Trump's new crackdown: Collective punishment for legal immigrants
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President Trump's overnight crackdown on diversity visas is the latest use of his 2025 strategy to scale down legal immigration.
Why it matters: The Trump administration is leveraging collective punishment by halting or trying to scuttle entire legal immigration programs after high-profile incidents.
- "[T]hey are using them fully as a pretext for ... undoing so many aspects of the immigration system," said Doris Meissner, who formerly led the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and is now at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute.
Driving the news: The alleged shooter at Brown University and MIT entered the U.S. from Portugal through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program, which allows roughly 50,000 people entry a year.
- DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that program is now paused. Trump had called to end this visa program several times in his first term.
The big picture: Through its travel ban, the Trump administration has halted the legal immigration process for roughly 20% of people in the system, according to a review from the CATO Institute.
- In November, DHS paused all asylum decisions after an Afghan national, who entered the U.S. legally and was granted asylum, attacked members of the National Guard in D.C.,
- The agency also suspended all immigration decisions for Afghan passport holders and nationals on the travel ban list, which has grown to 39 countries.
- The pause has stopped citizenship ceremonies, green card interviews and will prevent people from renewing their work or student visas.
Zoom in: Trump also ordered the termination in November of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalis over reports of widespread fraud in Minnesota.
- The Somali decision will impact less than 1,000 people, according to data shared with Congress earlier this year. But it's created justification to surge immigration enforcement in the state, particularly in Minneapolis.
The other side: DHS did not respond to questions about its broad crackdown on legal immigration program in reaction to acts of violence or alleged fraud.
- In a statement, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin blamed President Biden for restarting the diversity visa lottery after Trump's first term.
