Trump signed a torrent of anti-immigration orders. Here’s what could happen next

Denia Pérez was at a Sebastopol potluck with new friends. Luis Liang was enjoying a burger and a paloma in San Francisco’s Castro district. Reyna Maldonado was celebrating her mother’s 53rd birthday in North Beach.

Last Monday, the Bay Area friends and Dreamers — three of about 535,000 people given temporary immigration status under an Obama-era program for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children — were trying, in their own ways, to steer clear of Inauguration Day events.

Now they’re responding to them.

Since being sworn into office for a second time, President Donald Trump has made a torrent of decisions that threaten to tear status from legal and protected immigrants. 

He signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship, halted asylum and refugee admissions, expanded deportation efforts to migrants who were admitted for humanitarian reasons, declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, and reasserted his intent to activate the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a rarely used wartime authority, to carry out mass deportations.

The speed with which Trump has delivered these and other decisions has invited swift response from civil rights and immigrant advocacy groups — leading to a federal judge blocking the birthright citizenship order on Thursday — and contravened decades and in some cases more than a century of U.S. immigration norms.

“It’s alarming,” Pérez, 35, said. “It just doesn’t really seem like there’s a lot of guardrails against (Trump) carrying out his violent, xenophobic agenda.”

Two pillars of Trump’s agenda — ending birthright citizenship and activating the Alien Enemies Act — will test constitutional and legal guardrails, say immigrant activists and attorneys.

Birthright citizenship

A federal judge in Seattle on Thursday temporarily blocked Trump’s executive order stripping birthright citizenship from children of undocumented parents and immigrants without green cards, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.” The ruling is an early step in what is expected to be prolonged litigation that will likely reach the Supreme Court.

Expectant mothers will be part of that legal journey.

Five pregnant women sued the Trump administration in a Maryland federal court on Tuesday on behalf of their unborn children. Their lawsuit — led by the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, a New York-based litigation and activism nonprofit, and CASA, an immigrant services organization headquartered in Maryland — joins at least three others, all contending that Trump’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship from the children of undocumented parents and noncitizens without green cards plainly violates the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

In a landmark case involving a San Francisco-born Chinese man, the Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to every baby born on American soil, regardless of their parentage.

In response to a lawsuit filed by Arizona, Oregon, Illinois and Washington state, U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee, issued a two-week restraining order and indicated a nationwide injunction would be next. Without such an injunction, Trump’s order would take effect Feb. 20.

The other lawsuits — including one filed by San Francisco along with California and 17 other states; and another by a coalition including the American Civil Liberties Union and Asian Law Caucus, a San Francisco-based civil rights organization — are also proceeding.

One of the pregnant women suing the president discussed her reasons during a Tuesday video conference. Born in Venezuela and residing legally in South Carolina, the woman — identified by a pseudonym in court papers — said she would rather be excitedly planning for her child’s birth in August.

“I don’t understand how it is that my child could be treated differently than other children, that my child would not have the same rights because of his parents’ immigration status,” the woman said in Spanish through an interpreter.

The woman is in the U.S. on Temporary Protected Status, granting temporary status and the ability to work to citizens from countries facing war or emergencies.

Trump has directed his cabinet to review the program and has already revoked humanitarian parole — temporary status for those fleeing dangerous conditions — for migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti.

Because Venezuela has no consular services in the U.S., the woman said she thinks it will be nearly impossible to get her child Venezuelan citizenship documents, rendering the child effectively stateless if Trump’s order withstands legal challenge.

An estimated 150,000 children would be denied birthright citizenship over the course of a year under Trump’s executive order, the lawsuit from California and other states alleged, citing a 2025 analysis by the National Demographics Corporation, a nonpartisan firm.

In 2022, an estimated 24,500 children in California were born to noncitizen parents, according to the same estimate.

“One of the best things about America is the fact that people can come here and, within one generation, they are American,” said Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus. “They feel like they belong and they are here to work and to contribute and to really be a part of our society.”

Advocates say ending birthright citizenship could create an “underclass” of stateless Americans. A U.S.-born child denied birthright citizenship may not be recognized as a citizen of their parents’ countries of origin, depending on the countries’ citizenship laws.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, an estimated 4.4 million stateless people globally lack legal protections like the right to vote, face travel restrictions and lack access to basic education, health care, employment and other needs.

