Aerial view of the Bridge of the Americas Land Port of Entry. One of four crossings in El Paso, the Bridge of the Americas is located on the international border separating El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and connects with the Mexican port of “Cordova” in Juarez, Chihuahua. (Photo by Jerry Glaser/U.S. Customs and Border Protection)
This is one in a series of States Newsroom reports on the major policy issues in the presidential race.
WASHINGTON — Immigration remains at the forefront of the 2024 presidential election, with both candidates taking a tougher stance than in the past on the flow of migrants into the United States.
GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has made immigration a core campaign issue, as he did in his two previous bids for the White House, and has expanded his attacks this time around to include false claims about migrants here legally with temporary protected status in specific locations like Springfield, Ohio.
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He’s often demonized immigrants in speeches and at rallies, and has vowed to enact the mass deportation of millions of people living in the United States without authorization.
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, like the Biden administration this year, has shifted to the right on immigration, embracing limits to asylum and advocating for added border security, after migrant encounters hit a record high at the end of 2023.
With those new policies in place, signed by executive order in June, migrant encounters have sharply fallen to the lowest level since President Joe Biden took office.
Vice President Harris in her remarks on immigration has mainly stuck to her promise to sign into law a bipartisan border security deal that three senators struck earlier this year. That legislation, if enacted, would have been the most drastic change in U.S. immigration law in decades.
The deal never made it out of the Senate. Once Trump expressed his displeasure with the bill, House Republicans pulled their support, and the GOP in the upper chamber followed suit.
Harris has not detailed her positions on immigration beyond her support of the border security bill.
Regardless of who wins the White House, the incoming administration will be tasked with the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects a little over half a million undocumented people brought into the United States as children without authorization, often called “Dreamers.”
A Texas legal challenge threatens the legality of the program, and the case could make its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. South Carolina is among eight other states challenging the 12-year program.
Additionally, work visas, massive backlogs in U.S. immigration courts and renewing those individuals in temporary protected status, or TPS, will fall to the next administration. The Biden administration recently extended the status until 2026. Neither candidate has laid out how they would handle those issues.
The Trump campaign did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.
The Harris campaign pointed to the vice president’s remarks from an Arizona campaign rally where she acknowledged the U.S. has a broken immigration system and put her support behind border security and legal pathways to citizenship.
In an Oct. 7 interview on CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” Harris said “from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.”
She said a bill she and Biden offered shortly after their inauguration “was to fix our broken immigration system.” That legislation would’ve provided a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the United States. It would’ve granted immediate green cards for some people, including those on temporary protected status and “Dreamers” brought by their parents as children. Harris blamed politics for the bill not being taken up.
Harris also visited the southern border Sept. 27 at Douglas, Arizona. It was her first trip to the border since 2021 and second as vice president.
Promise: border security deal
Harris has made the bipartisan border deal a centerpiece of her campaign. She’s often promised to sign it into law and has used the proposal to criticize Trump.
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“We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border,” Harris said during the Democratic National Convention in August.
The bill negotiated by senators would need to reach the 60-vote threshold to advance through the chamber. But after Trump came out against it and it was brought to the floor, the Republican who handled negotiations with Democrats and the White House, Oklahoma’s James Lankford, voted against his own bill.
Additionally, House Democrats in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and immigration groups were not supportive of the bill.
“I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law,” Harris said at the DNC.
The measure raises the bar for asylum, and would require asylum seekers to provide greater proof of their fear of persecution.
The bill would have also provided $20 billion for the hiring of more than 4,000 asylum officers, legal counsel for unaccompanied minors and the purchase of drug screening technology at ports of entry. It would also have provided $8 billion for detention facilities to add 50,000 detention beds.
The plan did include some legal pathways to citizenship for Afghans who aided the U.S. and fled in 2021 after the U.S. withdrew from the country. It also provided up to 10,000 special visas for family members of those Afghan allies.
It also would have added 250,000 green-card employee and family-based visas over the next five years.
According to the nonpartisan American Immigration Council, the bill “represents a serious attempt to acknowledge, and solve, some of the key problems with current border and asylum policy,” but “repeats mistakes made by the Trump and Biden administrations.”
Promise: Mass deportations
“Send them back,” is chanted at Trump’s rallies, where he often promises to carry out mass deportations.
Trump promises mass deportations of undocumented people. How would that work?
There are roughly 11 million people in the U.S. without legal authorization.
“We’re going to have the largest deportation,” Trump said at a June campaign rally in Racine, Wisconsin. “We have no choice.”
Under Trump’s vision, mass deportation would be a broad, multipronged effort that includes invoking an 18th-century law; reshuffling law enforcement at federal agencies; transferring funds within programs in the Department of Homeland Security; and forcing greater enforcement of immigration laws.
Promise: An end to birthright citizenship
In a May 2023 campaign video, Trump said if he wins the White House, one of his first moves would be to issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship, which means anyone born in the U.S., regardless of their parents’ status, is an American citizen.
This is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and would likely face legal challenges.
“As part of my plan to secure the border, on Day One of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship,” Trump said.
Promise: Deportation of pro-Palestinian students on visas
Across the country, students on college campuses during the past year have set up encampments and protests calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and an end to the Israel-Hamas war.
In the initial attack on Oct. 7, 2023, more than 1,200 people were killed in Israel and hundreds taken hostage. As the war has continued, the death toll of Palestinians has surpassed 42,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
At a private dinner in May, Trump told donors that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country,” according to the Washington Post.
“You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” Trump said. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
Trump also made that vow during a campaign rally in October 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“We’ll terminate the visas of all of Hamas’ sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country, if that’s OK with you,” he said.
The Republican party made it part of its party platform in July.
Promise: An end to parole programs
With immigration reform stalled in Congress, one way the Biden administration has handled mass migration is the use of humanitarian parole programs. Those humanitarian parole programs have been used for Ukrainians fleeing the war with Russia, Afghans fleeing after the U.S. withdrawal and for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.
More than 1 million people have been paroled into the U.S. under the executive authority extended by the Biden administration.
Trump said in a November 2023 campaign video he would end this policy on his first day in office.
“I will stop the outrageous abuse of parole authority,” Trump said.
Promise: Green cards for foreign students
In a June podcast interview, Trump said that he was supportive of giving green cards to foreign students if they graduate from a U.S. college.
“What I will do is, if you graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” Trump said. “That includes junior colleges, too.”
This would be done through rulemaking from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
On the podcast, Trump also said he would extend H-1B visas for tech workers. Those visas allow employers to hire foreign workers for specialized occupations, usually for a high skill role.
Promise: More screenings of immigrants
On social media, the Trump campaign said it would put in place an “ideological screening” for all immigrants and bar those who have sympathies toward Hamas.
Promise: Trump-era immigration policies
Trump has stated in various campaign speeches that he plans to reinstate his immigration policies from his first term, which Biden reversed soon after inauguration.
That would include the continuation of building a wall along the southern border; reissuing a travel ban on individuals from predominantly Muslim countries; suspending travel of refugees; reinstating a public health policy that barred migrants from claiming asylum amid the coronavirus pandemic; and reinstating the remain in Mexico policy that required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting their cases.