The Trump administration’s highly visible immigration enforcement efforts are impacting immigrants across the country – be it through the arrest and detention of immigrants or through the chilling effects these operations have on immigrant communities. |
State legislatures are advancing policies that directly impact immigrant communities — creating new rules, expanding enforcement, and offering critical protections.
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A newly declassified memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Freedom of the Press Foundation undermines some of the key assumptions President Trump presented in justifying the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. |
Three committees in the House of Representatives recently approved several immigration- and border-related spending proposals as a part of the budget reconciliation process. If approved, the bill will be sent to the Senate for consideration. While the recommendations largely provide increases to immigration- and border enforcement-related funding provisions—roughly $151.3 billion—they also drive dramatic changes to immigration policy.
The Judiciary bill risks turning legal immigration into a pay-to-play system, by significantly increasing fees on everything from asylum applications and work permits to family reunification and humanitarian protections like Temporary Protected Status (TPS). It would provide $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers, including family detention facilities. This amount is 13 times ICE’s FY 2024 detention budget and would be a 364 percent increase on an annual basis that would primarily benefit private companies contracted to build and run detention facilities.
Read our Fact Sheet: What’s in the 2025 House Reconciliation Bill? |
This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the Birthright Citizenship case CASA v. Trump, in which five pregnant women, along with CASA and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP) challenged President Trump's executive order seeking to deny birthright citizenship to children born in the United States to certain immigrant parents. A final ruling is not expected to be issued until June or early July 2025.
Read More: Birthright Citizenship Fact Sheet |
ICE commonly transfers people in its custody from one detention center to another, often relocating them to different parts of the country. Recently, ICE has made high-profile arrests, including that of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, that have led individuals detained in the northeast to be quickly transferred to detention facilities in Louisiana. In 2012, ICE issued a policy to establish protocols for ICE officers to follow when transferring individuals. However, it is unclear whether the agency updated its policy or whether the agency even follows its own protocols. On May 14, 2025, the American Immigration Council and the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network (RMIAN) filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to get more information and access agency records to find out if ICE adheres to its own policies when transferring a person in its custody from one detention center to another.
Read more: Council and RMIAN Sue ICE to Get Records about Transfers of People in ICE Custody |
