Donald Trump to reinstate ‘Remain in Mexico,’ end parole for Latin American, Haitian migrants

In the early hours of his second presidential term, Donald Trump is signing numerous executive orders to resurrect his “Remain in Mexico” policy, suspend refugee resettlements and end a parole program that enabled migrants from Latin America and Haiti to pursue legal entry to the U.S.

Trump has already killed the controversial CBP One app, which assisted immigrants seeking parole in the U.S. The app launched during Trump’s first administration to aid in cargo inspections. It was expanded in 2023 to enable migrants to make appointments at the border to be allowed entry under ex-President Joe Biden’s “lawful pathways” policies.

A message on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website says that as of Jan. 20, 2025, the CBP One app “is no longer available, and existing appointments have been cancelled.”

Trump is also expected to discontinue “advanced” authorization of parole processes for “certain nationals” from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (CHNV), which provided a legal pathway for entry. In October, the Biden administration announced that it would not extend the legal status of an estimated 530,000 migrants from those four countries who entered and were granted permission to live and work in the U.S. for two years under the policy, known colloquially as parole.

During his inauguration speech Monday, Trump vowed to “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” where “all illegal entry will immediately be halted” and “millions of criminal aliens (will be sent) back to the places from which they came.”

He also promised to bring back “Remain in Mexico,” a policy instituted during his first administration requiring asylum seekers from Mexico to stay there until their applications were approved.

Trump said he’ll send troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to stem “the disastrous invasion of our country” and designate drug cartels as terrorist organizations.

A Trump White House statement subtitled “Make America Safe Again” added that the President is “suspending refugee resettlement, after communities were forced to house large and unsustainable populations of migrants, straining community safety and resources.”

Trump’s outspoken stance against anti-illegal immigration have been a hallmark of his public policy platform since the onset of his 2016 presidential campaign. When Trump announced his bid for the presidency on June 16, 2015, he described a chaotic border and a flood of migrants coming from “all over South and Latin America” and “probably from the Middle East.”

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best,” he said then. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems. … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”

Trump’s policies to stifle immigration bore troubling optics. The photo of a 2-year-old immigrant girl sobbing as her mother was searched near the border won a World Press Photo prize and became emblematic of border practices that often separated minors from their families. Photos of detained migrants, many of them children, sleeping in cages under thermal blankets also spread far and wide, drawing condemnation.

Biden reversed many of his predecessor’s policies after taking over the White House in January 2020 and consequently oversaw a historic surge in net migration to the U.S. that The New York Times estimated is likely to exceed 8 million people.

But the outgoing President reversed course over the past year. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it expelled more than 271,000 immigrants in Fiscal Year 2024, exceeding a record Trump set in his first term.