Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
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From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In 2017, when Trump came into the White House for the first time, on day one, he signed exactly one executive order. It was targeting the Affordable Care Act. In 2025, he signed 26 executive orders on day one, throwing pens into the roaring crowd. Some of these orders were really big, ending birthright citizenship. There were big orders on energy. He signed orders about Doge and governmental efficiency, about the federal workforce. Some of them were more messaging bills. Some of them are big, but... They may not be big after the courts get done with them. So what has really changed here? What has all this flurry of policymaking and activity amounted to?
One of the difficulties of covering Donald Trump is it's always hard to know where to look first, where even to look at all. Back in the day, I used to do a policy podcast at Vox with Matt Iglesias, who is now the author of the excellent Substack newsletter, Slow Boring, and Dara Lind, who's now a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. Thought it'd be good to have a bit of a reunion with two of the people who follow the policies that Trump is working on most closely to get into the guts of what is actually changing and what as of yet really isn't. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Darling, Matt Iglesias, welcome to the show. Good to be here. Good to be on. It's like old times. Yeah.
So let's dive into immigration first. Donald Trump signed about 10 executive orders on border security and immigration. When you look at them together, Dara, what do you see?
What we see here is a body of orders that are pushing the federal government to take a much, much, much, much, much more aggressive approach on immigration enforcement, especially in the interior of the United States, especially integrating the military into border enforcement in a way we haven't seen. But... without really prescribing a whole lot in terms of specifics because they understand that that's going to have to happen at the agency level. That's going to have to – you know, that requires the actual machinery of the federal government to work itself out to figure out what that looks like on the ground. And so a lot of Biden-era enforcement priorities got rescinded. It is currently – and this is actually as of Tuesday night – The U.S. has the legal authority to deport people without a court hearing if they're arrested anywhere in the U.S. and cannot prove to an ICE agent's satisfaction that they've been in the U.S. for at least two years, which is something we're going to have to see how that plays out on the ground. And there is...
A push toward building more capacity for detention, which is going to be very important if they're going to scale up enforcement efforts. A push toward punishing other countries that refuse to accept deportation flights by putting visa sanctions on them, which is going to be extremely important if you're going to succeed in deporting people. So, like, on the interior side, there's a very big shift toward both the kind of expanded legal authority and the expanded capacity, which you can't do immediately, but which they're building toward.
When you read this, Matt, does it look to you like mass deportation, which was promised and feared? Or does it look to you like what they're trying to do is create a climate of fear and, as Mitt Romney once put it, self-deportation?
I mean, it's what's actually happening is closer to the latter. Right. I mean, in terms of the question of like, what is the quantity of people who are deported? The historic peak for the United States came during Barack Obama's term. And the main reason for that, at least as I understand it, is that there was really strong cooperation between ICE and state and local law enforcement officials there. And basically, they were picking people up out of jails all throughout the country, which is a very efficient process. If you're thinking of deportation as a resource-intensive kind of operation, people who are already in custody are the easiest people to deport. And then numbers started to come down because of policy changes in blue states, then different enforcement priorities, things like that.
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