CNN

Trump is digging up old immigration policies to help his crackdown. Here’s a timeline for how we got here

By CNN Newsource

Published May 17, 2025 8:00 am

By Elise Hammond, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump wasted no time enacting his immigration crackdown after being inaugurated for a second term. On the campaign trail, he promised mass deportations and more arrests — and to do it, he’s resurrecting old policies.

Immigration policy being at the forefront of politics is nothing new. From the nation’s founding to modern day, the policies enacted over time reveal shifting priorities — from establishing the first basis of what it takes to immigrate to the US, to regulating the flow of arrivals, to addressing national security concerns in the wake of wars and 9/11.

Members of the Trump administration are “very, very familiar with our immigration laws throughout the country’s history and (are) looking back to see what provision they might use to achieve their current policies on immigration,” said Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the US Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.

But, according to a recent CNN poll conducted by SSRS, about 52% of Americans say Trump has gone too far in deporting undocumented immigrants and 57% say they do not believe the federal government is being careful in following the law while carrying out deportations.

In fact, while weighing the issue before the election, some young voters told CNN current laws don’t keep up with the times and they wanted to see bipartisan reform. The problem: accomplishing a comprehensive overhaul of the system is no easy task in an increasingly divided political climate.

Here’s a look at how we got here:

The first Congress passed the first naturalization act. It ratified the recently written Constitution, granting the power to establish a “uniform Rule of Naturalization” for “free white person” who lived in the United States for at least two years.

The Alien Enemies Act gave the government the authority to detain and deport people who were not US citizens and deemed a threat during wartime, plus allowed the government to bypass some of the protocols in the immigration statutes. It was part of four laws, collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, that were passed when the US was on the verge on conflict with France. It could be invoked by a president if the US was at war with another country, or if a foreign nation or government invaded, or threatened to invade, the US. The Sedition act also permitted deportations of anyone who was deemed a threat or who published false writing against the US.

Ratified by the states in 1868, the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to all people “born or naturalized in the United States,” including Black Americans and former slaves, according to the Constitution.

Large numbers of Chinese immigrants began arriving during the California Gold Rush. The mass migration of speculators swelled California’s population to more than quadruple in size in about a decade’s time, growing to more than 370,000 people by 1860. So, when economic panic ensued in the US in the 1870s, White citizens scapegoated Chinese immigrants for taking away jobs.

Signed into law by President Chester Arthur, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first and only federal law to prevent a specific nationality of people from becoming US citizens. It blocked Chinese workers from coming legally to the country, and blocked Chinese immigrants who were already living here from becoming US citizens. The Library of Congress called it the “first significant restriction on free immigration in U.S. history.”

The Immigration Act of 1891 gave the federal government authority over the immigration process, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Prior to this law, immigrants were required to be processed by individual states.

Ellis Island opened to accommodate the federal government’s new authority, according to the National Park Service. Between its opening on January 1, 1892, and when it closed in 1954, Ellis Island received more than 12 million people, NPS said.

The United States passed its strictest immigration law of its time, the Immigration Act of 1917 — two months before the US entered World War I.

The law restricted the immigration of many people from the Middle East and Asia — including modern-day India, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Southeast Asia and the Asian-Pacific islands. To keep these people out, the law raised the tax imposed on most adult entrants. It also imposed a literacy test, requiring newcomers older than 16 years old to show basic reading comprehension in any language. Many of these provisions paved the way for another immigration policy in the future, the State Department’s Office of the Historian said.

Some context: With World War I in full swing, US lawmakers who drafted and passed the Immigration Act of 1917 characterized it as necessary for the country’s security. The Office of the Historian said that “the uncertainty generated over national security” during the war made it possible for the act to be signed into law. But it didn’t pass unopposed. President Woodrow Wilson vetoed it, arguing the law prevented good people from joining American society. Congress overrode the veto.

The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was the first time the US set a cap on the number of immigrants allowed into the country, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The quota applied only to people coming from outside the Western Hemisphere, MPI said. Most people from Asia were still barred, per the Immigration Act of 1917. It came during a time of growing isolationism, immigration fears and increased global displacement during and after WWI, the NPS said.

The Immigration Act of 1924 reflected desires to tamp down on overall immigration, “but also try to shift the origins of immigration back to the western and northern European origin,” Gelatt said.

The act lowered the quotas, according to the Office of the Historian, and included people of British descent whose families lived in the US for a long time in the calculations. This meant more visas were available for people from the British Isles and Western Europe, the office said. Immigrants from Asia were still excluded, it said.

Republican Sen. David Reed of Pennsylvania, one of the lead sponsors of the bill, wrote in The New York Times that year that the US would become “a more homogeneous nation.” He wrote that excluding people from certain countries “implies no reflection upon the merit of the excluded peoples. It is merely a recognition of their fundamental dissimilarity from ourselves.”

“This was a period where eugenics was sort of cutting-edge science,” Gelatt said. “There was a concern that these were lower quality people, basically, who were coming from eastern and southern Europe.”

