With Trump returning to office on January 20th and Republicans regaining control of Congress, several policies are in place to change, with immigration as a major focus.
Many of these policies may not directly impact people living in Massachusetts, as Congress has specific limitations to what laws they are allowed to pass. Additionally, no laws can be made ex post facto: someone cannot be charged for a crime that was not illegal when the act was done.
Despite this, new laws may potentially impact some people living in Massachusetts, including Malden. States with a Republican majority may propose and implement harsher immigration laws, which may impact families of people in Malden. Additionally, these laws may slow or limit future Green Cards or citizenship requests, including those of immigrants in Massachusetts.
In Trump’s first term as president, he planned to make a border wall, justifying that it would protect America from any harm that came into it. This wall would stretch across the southern border of the US where it meets Mexico, where many immigrants—documented or not—come from.
In his upcoming term, he and the Republican party have expressed plans to carry out interior enforcement on immigration, focusing on banning and deporting any undocumented citizens in the United States.
“I think if we were to lose the amount of undocumented immigrants we had in the US, we would be losing a lot of good things,” freshman Aya Senami stated.
One of the main reasons Trump was ahead in the political race was that he was adamant about enforcing harsher immigration laws. In general, Democrats and Republicans agree that there are several flaws with the current immigration system. People could have immigrated here 60 years ago and still be undocumented, which shows how slow the system is. Due to this, there has been an increase in undocumented immigrants, as it can be easier than the process of citizenship.
Kurtis Scheer, a US History teacher and the teacher leader of the Social Studies department, describes the system as “broken.”
English teacher Anne Mooney expressed, “The thing that I value most in education is really teaching students to be critical thinkers and to try and empathize with other people to really consider other people and other people’s values. And I worry that is not what [Trump’s] administration values.”
Madison Rodriguez, another freshman, shared her thoughts about the challenge of immigration on immigrants: “The process was really hard and difficult, a lot of trauma and a lot of heartbreaks leaving behind people when you know you don’t want to, but know you have to for a better future.”
“It was very difficult transferring from one place to another and adapting to the world around me, along with the language barrier,” Wiam Saadouni, a freshman from Morocco, shared. Many other Malden High students shared that they had the same experience when they migrated to America.
For the many undocumented immigrants in the US, Trump has certain plans to alter the system of immigration. One plan of his that he hopes to enact is family detention, where families of undocumented immigrants are placed into camps where they are held while their cases are processed. Most people do not know how long it will take, especially since the system is incredibly slow.
Until the new administration takes office and implements any of these proposals, it is unclear what bills will become laws and how they will impact the US.
