult to pursue in practice.

A 2025 policy memorandum by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, part of DHS, paused adjudication of asylum applications, leaving more than one million cases unresolved. The rationale was that a full assessment of ‘all national security and public safety threats’ was required. At the same time, the government imposed a non-waivable $102 annual fee for applicants with pending claims. ‘These policies have had a chilling effect on people’s desire to seek asylum in the US,’ Grossman says. ‘The right still exists, but the legal and procedural barriers are much more significant than they were in the past.’

Other enforcement tactics are eroding long-standing legal protections, including the principle of non-refoulement under the UN Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a party. The principle prohibits returning individuals to countries where they face torture. The administration has deported people to third countries with weaker protections, from which they may ultimately be returned to unsafe conditions.

Restructuring the courts

More broadly, the Trump administration is asserting an expansive interpretation of executive authority over US immigration law. It ‘has asserted that it holds unilateral power to grant or deny immigration-related benefits based on shifting national priorities,’ Grossman says, rather than established statutory and international standards.

Joshua Rubenstein, Chair of the IBA Family Law Committee, says the administration’s deportation agenda is inflicting lasting harm on families while exposing the limits of institutional checks on executive power. President Trump’s deportation policies are particularly damaging for children, he says, highlighting the removal of parents alongside cuts to social service organisations that would normally help young people cope.

The US legal system has struggled to halt many of the most controversial actions taken by immigration authorities, he says. ‘Trump has a very successful strategy of doing whatever he wants and seeing if the system stops him,’ says Rubenstein, a partner at Katten Muchin Rosenman in New York. Because courts operate case-by-case, ‘a lot gets through because you can’t stop everything.’

Rubenstein believes the judiciary will eventually impose limits. ‘The system will challenge him one important case at a time,’ he says. ‘But in the meantime, look at all the damage he’s caused.’

The administration has pursued a coordinated strategy to accelerate deportations by reshaping multiple elements of the immigration system simultaneously, according to Erez Reuveni, a former Justice Department prosecutor who later became a whistleblower.

Central to that effort is a restructuring of the immigration courts, which are part of the executive branch under the US Constitution – giving President Trump more control. Over 100 experienced immigration judges were dismissed in 2025 and replaced with newer hires who are under pressure to move cases quickly and deny asylum claims.

‘They fired over 100 long-serving, competent, experienced immigration judges,’ Reuveni says, arguing the aim was to remove adjudicators ‘they think are not loyal to the agenda.’ US Attorney General Pam Bondi has said that ‘42 new highly qualified judges’ will help deliver on the goal of reducing the immigration court backlog. ‘Under the Trump Administration, immigration judges will decide cases based on the law – ⁠not politics,’ said Bondi.

Immigration judges are increasingly using procedural tools such as ‘pretermission’ – a form of summary dismissal – to dispose of asylum claims before a full hearing can take place. It’s seen by the Justice Department as a tool judges can use to reduce the significant backlog in cases. ‘They are issuing these orders and doing it on an oral record, so there’s no paper trail,’ Reuveni says, adding that ‘very fast, thousands of people are getting these final orders of removal.’

Another pillar of President Trump’s policy, Reuveni says, is the expansion of mandatory immigration detention. Under a revised interpretation, individuals without legal status may be held without bond regardless of how long they’ve lived in the US. The policy is intended to pressure migrants into abandoning their claims, Reuveni says. ‘The whole point is to make people miserable beyond what they’re willing to bear so they will self-deport,’ he says. Overall, these policies ‘are all working together to facilitate the mass deportation agenda.’

The last safeguards

Reuveni represented Democracy Forward – a nonprofit legal services organisation based in Washington, DC – in a lawsuit, brought with several advocacy groups, challenging a new rule governing the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews immigration court judgments. The rule, parts of which have now been blocked by a federal court, would have allowed appeals to be dismissed on procedural grounds, causing automatic stays on deportation to lapse. ‘That stay is gone, and then it’s a race to the airport versus a race to the courthouse,’ Reuveni says, warning that migrants could be deported within 24 hours of a final order if the rule is allowed to stand. The Justice Department says the change would help deal with the backlog in immigration courts.

For immigration advocates, the federal court judgment in this case preserves one of the system’s last procedural safeguards. Appeals in the past have frequently resulted in cases being reversed or remitted for further review, delaying removal and allowing additional evidence to be presented.

The issue is particularly important because around 70 per cent of migrants appearing in immigration court don’t have a lawyer. Without meaningful access to appeals, many would be removed before courts had any opportunity to correct legal errors or due process violations.

‘This really unprecedented mass deportation push is straining an already overwhelmed system,’ says Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC.

Many of the governing statutes date from the 1980s and 1990s, and it was in the latter decade that employment visa caps were last set. Immigration courts now face nearly four million pending cases. US Citizenship and Immigration Services has a backlog of 1.5 million asylum applications.

Against this backdrop, the Trump administration’s enforcement strategy is accelerating arrests and detentions at a scale the legal system cannot effectively process, lawyers say. ‘The need for attorneys is greater than ever, but there simply aren’t enough,’ Bush-Joseph says.

ICE’s growing reliance on cooperation agreements with state and local law enforcement is raising new fairness and due process risks. Courts have previously found that the rights of individuals may be violated when they are held beyond their sentences to facilitate ICE transfer, says Bush-Joseph. ‘There are very real concerns about access to due process and […] to legal representation when people are being held,’ she says.

Taken together, these developments represent not merely an escalation of immigration policy but ‘a fundamental shift’ in federal government enforcement power, Bush-Joseph says. ‘The Trump administration has gone so much further than previous administrations on asserting […] extraordinary executive authority. They’re even saying that judges do not have the authority to be reviewing their actions, which judges have repeatedly rejected,’ she says.

Despite lower courts blocking elements of the policy, ‘the administration is pushing forward’ with alternative grounds for removals, Bush-Joseph says. The administration takes advantage of the slow pace of litigation while counting on greater success in appeals and at the Supreme Court, she adds.

Even as President Trump’s mass deportation agenda is being fought out in court, it will probably fail in its stated economic goals, says Stan Veuger, a senior fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think-tank in Washington, DC. The administration’s central claim that deportations protect American jobs rests on flawed economic reasoning. ‘That’s just not how it works,’ Veuger says.

With immigration inflows collapsing, US labour force growth has effectively stalled. This will probably translate into stagnating employment and slower GDP expansion. ‘You have an overall labour market picture of basically no job creation in 2026,’ Veuger says. Deportations can remove entire sources of family income. ‘If you lose half of your household income, or all of your household income, that’s a massive negative shock,’ he says.

Over time, the policy may weaken innovation and productivity by limiting the entry of highly skilled migrants. ‘There [are] fewer high-skilled immigrants coming in [and they] are responsible for quite a bit of patenting,’ explains Veuger.

Despite the scale of President Trump’s programme, Siskind argues that legal and institutional limits may ultimately slow its implementation. The administration has suffered repeated setbacks in lower courts, while the complexity of litigation continues to place heavy demands on government lawyers. ‘They can have all the money in the world,’ Siskind says, ‘but if they don’t have the lawyers and judges to process these cases, the deportation machine can’t keep moving.’

William Roberts is a US-based freelance journalist and can be contacted at wroberts3@me.com