Anti-Immigration Movement in the U.S.: Laws, Enforcement, and Costs

The anti-immigration movement in the United States is the long-running political, organizational, and legal effort to restrict who can enter the country and who can stay. It has cycled through periods of intense restriction and relative openness since the 1790s, and it is now in one of its most aggressive phases: under the second Trump administration, it has produced mass deportation operations, entry bans on nationals of dozens of countries, new federal and state laws, and a wave of court fights that have reached the Supreme Court.

How the Movement Got Here

Restrictionist policy is older than most of the country’s immigration statutes. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 authorized the president to deport noncitizens deemed “dangerous” and stretched the residency requirement for naturalization from five to fourteen years. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first federal law to restrict immigration by race, suspending entry of Chinese laborers for ten years. The 1917 Immigration Act created an “Asiatic barred zone” and added literacy tests, and the 1924 National Origins Quota Act set quotas at two percent of the foreign-born population counted in the 1890 census, favoring northern and western Europeans while excluding Asians entirely.¹

Those quotas held until the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 abolished them and refocused the system on family reunification and employer sponsorship, driving a large rise in immigration.¹ The restrictionist current returned in 1996 with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which broadened the “aggravated felony” definition, created expedited removal, and imposed three-year, ten-year, and permanent reentry bars.² The Secure Fence Act of 2006 authorized more than 700 miles of reinforced fencing along the southern border.

The Organizations Driving Policy

Much of the modern movement’s institutional backbone traces to one person. John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist and former Zero Population Growth president, founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in 1979 and went on to found or co-found the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA.² Critics have described his ideological path as an evolution from environmental population concerns to white nationalist anxiety over non-white immigration, and that framework still runs through the groups he built.³

FAIR produces fiscal-cost reports, CIS publishes demographic research, and NumbersUSA runs grassroots lobbying. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated FAIR and CIS as hate groups.⁴ Their funding is concentrated: the Colcom Foundation, founded by a Tanton associate, gave FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA a combined $8.6 million in 2012 and more than $11.7 million to ten anti-immigration organizations that year. The Scaife family foundations and the Weeden Foundation have also provided substantial support, with Weeden’s leadership holding positions inside several of the groups it funds.⁵

The reach shows up in the media and in government. Between 2017 and 2021, officials from the three groups appeared on Fox News at least 84 times, and major newspapers cited them in 203 articles across a two-and-a-half-year period, with only 15 percent of those pieces noting the groups’ origins or extremist ties. Former FAIR research director Matthew O’Brien was appointed an immigration judge in 2020, and Trump adviser Stephen Miller has drawn on CIS research to shape administration policy.⁴

What the Movement Is Doing Now

The New York City Bar Association has described the current administration’s approach as an effort to “fundamentally reshape immigration policy and practice” through executive orders, policy memoranda, and enforcement directives that frequently “test the limits of executive power.”⁶

Stephen Miller as the Central Figure

Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff and homeland security adviser, oversees overall immigration policy, requires immigration authorities to report to him, and runs a daily morning call with conservative diplomats to direct enforcement and State Department operations.⁷ Reporting drawn from the book Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan says Miller avoids putting directives in writing to prevent discovery in litigation and often claims to speak for the president when directing other officials.⁸

Miller has pushed deportation efforts past people with criminal records to include everyone without legal status and holders of Temporary Protected Status. He set ICE arrest quotas aimed at one million deportations per year and, by May 2026, was demanding 3,000 arrests per day.⁹ He has also restricted legal immigration, ending nearly all refugee admissions and overseeing entry bans on nationals of 39 countries. According to that same reporting, he advocated for suspending habeas corpus to deny immigrants due process, an effort blocked internally by White House staff.⁸

Executive Orders, Travel Bans, and TPS

On his first day back in office, Trump signed Executive Order 14161, directing agencies to identify countries with deficient visa screening to justify travel suspensions. By December 2025, a sweeping proclamation imposed full entry suspensions on nationals of 20 countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Iran, Somalia, and Syria, along with partial suspensions on nationals of roughly 19 more. Family-based immigrant visas lost their status as a broad categorical exception.¹⁰

