Three Key Immigration Points Ahead of Trump’s Tuesday Speech 

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Washington, DC — On Tuesday, President Trump will speak to a joint session of Congress. Like all Trump speeches, we expect immigration to be a core focus of his address.

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:

“We don’t need to see prepared remarks to already know that every sentence Donald Trump will say about immigrants on Tuesday night will include a noun, a verb, and an ugly lie on immigration.

We also already know that Trump and Republicans’ chaotic and cruel immigration agenda will come at a high cost for all Americans – robbing seniors and families of their healthcare and access to food programs; harming our economy and competitiveness; gutting key industries and evicting essential workers; splitting apart families; and turning our back on American values. None of these advance public safety or move us any closer to fixing a broken immigration system. Instead, Trump’s policies and executive actions are moving America backward as part of a radical effort to remake the nation in MAGA’s preferred image.”

Below are three key immigration points to keep in mind for Trump’s speech:

1. The high costs of Trump’s anti-immigrant obsession. From spiking inflation and depressing our economy to harming disaster recovery efforts to de-prioritizing actual public safety threats to cutting crucial kitchen table and healthcare programs for seniors, children and working families to fund mass deportations, all Americans will pay a high price because of Trump and Republicans’ chaotic and cruel immigration agenda and mass deportation obsessions.

2. The indiscriminate nature and harms of Trump’s planned mass deportations. As their early enforcement actions underscore, the Trump administration is not targeting public safety threats and the “worst of the worst” as promised, but instead is going after long-settled and deeply rooted immigrants.

Meanwhile, they are laying the groundwork to turbocharge their current efforts, seeking to purge as many immigrants as possible – including many here legally and in mixed status families with U.S. citizen children. Mass deportations will harm both our America’s interests and values – splitting apart families, dampening the economy and gutting key industries. As CNN recently phrased, “Economists say immigration is the solution America’s economy needs. That’s a dilemma — because the White House says immigration is the problem.”

3. Declining monthly border metrics under Trump merely continues the trendline from the Biden administration. As Trump claims “victory” regarding the declining monthly border numbers, he’s ignoring the trendline and the fact that border encounters and apprehensions also declined precipitously during the last six months of the Biden Administration.

Also recall that throughout 2019 during Trump’s first term, border encounters were the highest in more than a decade, spiking to about triple the totals of when he took office. And in December 2020 – the final month of the first Trump administration – border encounters were at the highest level for a December in more than two decades and had been rising for months.

Global migration is complicated and the ebb and flow of border numbers – under Trump and under Biden – remind us why we need a full immigration overhaul from Congress to equip America for 21st century migration – not the enforcement-only agenda and obsessions of Trump.