Trump Can Keep Plenty of Immigration Promises Without Congress
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, celebrates as results are announced in favor of Trump.
Photographer: M. Scott Brauer for Bloomberg Businessweek
Since launching his presidential run a year and a half ago with a speech describing Mexican immigrants as rapists, Trump has made a bevy of promises about how he’d overhaul U.S. immigration policy.
Many of those pledges—such as tripling the ranks of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and building a wall along the southern U.S. border—require cooperation from Congress, which some of his Republican allies will be eager to provide. But what worries pro-immigrant activists the most are the things President Trump can do by himself. “It’s equally scary to think about what could come out of Congress as what he could do administratively,” says Jacinta Gonzalez, field director for the Latino advocacy group Mijente.