During the Great Depression, federal and local authorities rounded up large numbers of Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans, forcing them to leave their homes on the Arizona, California and Texas borders and relocate to Mexico. Many Americans at the time blamed Mexican communities for taking away jobs and public assistance resources. The USCIS notes many people also returned to Mexico voluntarily, but state and local officials often used coercive methods or threats.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) during the Great Depression, unifying the federal government’s immigration and naturalization responsibilities into one agency, according to the USCIS.

In the wake of the US entering World War II, Roosevelt signed an executive order targeting Japanese-Americans to be put into “relocation centers” or “internment camps.” As a result, approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forced to evacuate their homes and leave their jobs to live in the camps that were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, conditions that are now drawing comparisons to modern-day detention facilities.

The Chinese Exclusion Act and other related measures were repealed with the Magnuson Act of 1943, the Library of Congress said, establishing quotas for immigrants from China and making them eligible to receive citizenship. A State Department history notes the move was “in the interests of aiding the morale of a wartime ally during World War II.”

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 amended the 1924 measure and laid the foundation of modern immigration law, according to the USCIS.

It continued the national origins quota system but ended the exclusion of immigrants from Asia and got rid of laws that prevented Asian immigrants from receiving citizenship, the Office of the Historian said.

But caveats still made the law discriminatory in practice. For example, the law used race instead of nationality in its quotas of Asian countries, which only received 100 visas each year, the office said. Further, if an immigrant had at least one Asian parent, they counted toward the quota from the country of their ethnicity or against a general — also restrictive — quota for the so-called “Asia-Pacific Triangle.” This applied regardless of where the immigrant was coming from and even if they were a citizen of another country, according to a policy brief from the Immigration Policy Center and the Office of the Historian.

It also laid out legal framework to deport people in the US illegally, according to USCIS, and prioritized skilled workers and family reunification, which is still used today, the office said.

In the early years of the Cold War, the debate around immigration was intertwined with the debate about foreign policy and national security. During deliberations about the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, some lawmakers wanted more liberal immigration laws, fearing that a restrictive quota system would lead to tension with other countries, the Office of the Historian outlined. However, other lawmakers were concerned about communism infiltrating the US, the office said.

“Operation Wetback” was an aggressive and unprecedented sweep by US Border Patrol agents in the mid-1950s that plucked Mexican laborers from fields and ranches in targeted raids, bused them to detention centers along the border and ultimately sent many of them deep into the interior of Mexico, some by airlift, others on cargo boats that typically hauled bananas. During his first campaign in 2015, Trump cited the operation as a model for how he would carry out mass deportations.

More than 200,000 people fled Cuba in the span of three years after Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution. As a result, the Cuban Refugee Program — established in 1961 — helped relocate hundreds of thousands of immigrants who arrived in Miami across the US during the next two decades, the Library of Congress said.

The Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962 helped provide funding and resources for refugees who came to the United States, including resettling them in the US and providing aid through international organizations. It also allowed nearly 20,000 refugees into the country between 1960 and 1965, extending the terms of the Fair Share Refugee Act which Congress passed in 1960, according to USCIS.

Parts of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 have made their way into modern immigration policy. The bill was spearheaded by President John F. Kennedy who wanted immigration reform, specifically to get rid of bans based on national origin, according to his letters to lawmakers. The law was ultimately signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, after Kennedy’s assassination. It made several changes to immigration policy — but also several miscalculations that have had lasting consequences in which politics has since made it difficult to correct, experts said.

The law abolished quotas, established a preference system prioritizing immigrants’ skills and family reunification and opened the door to more non-European immigration. However, it still favored immigrants from western and northern Europe over eastern and southern Europe and had very low levels of permissible immigration from other countries — especially from Asian and African countries, Gelatt said.

Notably, the law placed a cap on the number of available visas, but did not include the immediate relatives of someone who is already in the country as part of the count. During debates around the 1965 act, some members of Congress were worried that eliminating national origins quotas would shift the origins of immigrants away from Europe, Gelatt said. Their concerns were stated in “rather racist terms,” she said.

In fact, when Johnson signed the bill into law under the Statue of Liberty, he said it wasn’t a “revolutionary bill” and told Americans it “wouldn’t reshape the structure of our daily lives” but that it “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.” By promoting immigration through family ties, the idea was that immigration would “replicate the racial and national origins of current residents of the United States,” Gelatt said. That’s not what happened in practice.

There were enough other pathways into the country — including student or temporary visas, for example — for immigrants from other parts of the world to also sponsor their own family members, leading to “a very large increase in immigration from Latin America and from various Asian countries,” Gelatt said.

There was also an effect on illegal immigration. The new cap on the immigrants from the Western Hemisphere was lower than the number of people who wanted to come to the US, Gelatt said. That “served over time to shift some immigration flows” from happening “within the law, to causing those to happen outside of the law,” especially from Mexico, she said.

According to data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute, immigrants from the Americas became the largest portion of the total immigrant population from 1980 onward, a shift from a majority European-born population.

President Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act of 1980 as an amendment to the 1965 law to standardize the process of letting refugees into the US. The law provided the “first statutory basis for asylum,” according to the USCIS, and increased the number of refugees allowed in each year. Moving forward, the president and Congress also had the power to set how many refugees would be admitted annually, the law said.

