TRUMP’S FIRST 100 HOURS: A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM. It’s a long tradition in American politics to evaluate a president by what he has accomplished in his first 100 days in office. Like so many other traditions of the presidency, Donald Trump has changed that. In his second term, he has been moving so fast on so many policy fronts that it will take a while to digest what he has done in the first 100 hours.
Trump’s arrival has been a shock to the system in Washington. With his barrage of executive actions, he has simply overwhelmed the ability of the media and the political opposition to keep up with him. Trump’s opponents have been forced to choose which actions to resist and which to let slide, or at least just nominally resist. They simply don’t have the resources or the energy to mount a full-scale challenge to everything.
Taken as a whole, Trump’s executive actions have closely tracked the voters’ greatest concerns in the presidential election, beginning with the border and immigration. Looking just at that issue brings Trump’s strategy into focus.
Probably the most consequential thing Trump has done on the border issue is to reinstate the Remain in Mexico program from his first term. It was the single most important policy innovation in stopping a flood of migrants from trying to cross illegally into the United States. Trump’s policy means the migrants who cross into the country will not be allowed to stay in the U.S. while their asylum claims are adjudicated. (The vast majority of those claims are found to be without merit.) When would-be border crossers knew they would quickly be returned to Mexico, they didn’t try to cross. When, under former President Joe Biden, they knew they would be allowed to stay in the U.S., they came by the millions. Trump has returned a sense of order to the system.
In a related move, Trump signed an executive order ending the practice of catch-and-release for illegal border crossers. He signed an order designating the drug and human smuggling cartels as terrorist organizations. He also signed an order “guaranteeing the states protection against invasion.” And an order to resume construction of the border wall that was not built during his first term. And an order increasing the intensity of screening and vetting for would-be migrants. And a move to shut down immediately the CBP One app, which Biden created to facilitate the rapid influx of migrants into the U.S.
Trump also declared a national emergency at the southern border. That will allow him to order active-duty military units to the area to play a support role for civilian border enforcement.
Taken together, the orders completely reverse Biden’s disastrous border policy and underscore the powers the president already has to bring order and security to the border. There’s a line in the “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” order that serves as the foundation for everything Trump is doing. “This order ensures that the federal government protects the American people by faithfully executing the immigration laws of the United States,” it says. “It is the policy of the United States to faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens, particularly those aliens who threaten the safety or security of the American people.”
The point of that is to stress that the law already provides the president the authority to stop the massive flow of illegal border crossers that happened under Biden. The country just needed a president who would enforce it.
That was quickly illustrated by the beginning of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to deport criminal immigrants who were in the U.S. illegally and sometimes under the protection of “sanctuary” jurisdictions. ICE agents have begun by targeting some of the worst of the worst — gang members and murderers and rapists and the like. The reaction of most Americans will likely be: Why were these guys in the country to begin with?
One final thing. Missing from the above list of Trump actions is his executive order to end birthright citizenship. It is the most controversial of Trump’s border and immigration actions, and it is the one that he does not have the legal authority to accomplish. The order, of course, set off a frenzy among activist groups and their allies in the press — they’ve already taken it to court — and it is safe to say that it has received more media attention than Trump’s other moves.
Trump is going to lose that fight — like it or not, the plain text of the 14th Amendment provides for birthright citizenship. But here’s the thing. While the Democratic/media/activist/legal world is in a frenzy about birthright citizenship, Trump will be plowing ahead on all the other vitally important things he needs to do to restore order after years of Biden border chaos. If the president can simply “faithfully execute” U.S. immigration law, using the authority he already has, it will be a great accomplishment.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
