The hard-line policies in his first term were a significant shift that reframed the national conversation on immigration and helped return him to the White House.
President-elect Donald J. Trump, who made immigration a pillar of his campaign, has pledged to unleash a broad crackdown on Day 1 of his second term.
Restricting both lawful and unlawful immigration was a key focus of Mr. Trump’s first four years in the White House, as he leveraged the executive branch’s vast authority over immigration to reshape policy, bypassing the need for new laws from Congress.
All told, Mr. Trump announced 472 immigration actions, large and small, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
Some of them endured only in revised form amid legal challenges. Others were reversed by his successor. But his aggressive action and fiery rhetoric redefined the politics of immigration in America. As he returns to the White House, the signature initiatives of his first term offer insights into what might lie ahead.
Border
The Wall
The most memorable promise that Mr. Trump made on the campaign trail was to erect an impenetrable barrier along the entire southern border, which is almost 2,000 miles, and to have Mexico pay for it.
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