Washington, DC — The Trump team’s array of Day One announcements on immigration and the border are sweeping in scope and by design, part of a purposeful “shock and awful” effort that aims to overwhelm potential opposition by sheer volume. While we join policy and legal experts in poring over the fine print to assess the full implications and next steps associated with yesterday’s volume of announcements, below are four key points of emphasis from Trump’s Day One that caught our eye:

• “Invasion” assertion moves from dangerous rhetoric to substantive justification for draconian new powers: In recent years, conspiratorial “invasion” rhetoric has moved from the white nationalist fringes to the mainstream right. “Invasion” and the related “great replacement theory” rhetoric has not only inspired a pattern of deadly terrorist attacks across the U.S., in places like El Paso, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo but is now the lie used to justify a sweeping nativist agenda, including authoritarian notions of deploying the military on U.S. streets (note the “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion” and “Protecting The American People Against Invasion” declarations issued by Trump on Day One).

• Redefining who gets to be an American: The attack on the 14th Amendment isn’t about reforming our immigration policy. The push to gut 150 years of settled law and hard-won progress by attacking birthright citizenship, for example, instead seeks to reshape America’s future by moving this nation backwards. The attack on birthright citizenship seeks to erase the hard-won progress of the Civil War and purposefully tees up a new legal fight the Trump administration hopes to steer through its anti-immigrant judicial pipeline. Meanwhile, think of the practical implications – the push to root out births to non-citizen parents will undoubtedly mean more big government intrusion into people’s lives and bureaucratic meddling and investigating of newborns and hospitals. Read more at “5 Key Things to Know About Birthright Citizenship.”

• Fueling more chaos and inhumanity; moving us farther from real solutions: The scope of what was announced and on display yesterday is more about division and scapegoating than advancing immigration and border solutions. In fact, as we saw during the first Trump term, these policies will fuel more chaos and cruelty. As one example, the now-terminated CBP App created new legal and orderly pathways for migration that reduced border pressures and reliance on smugglers.

• January 6th pardons expose why “law and order” justifications for immigration and the border don’t hold water: Trump’s speeches and the stated announcements yesterday remain filled with a lurid and false linkage between immigrants and crime and public safety. Yet the “full, complete and unconditional” nature of the 1,500-plus pardons Trump issued for the January 6th rioters – including those who violently attacked U.S. Capitol Police – is a reminder that the Trump focus on public safety and keeping Americans safe is selective, disingenuous and filtered solely through the lens of Trump’s self-interest and perceived political benefit.

As Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, stated:

“This is an attack on American families and our American values. Trump’s framing of our nation being ‘invaded’ coupled with the attacks on birthright citizenship and policies that will throw our immigration system further into chaos show that this is a hateful campaign to justify a nativist agenda that seeks to redefine ‘American’ and move this nation backwards.”

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