The administration also terminated Temporary Protected Status for Somalia, Venezuela, and Haiti, and the State Department paused immigrant visa processing for 75 countries the administration identified as having migrants who use public benefits at rates it deemed unacceptable.¹¹

The Alien Enemies Act

On March 14, 2025, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 through Proclamation No. 10903, authorizing the apprehension and removal of Venezuelan citizens 14 and older alleged to be members of the gang Tren de Aragua, which the proclamation described as conducting “hostile actions and irregular warfare” as part of an “invasion.”¹² This was the first use of the wartime statute since World War II. DHS began moving Venezuelan migrants to a detention facility in South Texas and, in some cases, to El Salvador’s Center for Terrorism Confinement.¹³

In Trump v. J.G.G., decided April 7, 2025, the Supreme Court vacated district-court orders that had paused the removals, holding that challenges must be brought as habeas petitions where a person is detained. The justices affirmed that detainees are entitled to notice and a meaningful chance to seek judicial review before removal. Justice Sotomayor dissented, warning the transfers to the Salvadoran prison posed “extraordinary harm.”¹³

New Laws

The Laken Riley Act

The Laken Riley Act was signed by President Trump on January 29, 2025, after the House passed it 264–159 on January 8 and the Senate invoked cloture 61–35 on January 17, with bipartisan support. It requires ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who are arrested for, charged with, convicted of, or who admit to theft-related offenses such as burglary, larceny, and shoplifting, along with assault on a law enforcement officer or any crime causing death or serious bodily injury. Detention is mandatory even without a conviction.¹⁴

The law also lets state attorneys general sue the Secretary of Homeland Security to force detention and removal, with standing triggered by as little as $100 in claimed financial harm to a state or its residents. Legal observers have raised due process concerns about mandatory detention of people only charged, not convicted, and warned that the standing provision could let states override federal enforcement discretion.¹⁴

Criminal Penalties and Enforcement Funding

The House passed the Stop Illegal Entry Act of 2025 (H.R. 3486) on September 11, 2025, by 226–197. It sets a five-year mandatory minimum for people who illegally enter and are then convicted of a felony, with ten-year minimums and possible life imprisonment for those who reenter after a prior felony conviction, and it raises maximum sentences for repeated illegal entries and reentry after removal.¹⁵

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025,” the House’s fiscal year 2025 reconciliation package, includes $50 billion for border wall construction and border facility improvements, $45 billion for adult alien detention capacity, $14 billion for transportation and removal operations, and $8 billion each for new ICE personnel and CBP staffing.¹⁶

State Laws

Texas Senate Bill 4, passed in 2023, criminalizes reentry for people living in or traveling through Texas, gives state magistrates authority to issue deportation orders, and criminalizes noncompliance with them. On May 14, 2026, a U.S. District Court blocked four key provisions in LML v. Martin, with the ACLU arguing that immigration enforcement is an exclusive federal power and that the law violates the Supremacy Clause.¹⁷

Iowa’s Senate File 2340 lets state officials arrest, detain, and remove noncitizens who reentered after deportation and directs state judges to order removals to Mexico for people who entered at the southern border, regardless of actual nationality. Two lawsuits challenging it, including one from the Department of Justice, were filed on May 9, 2024.¹⁸

Enforcement on the Ground

The White House reports that more than 2.5 million people have left the United States since the administration took office, including over 605,000 deportations and roughly 1.9 million departures the administration calls “self-deportations.” ICE says it has doubled its officer corps from 10,000 to 22,000.¹¹ Those figures have not been independently verified at that scale. The Dallas Federal Reserve noted that by March 2025 net unauthorized immigration had dropped 82 percent from December 2024 levels, but also found ICE “falling short of its numerical targets” and called a scenario of one million removals annually by the end of 2027 “unlikely due to resource constraints.”¹⁹

