January 2025: The Month Everything Changed in Immigration
Trump II arrived with a flurry of executive orders and presidential proclamations, and (as importantly) Congress passed the ‘Laken Riley Act’
By Andrew R. Arthur on December 29, 2025
With 2026 in the offing, it’s time to look back at key laws and policies implemented in January 2025 – likely the most significant month in immigration history, when a newly returned President Donald Trump began acting on the border security and enforcement promises he made on the 2024 campaign trail, aided by Congress’s passage of the most important piece of immigration legislation in over a decade.
The Prelude: December 2024
By the waning days of the Biden-Harris administration in December 2024, Border Patrol apprehensions of illegal migrants at the Southwest border had fallen to just over 47,300, their lowest monthly level in more than four years.
It was largely illusory, because that figure omits the 48,700-plus aliens encountered that month at the Southwest border ports, a direct response to attempts by the Biden-Harris White House to hide the scope of illegal immigration by allowing would-be illegal migrants to secure illicit entry using the CBP One app, a maneuver of questionable legality I dubbed the “CBP One app interview scheme”.
Aliens released into the United States under that scheme were just as removable as those who crossed illegally, and even though it was clear the scheme was riddled with fraud and other risks, most in the media ignored it.
https://cis.org/Arthur/January-2025-Month-Everything-Changed-Immigration
