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Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, January 26th, 2025.

On the campaign trail, then presidential candidate Donald Trump made illegal immigration his signature issue and also his scapegoat, routinely equating immigrants with criminals.

On day one of his presidency, Trump sought to make good on his campaign promises to curb illegal immigration by passing a flurry of executive orders related to the southern border and refugee admissions. What's in the legislation that he either signed by executive order or was passed by Congress in week one of the Trump presidency. And what kinds of impacts are we already seeing? Here to make sense of it all is USA Today,

national reporter covering immigration, Lauren Villagran. Lauren, thanks for joining me.

Thank you. Lauren, one of President Trump's first official access president was to declare a national

emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.

What kinds of federal resources does this declaration enable?

And how has that been playing out so far?

Yeah, so that was one of his first orders of business on day one, as he promised.

He declared a national border emergency, which opens up avenues for, as you mentioned,

additional resources, the potential for quickly, for example, procuring private contracts to support

immigration enforcement. it opens the door

to a whole host of authorities that he will be able to use.

There have been reports of activity by Border Patrol and U.S. immigration and customs enforcement.

What do we know so far?

So, Dana, you know, it's a little hard this early into the administration to parse what

is typical everyday immigration enforcement in the United States and what is the ramp up by

President Donald Trump.

There have been reports around the country.

It does seem like certainly immigrant communities are on edge.

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