Trump Admin Moves Immigration System Back a Century To Discriminatory, Racial Hierarchies
These moves are not popular, they are not normal, they are not what the American people want; but do people know that this fundamental reshaping of the immigration system is even taking place?
By Josef Burton
The last few months of 2025 were among the most consequential for American immigration since the immediate aftermath of September 11th. Blanket restrictions on immigration in Trump’s second term are progressing in the same way that Hemingway once described the process of going broke; it happens slowly, then all at once.
The tragic shooting of National Guard soldiers in Washington, DC by an Afghan national veteran of the CIA’s “Zero Unit” militias in November has been used by the White House as the primary justification for totally re-shaping the immigration policy landscape. A flurry of policy memos and opaque bureaucratic changes, most but not all of them internal to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), has turned the Muslim Ban - now expanded to almost 40 countries - into domestic policy. While once the ban was limited to visa issuances abroad, it now operates within the United States and targets nationals who were lawfully admitted. These changes can impact anyone in the U.S. with any form of non-citizen status, not just visa applicants abroad who haven’t yet set foot in the country. Refugee admissions, asylum processing, and even U.S. citizenship ceremonies for people born in ban-list countries have all been canceled. The diversity visa program (also known as the green card lottery) seems to be being wound down entirely in response to an unrelated mass shooting at Brown University committed by a man who arrived via that program years ago.
The second Trump Administration has taken its time, moving much more slowly and deliberately than the first term when Trump attempted a Muslim ban on his first day in office. This time, Trump’s team didn’t impose the ban formally until six months into his second term, when it came into effect with no chaos, no drama, no waivers, and no exceptions. There is sometimes friction and lack of clarity and ambiguity in some of the policy announcements and memos released by USCIS, and much more opacity when it comes to State Department immigration policy, but this seems more due to a general lack of professionalism within the administration than an ineptitude in moving forward with announcing changes in how things work. This is because, while things may sometimes move very quickly when the time is right (like when one of the very common acts of senseless violence in American life happens to be committed by an immigrant), the White House has a clear picture about where they want immigration policy to go and they have a plan to take us there. Reshaping the immigration system is taking priority over all other concerns, and almost anything can be justified if it leads to deportations. Last year, the Trump administration reached out to the government of Iran. Not to negotiate about human rights or the nuclear program, but to propose rare Iran-US cooperation when it came to deporting Iranian citizens from the United States. Hundreds of Iranians are being deported back to Iran via these coordinated US-Iranian flights, including those vulnerable to political persecution during Iran’s unprecedented crackdown.
We entered 2026 with an immigration system more arbitrary, more restrictive, and more nakedly discriminatory than it has been since a century ago. The shift is by no means done and the coming months will probably bring further bureaucratic fine-tuning and screw tightening along the lines of what has come before; termination of categories of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), cancellation of appointments, and the sunsetting of automatic employment authorization while people wait for status extension. Such seemingly small changes upend countless lives. The goal isn’t just supercharged security screening, or retaliation against disfavored governments by targeting their diasporas. These internal bureaucratic maneuvers are intended to in practice un-do or render irrelevant the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act which is the bedrock of the pre-existing immigration system. Taken together, these rule changes and policy tweaks effectively repeal a bedrock piece of society-defining legislation. It is as if the Civil Rights Act or Social Security was abolished via a dull internal memo.
The vision at work is a return to something like the National Origins Formula of a century ago; a system of naked racial categorization which limited immigration from all Eastern Hemisphere countries based on a byzantine calculation of racial hierarchy meant to preserve and also delineate the structures of racial belonging within the US. History rhymes in many ways in this story. Even the massive ICE sweeps in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis echo the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920 which used immigration enforcement as a fig leaf to persecute political dissidents and target disfavored ethnic groups. The National Origins Formula itself existed as a series of discreet ad-hoc laws in the early 1920’s before being fused with an updated Chinese Exclusion Act in 1929. The goal of the National Origins Formula was always explicitly to maintain immigration to less than 2-3% of the White population of the United States, closely tracked and assigned. Indeed, a large part of the National Origins Formula was devoted to racially categorizing and tracking the national origins of American citizens with a fixation on determining which Americans were of “colonial stock” and who, despite being White, were still perhaps a little too “ethnic” to allow their relatives to come and join them. With the recent introduction of the vague but ominous term “heritage American” into the MAGA lexicon to denote some yet-undefined level of “real American,” it’s not quite clear that this sort of revived race science is totally off the table.
History appears to be repeating on a 100 year timeline. If so, we are currently in the phase where piecemeal laws and policies enacted amid specific immigration panics are being codified and systematized into one coherent and overarching racially-motivated system. In the 20th century, this system ruled over immigration in America for the next forty years. The goal of this rush of minute and incomprehensible policy adjustments is less immigration, less non-white immigration, and, eventually, the weakening of citizenship rights and the establishment of a legally-defined racial hierarchy inside America that will itself be largely regulated by the immigration system. The immigration system, and more specifically the baroque and secret security regulations within that system - things like the travel bans - are how people get divided into belonging and not belonging in American society based on their country of birth. The domestic enforcement of those categories, be it through paperwork or a brutal ICE raid, is how America becomes a two tier society where some people have rights and other people are subject to detention at any time for any reason.
There is a deep current of lawlessness within Trump’s second term immigration policy. That is to say, the very literal and mechanical re-wiring of how American immigration works is not being done through the law. Instead, special national security concerns, internal standard operating procedures, executive orders, and presidential proclamations are being deployed as tools to change lived reality head-over-heels – while not a single word of the codified law changes. The unrestrained executive power of the Presidency in the 21st century that has heretofore mostly applied abroad has come home through the immigration system.
This is all possible because the use of provision for national security concerns to justify progressively more and more exceptions to the rule of law has been allowed to expand beyond all reason to consume the entire administrative apparatus of the American government. We face a challenge similar in nature, but very different in form, from what existed a hundred years ago. The Chinese Exclusion Act or the Johnson-Reed Act were actual laws that could be fought against with mass movements, legal campaigns against discrimination, with elections and with political change. The new iteration of the Muslim Ban (perhaps it should soon be called the “everyone ban”) is nested within a modern bureaucratic structure that is confusing and opaque even to the career professionals who run it and which carries explicit legal impunity alongside its ever-broadening authority.
Undoing these massive changes will not be that simple. The Biden administration missed many opportunities when they repealed the first ban in toto without surrendering an iota of the executive power the first ban was justified by. Whatever political response to these immigration restrictions emerges, it must demand safeguards for legal immigration enshrined in law and law empowered to actually curtail institutional and executive power. Yet, legislation to reform immigration was long stymied before President Trump first ascended to power.
This wave of White House driven reorganization and restriction is a deep restructuring that hides from public view. Unless you or your family are affected, you might not even know that it is happening. It is confusing and specific in a way that isolates us. The spouse of an H1B visa holder who just had their work authorization lapse due to a technicality in the renewal process is in a different situation from the visa applicant who is getting travel banned, or the green card holder from a ban list country who just had their naturalization appointment canceled. These feel like separate, isolated, individual struggles, but they aren’t. They are each a tentacle of executive power that moves behind obfuscating bureaucratic language while seeking to fundamentally re-shape what kind of country America is. ICE raids draw instant popular mobilizations because paramilitary occupations of entire cities are visible and meant to be. But policy changes affect thousands of isolated individuals out of public view. These moves are not popular, they are not normal, they are not what the American people want; but do people know that this fundamental reshaping of the immigration system is even taking place?
Josef Burton is a former US diplomat turned immigration justice advocate. As a consular officer, he oversaw the Muslim Ban during Trump’s first term.