Fears of being detained are in overdrive, even if the Trump administration insists that they’re overblown.
Jeff Joseph, a 53-year-old immigration attorney in Colorado, has recently started taking precautions while traveling abroad that, at another time, he would have considered a little paranoid. He leaves his phone at home. Instead, he carries a “burner’’—a device scrubbed of his contact list and communications—in case U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers send him to secondary inspection or seize his electronics when he returns home. Joseph told me his knowledge of immigration law has left him with less confidence, not more, about the risks of crossing U.S. borders during the second Trump administration.
“Among immigration lawyers who are well versed in this, and who know what happens in secondary, there’s a level of anxiety and panic that we’ve never seen before,” said Joseph, the president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “Myself included.”
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Immigration attorneys also note Trump has curbed CBP officers’ ability to allow the entry of migrants or visitors using an authority known as “parole.” So travelers who do not qualify for admission to the United States are more likely to be handed over to ICE for detention and deportation. Although U.S. citizens cannot be denied entry to the United States, all other categories of noncitizens—even, in some cases, legal permanent residents with green cards—are at risk of being denied entry or deemed inadmissible by a CBP officer.