Operations have included street sweeps and worksite raids. In June 2025, ICE arrested more than 100 people at a Tallahassee, Florida construction site, and federal agents ran raids near construction supply stores in the Los Angeles area that August.²⁰ In January 2026, federal immigration agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens during “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis. Renee Good, 37, was shot by an ICE officer on January 7 while behind the wheel of an SUV. Alex Pretti, 37, an ICU nurse, was shot on January 24 while documenting the scene with his phone. In both cases, eyewitness accounts and independent video analysis from multiple major news outlets contradicted the administration’s initial self-defense account.²¹ UN experts warned the incidents may constitute extrajudicial killings.²² Between September 2025 and February 2026, federal immigration officers shot 14 people nationwide; several agency leaders later left their positions.²³

What Mass Deportation Would Cost

Analyses of removing the estimated 11 to 13 million unauthorized immigrants in the country project steep costs. The Penn Wharton Budget Model puts the average cost at $70,236 per deportee, with a four-year deportation policy adding $350 billion to federal deficits and a ten-year policy adding $987 billion, on top of $170 billion already allocated for border and interior enforcement in the 2025 reconciliation bill.²⁴ The American Immigration Council estimates the operation would require 24 times current ICE detention capacity, more than 1,000 new immigration courtrooms, and more than 30,000 new ICE agents.²⁵

Agriculture

Roughly 42 percent of crop farmworkers lack legal work authorization, and USDA calls the sixfold rise in H-2A certifications, from 48,000 in 2005 to about 385,000 in 2024, “one of the clearest indicators of the scarcity of farm labor.” New immigrant arrivals for agricultural work have fallen 75 percent in recent years, and the average age of foreign-born farmworkers rose by nearly seven years between 2006 and 2022.²⁶ County-level research on 287(g) enforcement agreements found that heavier interior enforcement reduced vegetable acreage, cut the value of dairy production, and left fewer operating dairies. Between 2007 and 2021 the U.S. share of imported fresh fruit rose from 50 to 60 percent, and imported fresh vegetables from 20 to 38 percent, as domestic production fell alongside labor scarcity.²⁷

Construction and Housing

Immigrants make up over 23 percent of the construction workforce, and roughly 54 percent of those foreign-born workers are estimated to be undocumented.²⁸ In a summer 2025 survey by the Associated General Contractors of America, 92 percent of hiring firms said they had trouble finding qualified workers, and 28 percent said they had been directly or indirectly affected by immigration enforcement in the previous six months. Workers vanished from job sites after actual or rumored raids, subcontractors lost staff, and 45 percent of firms blamed labor shortages for project delays.²⁹

The Economic Policy Institute projected in July 2025 that if the administration meets its deportation targets, construction would lose 1.4 million immigrant workers and see a net loss of 861,000 U.S.-born jobs from business closures and scaling back, in a housing market already short about 1.5 million units.²⁰ Research on the earlier Secure Communities program found stricter enforcement produced lasting drops in construction labor and homebuilding while pushing prices up.²⁸

GDP, Revenue, and Families

Penn Wharton projects that mass deportation would cut GDP by 1.0 percent under a four-year scenario and 4.9 percent under a ten-year scenario by 2054, with wages for high-skilled workers (63 percent of the population) falling while authorized low-skilled workers could see wages rise by up to 5 percent if enforcement is sustained.²⁴ The American Immigration Council estimates annual losses of 4.2 to 6.8 percent of GDP, $46.8 billion in federal tax revenue, and $29.3 billion in state and local tax revenue. Removal at that scale would separate an estimated 4 million mixed-status families, affecting 8.5 million U.S. citizens including 5.1 million children.²⁵

