Trump’s immigration orders designed to sow chaos – ‘he wants you to feel afraid’
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Expert Austin Kocher explains why the ‘clown show’ of Trump orders will nonetheless fuel confusion and anxiety. Donald Trump began to enact his promised immigration crackdown just hours after taking power, issuing a barrage of executive actions that have incited panic and chaos across the US and at its borders. But much of the orders’ content will be difficult to enforce, and many will face strong legal challenges.
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Trump’s executive orders on immigration didn’t read like presidential actions so much as a “stream-of-consciousness mess … strung together in a lattice of nonsense”, wrote the political and legal geographer Austin Kocher, who had been issuing hourly immigration policy updates on his blog throughout inauguration day.
In the hours after Trump signed the orders, Kocher and many others – lawyers, civil rights organizations and immigrant advocates – are scrambling to sort out what exactly these policies would do, and what it means for millions of immigrants and their families.
The president’s day one actions included a national emergency declaration to deploy the military to the border, and a brazen attempt to end birthright citizenship, which would upend a key tenet of the country’s constitution. Another order rescinded a taskforce to reunite families deliberately separated at the border during Trump’s first term. Yet another order proclaims that people crossing the US border threaten public health – while offering few specifics about what those threats would be.
