How the Trump administration stripped legal status from 1.6 million immigrants
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.1 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
The Trump administration has removed over 600,000 people without legal status from the U.S. through deportation this year, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
The Trump administration has also been busy revoking legal status for immigrants who entered the country through legal pathways -- affecting at least 1.6 million people -- by canceling programs and protections like CBP One, Temporary Protected Status, humanitarian parole and student visas.
That legal limbo means they too now fear the constant threat of deportation.
NPR's Sergio Martinez-Beltran and Ximena Bustillo recap the largest effort to delegalize immigrants in U.S. history.
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Transcript
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| 1:09.8 | All right, on to today's show. |
| 1:13.3 | The Trump administration is waging its anti-immigration campaign on all fronts. |
| 1:22.4 | It's aggressively removing people without legal status from the U.S. |
| 1:26.3 | More than 600,000 deportations, according to the |
| 1:29.8 | Department of Homeland Security. That campaign has affected communities across the country. |
| 1:35.6 | On Sunday, NPR's Aisha Roscoe spoke with Seth Lavin, a Chicago school principal. |
| 1:41.0 | Yes, there have been impacts at my school. And at every school that I know there are |
| 1:44.5 | kids who are living in this fear, and at many, many, many schools, this is a reality. Kids crying in a |
| 1:50.4 | classroom, kids crying in a cafeteria and saying, what's wrong? What's wrong is that they took my dad? |
| 1:55.7 | What's wrong is that they took my mom? The administration is also limiting people from legally entering |
| 2:00.6 | the country by severely |
| 2:02.5 | capping refugee admissions, banning travel for people from certain countries, imposing a $100,000 |
| 2:09.5 | fee for new visas for workers and specialty occupations, or just last week, pausing the |
| 2:15.9 | Green Card lottery program, also known as the Diversity Visa. |
| 2:20.3 | And the Trump administration is working to scrap multiple programs or protections from many people who previously entered the country legally. |
... |
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