Six years later, President Ronald Reagan tried to address undocumented immigration with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 which set up restrictions on employers. It made it illegal for people to knowingly hire undocumented immigrants and established an “employment verification system,” according to the bill. It also gave more money to the Border Patrol and other federal agencies.

The Immigration Act of 1990 was the first significant revision of immigration policy since the Immigration and Nationality Act and tried to address some of the 1965 law’s pitfalls by creating more avenues for skilled and educated workers. It defined three categories of immigration, based on family, employment and diversity, the MPI said. It set a cap of 700,000 total immigrant visas for fiscal years 1992-1994, but still did not include the immediate family members of US citizens in that count.

Notably, the 1990 law also set up five categories of employment visas, targeting skilled workers, according to the MPI, and used a lottery system to determine which H-1B petitions would proceed further.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. “Most of the rules that we’re operating under, in terms of legal immigration, were set in 1990,” Gelatt said.

Additionally, the 1990 law created Temporary Protected Status, which has been a big topic in immigration policy today, she said. TPS applies to people who would face extreme hardship if forced to return to homelands devastated by armed conflict or natural disasters, therefore the protections are limited to people already in the United States. Republican and Democratic administrations have designated the protections.

The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act put in place measures that intensified the law enforcement focus of US immigration laws, Gelatt said. It expanded the number of immigrants with criminal convictions eligible to be deported, introduced expedited removal procedures and put restrictions on many unauthorized immigrants from legalizing though family relationships, she said.

Terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, putting new emphasis on national security, border security and immigration. After the attacks, immigration was reframed as a “critical part of our national security infrastructure and so the emphasis on vetting and screening of immigrants just really increased,” Gelatt said, adding that there has also been a focus on integrating government databases since then.

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 overhauled the federal government’s role in immigration in response to the 9/11 attacks and disbanded the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Among other national security functions, it created the Department of Homeland Security, noting a shift toward border security and counterterrorism. In 2003, the functions of the INS were put into three new agencies within DHS — US Citizenship and Immigration Services, US Customs and Border Protection and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as outlined in the bill.

The Secure Fence Act under President George W. Bush authorized construction of about 700 miles of barriers and surveillance along the US-Mexico border. In an effort to “make our borders more secure,” Bush, at the time, called it an “important step toward immigration reform,” according to a White House fact sheet.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was introduced by President Barack Obama. It allowed certain immigrants who were brought to the US as children to receive renewable protection from deportation and be eligible for work permits, obtain drivers licenses and enroll in college. However, the program didn’t give them a path to become US citizens or legal permanent residents — something immigrant rights advocates have criticized, saying it left people in limbo.

When President Donald Trump took office for this first term, he took a series of controversial actions aimed at reducing illegal immigration and enhancing border security.

Here are some of them:

Travel ban: Trump issued an executive order aimed at restricting entry into the United States for citizens from several predominantly Muslim countries. The order also suspended refugee admissions for four months and indefinitely halted refugees from Syria. After facing legal challenges, a revised version of the ban was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.
Efforts to end DACA: Trump announced plans to end the program, but after a series of legal battles, the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that Trump’s moves related to DACA weren’t backed with an adequate reason to end the program. President Joe Biden later issued an executive order to preserve the program.
End “catch-and-release”: Trump announced the end to the practice of releasing undocumented immigrants, particularly families and asylum seekers, into the US while their court proceedings played out. The administration increased capacity at detention facilities and put in place stricter enforcement measures.
Crackdown on sanctuary cities: Trump, through an executive order, tried to put pressure on sanctuary cities by stripping them of federal funding. These are cities, counties and states that seek to protect undocumented immigrants who come in contact with local law enforcement from deportation by federal authorities.
Border wall: To fund construction of a border wall, Trump initially tried to get billions of dollars passed through Congress as part of a funding bill. But a standoff with lawmakers led to a partial government shutdown at the end of 2018. In February 2019, Trump signed a compromise border security legislation to avoid another shutdown and also declared a national emergency to use funds from the Department of Defense and other sources to fund the border wall project, which was met with Congressional and legal challenges.

Biden reversed many of Trump’s immigration policies, including the travel ban and limits on asylum seekers. He also stopped border wall construction and established a task force for family reunification. Toward the end of his term, Biden spent a lot of time trying to defend his administration’s immigration actions against Republican attacks. Biden often pointed to a comprehensive, bipartisan border deal that failed in the Senate twice, at the direction of then-candidate Trump.

Now more than 100 days into his second term, Trump has pushed legal boundaries in trying to enact his immigration promises — one of which was to complete “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

To do it, Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador. It has only been invoked three times in US history — all during war. The Supreme Court has paused these deportations. Trump also signed an executive order declaring a national emergency at the US southern border to bolster military presence and send migrants to Guantanamo Bay, and has kicked off the process to end birthright citizenship, which was met with legal challenges.

The administration has also terminated hundreds of students’ visas under a rarely used provision that allows for revocation if a person’s presence in the US “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” The administration has said the students are sympathizing with Hamas. Some of the students challenged the move in court, but the government later backed down in the legal fight.