The United States, the country of immigrants which has locked its doors

John F. Kennedy defined the United States as “a nation of immigrants.” In the book published posthumously in 1964 under that title, JFK celebrated the historical and cultural contribution of successive waves of immigration as the driving force behind the nation’s strength. This year, as the country celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the question is whether that spirit still remains in the United States. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House on January 20, 2025, the Republican president has signed more than 180 executive orders aimed at limiting the arrival of new migrants and expelling those who are not citizens.

“For decades there was bipartisan support for reforming and modernizing our immigration system while recognizing the contributions of immigrants,” explains Naureen Shah, director of policy and government affairs for the Equality Division of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “However, it proved politically very useful for President Trump to capitalize on hatred, pit American citizens against their neighbors, and turn these people into a kind of frightening threat, when in fact they are individuals seeking asylum, fleeing to save their lives, and hoping for a better future. That hatred has now become federal policy and is devastating the lives of thousands of people across the country.”

With the exception of Native Americans, most Americans can trace their ancestry to an immigrant — whether they arrived on the Mayflower, aboard a slave ship, through Ellis Island, via JFK Airport, or by crossing the Rio Grande. In its early years, the United States was “open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions,” as the country’s first president, George Washington, once said.

More than two centuries later, the Trump administration is reshaping the nation. For the first time in the 50 years for which records exist, more migrants left the United States than entered it in 2025. According to data compiled by the Brookings Institution, net migration fell into negative territory by between 10,000 and 250,000 people, and 2026 is expected to follow the same trend.

Alongside mass deportations — which official figures put at 605,000 through December — the administration has closed the border, terminated refugee and asylum programs, barred entry to nationals of certain countries, and tightened or suspended visa programs.

Even so, the United States is home to more immigrants than any other country. Immigrants make up 15.4% of its population of 342 million, but after more than half a century of rapid growth, the country’s immigrant population is now declining.

“This is undoubtedly a nation of immigrants, but do I feel they are welcome here? No,” says Julie Moreno. She knows what she is talking about. This week, she returned from a trip to Baja California to see her husband. It was the second time she had done so this year since October, when her husband, Neftalí Juárez, was forced to separate from her and return to Mexico.

Juárez came to the United States in search of a future that would allow him to support the family he had left behind in the Mexican state of Puebla. He arrived as an undocumented immigrant, but he fell in love with and married Moreno, who is a U.S. citizen. A series of bureaucratic obstacles prevented him from obtaining legal residency, but although the worry of lacking legal status never disappeared, it was never a major problem during the 15 years they spent together. That changed when Trump returned with his promise to carry out the largest deportation campaign in history.

“That anxiety was always there, but it reached a point where it prevented people from working and even leaving their homes,” says Moreno. “The risk was no longer worth it, because if you take away the reward of being able to work hard, support your loved ones, or build a life here, then why take the risk at all?”

One of the greatest fears was ending up in a detention center run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), where poor conditions have been widely documented. As facilities struggle to cope with a dramatic increase in detainees, migrants — including children — are crowded into limited spaces. Complaints about food, sometimes expired and even contaminated with worms, lack of access to medication, and medical neglect have become common. In the first half of this year alone, 20 people have died in ICE custody. In 2025, 33 deaths were reported, the highest figure in more than two decades.

Fear of detention ultimately pushed Juárez to make the difficult decision to leave behind his construction job, his wife, and the country where he believed his future lay. Now Moreno is considering leaving as well.

“We’ve put so much effort into figuring out where our lives are headed, but everything is up in the air. It feels strange coming back to New Jersey. He’s never going to return here — or at least not for another 15 years — and that leaves me feeling like I’m stuck in limbo,” she says.

The prospect of ending up in an ICE detention center is one of the pressures the government has used to encourage so-called “self-deportations” or voluntary departures. Faced with the difficulty of meeting its goal of deporting one million undocumented migrants per year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chose to promote voluntary exits, first offering $1,000 and later increasing the incentive to $2,600.

The administration estimates that 1.9 million foreign nationals have left the country, although those figures cannot be independently verified. Nor can it be confirmed whether those who departed actually received the money they were promised.

About 63,000 people are currently being held in ICE detention centers, compared with roughly 40,000 when Trump began his second term. In recent days, arrests have doubled from the levels seen at the beginning of the year, reaching 2,000 per day. The appointment of former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin to replace DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in March appears to have changed the style rather than the substance of the policy: arrests are no longer carried out with the same level of publicity as under his predecessor. During Noem’s tenure, in January, U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed by federal agents while defending migrants in Minneapolis, sparking a wave of outrage across the country.

