Opening Soon: The Day Of 100 EOs

Someone on the Trump Team dropped the ball here. Why not produce a 60-second “trailer” for this grand premiere? Make some cinematic magic, people!

Of course, that’s a tongue-in-cheek observation. We’ve had our fill of overproduced promises from underproducing “leaders” the last four years, and perhaps in the last couple of weeks in particular.  Donald Trump’s transition team has its work cut out for them, considering the start that the new president envisions. Axios reports that Trump already has 100 executive orders ready to drop after his inauguration on January 20. Trump personally unveiled them for Senate Republicans last night:

President-elect Trump and top advisers previewed ambitious plans for 100 executive orders during a meeting with Senate Republicans on Wednesday night, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: While Congress debates the next moves on their own aggressive legislative plans, Trump let them know he is ready to roll — especially on immigration.

• Senators were given previews of some of what they were told would be 100 executive orders, two sources who were in the room told Axios.

One specific EO previewed for Senate Republicans was the reinstatement of Title 42 restrictions, which allowed Trump to eject hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in 2020 immediately on entry as a public health threat. The origin of the authority for this enforcement came from a CDC order in March 2020 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Biden allowed the Title 42 restrictions to end in May 2023, which only exacerbated an already catastrophic border crisis. 

It’s unclear exactly how Trump will reinstate Title 42, given that the COVID-19 pandemic has long since abated. Will the CDC find another public health issue to justify reinstatement, and if so, what? The CDC focuses on transmissible disease, not issues like fentanyl tracking, although fentanyl trafficking is a very serious public health issue as well as a big part of the border security crisis. This EO will likely generate some court challenges, and it might take a while for any such policy to get put into place. Congress could fix this problem by severely limiting asylum access, but of course they won’t, so it will be left to EOs for a while.

Predictably, one EO will order construction on the border wall to start again. This is more clearly rooted in both executive power and statute; Congress authorized the border wall years ago. They just keep refusing to fund it, but that will be less of a problem in Trump’s second term. He broke though that issue in court during his first term and Biden’s funding machinations make it less politically sensitive now. In fact, Trump could take a look at the $42 billion Biden got for rural broadband (zero homes connected) or the $7 billion Biden had for building electric-vehicle charging stations (47 installed) and perhaps put that to use … assuming that money didn’t disappear through graft and corruption. 

Axios offers up only one other specific EO:

• More aggressively using a part of the Immigration and Nationality Act — 287(g) — which allows some state and local law enforcement to assist in some of the duties of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This looks like a nod to Texas, which has fought in court to enforce border and immigration laws that the Biden administration ignored. The other border states are all run under Democrat administrations and are not likely to enthusiastically join forces with ICE and Homeland Security to lock down the border. On the other hand, their refusal to help may not play well with the voters in these states, especially in Arizona, which wound up flipping to Trump in November, and by a substantial margin. Ruben Gallego’s support for the Laken Riley Act is no accident, after all. 

The main problem Trump will face on this front isn’t a plethora of volunteers to enforce immigration law, but the so-called “sanctuary” cities and states that refuse to cooperate. Trump and border czar Tom Homan have plans to deal with that too, though, including the suspension of federal monies to such jurisdictions and potential prosecutions for obstruction of federal law enforcement. Despite his rhetoric in the first term, Trump left the gloves on in that period in the hope of reaching a full settlement on immigration policy (and in part, no doubt, because of the lawfare that plagued his first term). This time Trump has no incentives to play nice, especially given the broad shift among the electorate on border security as a high-priority issue. 

What about the other 90-odd EOs that Trump and his team promised? Axios doesn’t have much to say about those, at least not at the moment. Many of those may end up being technical in nature, as Stef Kight suggests, but there should be enough substantive changes of direction to keep this movie getting boffo BO for a few weeks after it premieres on January 20. And this points to a much-improved transition and preparation for Trump than in his first term — a welcome sign indeed, and one that may be having a bigger impact than expected. More on that later.