Alien Enemies Act

Following his inauguration, Trump vowed to use the 227-year-old Alien Enemies Act — last used to arrest and detain 17,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II — “to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks.”

For Trump, the wartime authority could allow him to circumvent due process usually granted to immigrants through the court system, experts say. And while the U.S. isn’t at war, Trump and Republican lawmakers have framed migration as invasion.

“It gives tremendous authority to everybody to straighten out our country,” Trump said of the Act in October.

Legal experts like Carl Takei, an Asian Law Caucus attorney who focuses on civil liberties and national security, said Trump’s plan to use the Act is illegal and a gateway to target immigrant communities that have nothing to do with the criminal networks Trump referred to.

“This Act is not supposed to apply to the actions of non-state entities, let alone acts of migration or people coming to the United States to make a better life,” Takei said. “It doesn’t fit the circumstances.”

Even if the U.S. was at war, Takei — whose great-grandfather was detained by the FBI under the Alien Enemies Act in 1941 — said the law shouldn’t be used.

“We know from the incarceration of Japanese Americans that the Act discriminates against immigrants based on their ancestry,” he said. “It violates immigrants’ due process rights, and it gives too much power to the president.”

Ultimately the courts will decide on the legitimacy of Trump’s plan.

“If the courts uphold this use of the Alien Enemies Act, then it would lead to people being taken into custody and incarcerated without due process,” Takei explained.

Immigrants and allies prepare

Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga, founder and executive director of Ayudando Latinos A Soñar (“Helping Latinos to Dream”), said Trump’s election has had huge mental health consequences for the immigrants her Half Moon Bay nonprofit works with.

“It’s shocking that Trump is bringing something back from 1798 when we’re in 2025,” said Hernandez-Arriaga, whose great-grandparents immigrated to Texas from Mexico. “He says ‘alien enemies’ — our immigrant community is not an enemy, and actually they’re the foundation of the economic sustainability of our country.”

In 2022, immigrants — who make up 14% of the U.S. population — made up 23% of entrepreneurs, 23% of STEM workers and 16% of nurses, and paid $579 billion in taxes, according to data from immigrant advocacy nonprofit the American Immigration Council. Undocumented immigrants paid $75.6 billion in taxes that same year.

In 2018, Hernandez-Arriaga connected immigrant families to the Half Moon Bay artist Na Omi Shintani, whose 2019 installation “Dream Refuge” at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara drew parallels between incarcerated Japanese Americans like Shintani’s parents and asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I’m horrified by this recurrence of this injustice of incarcerating families in America due to their culture or heritage,” Shintani said.

In 2018, Shintani and members of Tsuru for Solidarity, a national Japanese American advocacy group, tied paper cranes on the fence of an immigration detention center in San Antonio.

“Japanese Americans say it’s our moral obligation to stand up for people that are going through similar things that we did,” she said. “A lot of us feel as though our ancestors or our parents didn’t get that support.”

Pérez, a former immigration attorney whose family moved to the Mission District from Mexico when she was 11 months old, said she has been getting calls from extended family and friends seeking legal advice in preparation for what might happen.

In November, Liang, a startup investor, sat his family down for a difficult and emotional conversation about his future, which included the worst-case scenario, he said: self-deportation.

“The government has all my information and where I live, so it’s really easy for them to come to my door if Trump says, ‘we’re going to end DACA,’” Liang, 35, said. “That’s the possibility I’m imagining, and I am already reaching out to a couple friends who are attorneys.”

The Niskanen Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank that supports immigration, projects that net outmigration from the U.S. — “that is, the extraordinary case of more people leaving the country than entering” — will amount to nearly 1 million people in the first two years of Trump’s presidency. In 2025 alone, this would cost the nation some $130 billion in lost gross domestic product.

“Voluntary” departures, including self-deportation, would soar from 15% to 50% the number of interior removals, the center said in an October analysis, as “enforcement and deportation efforts reach levels not seen in recent decades.”

Before Trump’s inauguration, Maldonado, 32, attended a virtual workshop on immigrants’ rights with other employees at Las Guerreras, the Oakland restaurant she owns with her parents.

“Not being able to have due process is scary,” she said. “We’re not being seen as human beings.”

Reach Olivia Cruz Mayeda: olivia.cruzmayeda@sfchronicle.com. Reach Ko Lyn Cheang: kolyn.cheang@sfchronicle.com