Mullin intends to continue the effort, but more quietly. He will have no shortage of resources to do so. Under pressure from Trump, the Republican-controlled Congress approved $70 billion last month to fund immigration enforcement operations. Combined with the $170 billion already authorized under the July 2025 fiscal law, this represents an enormous budget that will allow the administration to accelerate deportations with limited oversight. During his first appearance before the Senate, Mullin suggested that his department would not comply with court orders he considers politically motivated. Trump’s executive orders have triggered a flood of legal challenges, with courts repeatedly ruling against his administration.

“The executive branch is acting in a way that demonstrates its hostility toward the decisions of federal judges,” says immigration attorney Eric Lee. “That is something that has never happened in this country’s history. If we are talking about the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, one of the most important democratic documents in human history, it is ironic that we have a president who behaves the way the King of Great Britain did in the years leading up to the Declaration and the Revolution.”

In Lee’s view, both Democratic and Republican administrations have undermined the rights of migrants, but Trump “has crossed the line” by attempting to “establish a dictatorship.” Among Lee’s clients are Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian graduate student at Cornell University, and Helyeh Doutaghi, an Iranian scholar at Yale. Both were forced to leave the United States after their visas were revoked because of their advocacy for the Palestinian cause.

Courts tailored to Trump’s agenda

Trump has sought to reshape the immigration courts — which decide deportation cases — by dismissing judges seen as most supportive of migrants.

“They are not independent. They know that if they issue a ruling in favor of a migrant, they can be fired. That is how courts operate in a dictatorship,” Lee adds.

To expand the pool of people eligible for deportation, the government has steadily canceled humanitarian programs granted by previous administrations. One such program is Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which was created to provide refuge to citizens of countries affected by armed conflict or natural disasters. Noem terminated TPS protections for 13 countries, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan.

In June, the Supreme Court upheld the administration’s decision to end TPS protections for 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. The ruling could affect more than one million people who rely on the program to remain legally in the United States.

Beneficiaries of temporary protection programs are not necessarily shielded from deportation. The Department of Homeland Security has deported 86 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients as well as 174 individuals whose applications were still pending. DACA was created by former president Barack Obama to protect people who were brought to the United States illegally as children from deportation. About half a million adults who have lived in the country for decades depend on the program. Trump has sought to eliminate it, and delays in processing renewal applications have left recipients vulnerable and without work authorization.

That is what happened to Ángel (who prefers not to give his full name). He arrived from Mexico with his mother when he was four years old and has spent virtually his entire life in the United States, the country he considers home. Now 36, he admits that “this is the first time I’ve been afraid” that he might lose his protected status. His DACA authorization was set to expire in May, and he submitted his renewal application in February, within the 120-day window established by the rules. This time, however, the renewal did not arrive on time, forcing him to leave his job as a physical education teacher at an elementary school before the academic year ended. Without DACA, he no longer had work authorization and was no longer protected from deportation.

“I felt deeply depressed, as if all the effort I’ve made my entire life had been for nothing,” he says.

Life as an undocumented immigrant was never easy. Before obtaining DACA, Ángel lived without any protection. Even in high school, teachers would ask him when he was going to get legal papers so he could attend college, but he never knew what to say. He felt that his only path to higher education was earning an athletic scholarship, and he devoted himself completely to that goal. He succeeded, but employment opportunities remained off-limits until DACA was introduced. Now even that no longer provides reassurance.

“I want to fight for my students. Many of them come from other countries, and although they don’t tell me directly, I know they have the same fears I had as a child,” he says.

Only white and wealthy foreigners welcome

The underlying issue — the creation of pathways to permanent residency and citizenship — remains unresolved and highlights Congress’s failure to pass a comprehensive immigration reform. The America envisioned by Trump, critics argue, has room for only one type of foreigner: the white and the wealthy.

The Republican administration ended the refugee admissions program while making an exception for white South Africans, the Afrikaners. At the same time that it revoked work and student visas at its discretion, it promoted a “gold card” visa program, offering a path to permanent residency for those willing to pay $1 million.

“This is the deepest and most explicit period of racist immigration policy that our country has experienced,” says Shah.

The administration’s aggressive immigration agenda has also had an economic and social impact on the country. In 2023, the most recent year with complete data, 33 million immigrants were part of the U.S. labor force, including approximately 23 million legal immigrants and 10 million undocumented workers.

Latinos constitute the largest immigrant community and have been the group most affected by deportations. Business leaders have warned about the economic effects of the administration’s policies. Latinos account for 78% of agricultural workers and one out of every three construction laborers. Their contributions are also indispensable in highly skilled professions such as medicine and technology.

Between January and June 2025 alone, the United States recorded a decline of more than 750,000 migrant workers, and the figures continue to rise.

Political repercussions are also expected. Most Americans do not support Trump’s immigration agenda, and one in four Latino voters who supported him in 2024 now regret doing so. Immigration policy is also part of the reason why, this Fourth of July, only 53% of adults say they are “extremely” or “very” proud to be American — the lowest level recorded since 2001, according to Gallup’s latest survey.

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