Immigration helped catapult Donald Trump back into the White House last year, and the issue remains one of his top political priorities. His agenda has focused on the sweeping presidential powers to enforce immigration law, going back to his first term. Now, the second Trump administration has decisively shown that a motivated executive can, in fact, maintain border controls.

However, the clock is always running in American politics, and proponents of border controls face an increasingly urgent challenge: building an immigration framework that will last beyond Trump. New reporting suggests that bills targeting migration restrictions are failing in Republican-led states as businesses push back. If the President can’t find a way around this obstacle, his whole immigration agenda could be at risk.

Upon taking office, Trump made substantial progress towards ending the border crisis within weeks. Unauthorised crossings at the south-west border nosedived in early 2025 and remain at a negligible level, and millions of foreign-born residents have left over the past year.

While this progress is encouraging to see, an immigration record rooted in executive discretion alone is vulnerable to a reversal by political means. If one president can impose border controls unilaterally, another can open the floodgates. This is an unequal dynamic, as it is very hard to reverse the effects of loose border policies in full. The migrant crisis of the Joe Biden years swamped the successes of the first Trump administration on enforcement. The foreign-born population swelled by over 8 million people during Biden’s single term, and he unilaterally invoked “temporary protected status” to grant legal protections to hundreds of thousands of migrants. When the Trump administration tried to rescind those declarations, it had to fight all the way to the Supreme Court.

In an effort to draw in the pro-migrant vote, many leading Democrats are positioning themselves as increasingly hostile to border controls. Senate Democrats have filibustered fully funding the Department of Homeland Security for months now. Tom Steyer, a former presidential candidate and a Democratic contender for the California governorship, has called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, pledged to prosecute ICE agents, and laid out plans to fund increased legal challenges to immigration enforcement. Steyer is not alone here. Democratic governors and attorneys across the country have moved to block cooperation with federal enforcement of immigration law.

So how does Trump develop an immigration platform that can outlast his administration? Building a sustainable border-control paradigm will require two things. First, it will demand keeping the public on side. The border chaos under Biden drove Americans in a hawkish direction on immigration, but Republicans and border controllers risk a backlash if enforcement becomes conflated with bloody melees. Polls have indicated that  Trump’s approval on immigration has dropped and that there has been a growing public scepticism of current ICE enforcement. In shifting DHS leadership, the Trump administration may be trying to address some of those concerns — a new poll shows a slight bump in support for his policies following the changes.

Perhaps even more importantly, a long-term strategy for border controls will require racking up some legislative wins. Legislative statutes are harder to enact, but also more difficult to erase. The right kind of legislative moves can also pay political dividends. For instance, in 2023 Republican senators — including now-Vice President JD Vance — proposed the Higher Wages for American Workers Act, which would pair a boost to the minimum wage with universal E-Verify technology in order to check the legal status of American workers. Implementing something like that would be a victory for border hawks and working families. It could also elevate tensions within the progressive bloc by pitting economic populism against identity politics.

The Trump years have proven that broken borders are a policy choice. However, maintaining orderly immigration beyond his administration will require a deeper foundation than Trump himself. The public needs to be onside, while there needs to be more concrete legislation that the Democrats can’t easily overturn. If widescale change like this isn’t put in place, Trump’s legacy of border controls could be swept away.

---

Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

fredbauerblog

---