Health and Hate Crime Effects

Research published in Health Affairs in November 2025 linked immigration enforcement to increased mental-health distress, cardiovascular disease risk factors, and adverse birth outcomes including higher rates of preterm birth and low birthweight. Fear of deportation creates “chilling effects” that cause immigrants to avoid medical care, skip safety-net programs like SNAP, and distrust government health information; those effects reach beyond unauthorized immigrants to their family members and, in some cases, entire racial and ethnic groups.³⁰ A systematic review of 40 studies found that fear of interactions with immigration authorities significantly delays treatment; in one cited study, tuberculosis patients who feared being reported were nearly four times as likely to delay care for more than two months, raising the risk of transmission.³¹ The American Psychological Association has reported increases in anxiety, depression, and panic attacks tied to enforcement activity and anti-immigrant rhetoric.³²

Anti-Latino hate crime incidents rose 18 percent nationwide from 2024 to 2025, reaching 1,014 reported incidents, an all-time high since the FBI began tracking the category in 1991 and a 238 percent jump over the previous decade, according to the California Association of Human Relations Organizations.³³ Preliminary 2025 FBI data also showed a 59 percent rise in anti-Sikh hate crime incidents and record highs for anti-Hindu and anti-Buddhist incidents.³⁴ Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said anti-immigrant rhetoric from the administration had created conditions where “it is acceptable” to target Latinos regardless of legal status. Asian Americans Advancing Justice cited the normalization of “hate-fueled ideology” in political rhetoric and a record number of incidents in which bad actors impersonated ICE agents to terrorize communities “perceived as not American,” and cautioned that official figures likely undercount the true scope because aggressive enforcement has deepened distrust of law enforcement.

Where the Courts Stand

Administration policies have drawn dozens of federal lawsuits, and a number have produced injunctions or reached the Supreme Court.

In Escobar Molina v. Department of Homeland Security, a D.C. district court issued a preliminary injunction in December 2025 prohibiting warrantless civil immigration arrests without individualized probable cause of flight risk, and in May 2026 ordered the government to stop relying on a January 2026 ICE memo that attempted to circumvent it. In Northern California, a federal judge ordered DHS to stop arrests at immigration courthouses and halted a policy of re-arresting people the agency had already cleared for release.³⁵

On asylum, RAICES v. Mullin challenged the January 2025 proclamation aimed at shutting down asylum at the border. A district court granted summary judgment for the plaintiffs in July 2025 and permanently enjoined the proclamation, and the D.C. Circuit partially stayed that ruling in August 2025 while the case proceeded on appeal.³⁶

Two cases have reached the Supreme Court with especially broad implications. In Trump v. Barbara, the ACLU challenged an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children born on U.S. soil. Argued April 1, 2026, reports suggested the Court appeared likely to rule against the administration; a decision is pending.³⁷ In Mullin v. Doe, decided 6–3 on June 25, 2026, the Court held that federal law bars judicial review of the Secretary of Homeland Security’s decisions to terminate Temporary Protected Status, effectively allowing the administration to end protections for Syrian and Haitian nationals. The majority also rejected a racial discrimination challenge to the Haitian TPS termination. Justice Kagan dissented, arguing the review bar should not stop courts from checking whether the Secretary followed required procedural steps.³⁸

Where the Public Stands

Public opinion has moved sharply since the enforcement campaign began. A June 2025 Gallup poll found the share of Americans wanting less immigration dropped from 55 percent in 2024 to 30 percent, and a record 79 percent said immigration is “a good thing” for the country, up from 64 percent a year earlier. Support for mass deportation fell from 47 percent to 38 percent, while 78 percent favored offering undocumented immigrants pathways to citizenship.³⁹

By February 2026, after the Minneapolis shootings, 65 percent of Americans said ICE had “gone too far,” an 11-point rise since summer 2025, and nearly 60 percent said the agency was making the country less safe, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll. The partisan divide is stark: 77 percent of Republicans said ICE makes Americans safer, while 56 percent of independents said it makes the country “much less safe.”⁴⁰ A March 2025 Pew survey found 42 percent of Hispanic adults worried that they, a family member, or a close friend could be deported, and majorities of all Americans opposed immigration arrests at places of worship, schools, and hospitals.⁴¹

1
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19
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29
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31
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34
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35
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39
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40
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41
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