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Trump's sweeping immigration crackdown strips legal status from thousands, fuelling fear and uncertainty across the US
Published : 26 Apr 2025, 10:12 AM
After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Taras Atamanchuk found safety for his family near Houston, Texas.
The 32-year-old moved to the US with his wife and daughter in 2023 through former President Joe Biden's "parole" program for Ukrainians with US sponsors, landing a job as a software engineer with an annual salary of $120,000.
In Feb he tried to renew his two-year work permit, but President Donald Trump's administration had quietly stopped processing renewals or applications by Ukrainians.
He now worries about how he will support his family, which includes a son born last year.
"I can't work and there's no place to go," he said.
In his first hundred days in office, Trump has taken dramatic steps to strip legal immigration status from hundreds of thousands of people, increasing the pool of those who can potentially be deported as he tries to ramp up removals to historic levels.
The Republican president has moved to end humanitarian legal entry programs launched by his Democratic predecessor and revoked visas of thousands of students who took part in protests or had minor criminal charges, including traffic offences.
The breadth of the crackdown has stunned immigrants who lost their legal status. Some Democrats have criticised Trump's strong-arm tactics as plainclothes and masked immigration officers have descended on homes, workplaces and university campuses.
Americans are split on Trump's immigration approach but he has a 45 percent approval rating on immigration, better than other major issues, a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in mid-Apr found.
"The message that his campaign gave is, 'We're going to go after the criminals,' but what he is doing is a much, much broader effort," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigrant advocacy group.
Trump said in Mar that he was weighing whether to strip the legal status of the 240,000 Ukrainians who entered under Biden's parole program. A similar move to revoke legal status from 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans was blocked in federal court earlier this month.
The Trump administration has paired the crackdown with a push to encourage migrants in the US illegally to "self deport" — threatening steep fines and highlighting efforts to send deportees to notorious prisons in El Salvador and Guantanamo Bay.
Polina Hlova, 25, from the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, was working as a dental assistant in Florida when she and her husband lost their work permits in March. She constantly checks for updates on pending applications and said the stress has been overwhelming.
"My emotions, I can't control it," she said. "I'm just crying every day."
White House spokesperson Kush Desai said the Trump administration was undoing what it views as unlawful Biden programs that allowed migrants to enter the US.
"The Trump administration is not 'stripping legal status from immigrants' — it is unwinding the Biden administration's illegal paroling of hundreds of thousands of aliens into the United States," he said in a statement. "Aliens who have not received asylum or other legal status to remain in the United States cannot be allowed to remain in our country indefinitely."
Desai said parole programmes should be used on a case-by-case basis and when there is a "significant public benefit."
LEAVE NOW
Immigration attorneys earlier this month reported that clients who used a Biden-era app to schedule an appointment to cross the US-Mexico border were among those pressed to leave the US. The app, which was meant to alleviate chaos at the border, was rebranded by the Trump administration as CBP Home and is now used to facilitate self-deportation.
Migrants who entered the country legally using the app — then known as CBP One — received a tersely worded email telling them their status had been revoked. "It is time for you to leave the United States," it read.
Claudia, 35, her husband and their four children entered the US using the CBP One app in Aug 2023, fleeing gang threats in Michoacan, Mexico, and applied for asylum. On the evening of Apr 11, she was checking her email for any correspondence from her kids' school in California's Central Valley when she got the email. It was in English, but her email provider automatically translated it into Spanish. "I felt dizzy," she said.
Desai, the White House spokesperson, criticised the CBP One programme.
"The fact of the matter is that the Biden administration's CBP One app was an illegal tool to effectively launder illegal immigration by allowing would-be illegal border crossers to obtain flimsy legal grounds to just walk right into the United States," he said.
US Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Trump's actions have "restored integrity to our immigration system, ended policies that were magnets to illegal immigration, and delivered a clear message to illegal aliens to self-deport or face the consequences."
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 145,000 immigration violators during Trump's first three months in office — up from 113,000 in all of fiscal 2024, a DHS spokesperson said. Deportations were down in Trump's first three months in office from 195,000 last year to 130,000 this year, DHS statistics show, due to a higher number of encounters at the border under Biden where migrants could be sent back more quickly.
VISAS REVOKED
The Trump administration stunned major universities with arrests of students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests, including Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident, raising questions about free speech.
Starting in March, ICE sent hundreds of names of foreign students to the State Department asking them to revoke their visas, according to a US official not authorised to speak about the matter.
The names initially appeared to be students who had police contact during a protest, the official said. Later, it was students with criminal charges, including for traffic violations.
The State Department declined to comment.
On Apr 8, Prasanna Oruganti, an Indian PhD student at Ohio State University, received an email from her university alerting her that her status had been terminated in an ICE-maintained database known as SEVIS, according to court documents. They told her the reason given was "Other — individual identified in criminal records check and/or has their visa revoked."
Oruganti had not been notified that her student visa had been revoked, and her only criminal record was a traffic misdemeanour after she misjudged the distance turning a corner and her car hit some decorative bricks, she said in court documents.
Oruganti sued and a judge blocked the termination, so that she can, for now, continue to study.
The Trump administration said in a court filing on Friday that it would restore previously terminated student statuses but said it would seek to find other ways to proceed with the crackdown.
A mechanical engineering student at the University of California Riverside with one quarter to go until graduation was given the same reason as Oruganti for his status revocation.
"It didn't make any sense, I was super confused," the 23-year-old Indian national, who is identified in court documents as VJ, said in an interview.
He had lived in the US since he was 10, as a dependent on his mother's H-1B visa for skilled workers.
When he was a sophomore in college, he was arrested for public intoxication, he said, but he had disclosed the offence when he applied for his student visa.
He has sued to get his status reinstated, but worries that he will be detained or deported.
"I still don't know if I can go to class or not," he said. "I've just been completely under the radar."
