Key points:
- Trump administration’s immigration actions are part of a broader political strategy, says UCLA law professor Hiroshi Motomura.
- The administration’s approach is more intense and disciplined in its second term, with fewer restraints.
- “The damage being done in the university setting is severe.” – Hiroshi Motomura
UCLA law professor Hiroshi Motomura, one of the nation’s leading scholars on immigration law, says the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration actions are part of a broader political strategy designed to reshape the country’s identity, instill fear in immigrant communities, and redefine who counts as an American — and that the second Trump administration is pursuing these goals with greater discipline, intensity and fewer restraints than in Trump’s first term.
“This is much more intense than what happened in the first Trump administration,” Motomura said. “I think that those restraints are not there.”
In an interview with Everyday Injustice, Motomura said the sheer scope of the administration’s executive orders — from enforcement crackdowns to attempts to narrow birthright citizenship — reflects a “comprehensiveness” and “intensity” aimed at far more than changing specific laws.
“I think there’s a broader agenda to give voice to a certain conception of America,” he said. “The point of an initiative is not necessarily to see that initiative get upheld in court and enacted into law.”
Motomura, who has taught at UCLA, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Colorado, has spent nearly four decades studying immigration, citizenship, refugee, and asylum law. Beyond his academic work, he has been active in advocacy, including helping lead the campaign that resulted in the creation of DACA in 2012. He is the faculty co-director of UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy.
From his perspective, the administration’s messaging is as important as the policies themselves. He pointed to Trump’s push to reinterpret the Constitution to limit citizenship for children of noncitizens — an initiative he sees as unlikely to survive in court but highly effective as a political signal to supporters.
Similarly, he described mass deportation campaigns as serving a dual purpose: removing people and creating “concern, anxiety, fear, even terrorize some immigrant communities.”
In Motomura’s view, Trump’s second term has been far more organized. The first time around, he said, the administration included “traditional Republican voices” who sometimes pushed back on immigration proposals over concerns about family separation or economic fallout. That internal resistance is gone.
“When Trump lost in 2020, there are people who stuck with him… and there are people, for example, Stephen Miller… who was very much the hardest of the hardliners as far as I can tell on immigration issues,” Motomura said. Miller, now deputy chief of staff, “is in a position of much greater power in the second Trump administration.”
Motomura said the administration’s promises to deport millions inevitably leads to targeting citizens and legal residents.
“People who might be deportable… don’t walk around with a sign around their neck,” he said. The only way to produce those numbers, he argued, is to take shortcuts — such as racial profiling, language-based targeting, and neighborhood sweeps — and to limit due process through measures like expanded “expedited removal,” which allows deportations without a full immigration court hearing.
Many of those caught in enforcement dragnets, he said, have deep roots in the U.S. — people who have lived in the country for decades, raised families, and built their lives here.
He also stressed that decades of labor policy have “tolerated and even invited” undocumented workers, creating an economic reality in which millions live and work without legal status. Fixing the system, he said, requires not just legalization but “rethinking the categories and the ways people are brought to this country.”
Motomura challenged the popular image of undocumented immigration as mostly unauthorized border crossings.
“A significant percentage… did not sneak across the border,” he said. “They came in lawfully and for one reason or another, they stayed longer than they’re supposed to.”
That reality complicates the administration’s narrative and underscores the racial stereotypes in immigration enforcement. Undocumented immigrants include people from Europe, Asia, and around the world, he noted, yet public rhetoric still centers on Latin American migrants.
The current crackdown also goes beyond the undocumented, he said. The administration has targeted people with lawful status, including holders of Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian designation Congress created for nationals of countries facing dire conditions.
Removing TPS from hundreds of thousands of people is a deliberate way to “get the numbers of deportable people up,” he said.
Universities have also been affected, with international students facing visa denials or restrictions that prevent them from completing degrees or taking jobs in the U.S.
The loss is not just educational but economic, Motomura said, as students contribute tuition revenue, fill teaching assistant positions, and spend money in local communities.
The approach reflects “a certain degree of extreme isolationism,” he said, signaling a disregard for higher education and global exchange. “The damage being done in the university setting is severe.”
Motomura linked disparate policies — from due process rollbacks to the use of the Alien Enemies Act — to a unifying narrative in which immigration is cast as a form of “invasion.”
“It’s no accident that the word invasion appears… in the executive orders,” he said. “That’s what justifies… that we can’t afford due process because we’re going to protect you from invaders.”
This framing also drives attempts to restrict birthright citizenship, which could strip citizenship from people born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents, including international students and businesspeople.
Motomura acknowledged that U.S. immigration law exists against a backdrop of conquest and displacement, from wars against Indigenous nations to the annexation of Mexican territory.
But he cautioned against assuming that recognizing those injustices means erasing national borders altogether.
He described himself as a “realistic utopian,” focused on incremental reforms that make the system fairer while keeping political change possible. That means recognizing history’s role — for example, in justifying asylum for Afghans who worked with U.S. forces or legalizing long-term residents whose labor was encouraged — but also navigating current political constraints.
“I’m focused on choices that are good choices and choices that are bad choices… that add up during a presidential administration or in a decade to make policy more fair than it is today,” he said.
Motomura sees economic dislocation as a driver of anti-immigrant sentiment, with political leaders channeling economic uncertainty into “racial anxiety or cultural anxiety.”
The immigrant rights movement, he said, has not always paid enough attention to economic injustice, leaving “fertile ground for people to swoop in and say, I’m for you and those other people are against you.”
Much of the economic pressure has little to do with immigration, he added, citing automation, weakened unions, and global trade shifts. But the U.S. has done “a poor job of really sharing wealth,” failing to invest in job retraining, education, and infrastructure that could ease displacement.
Motomura’s new book, Borders and Belonging: A Guide to Making Immigration Policy Ethical, is aimed at a general audience and distills decades of scholarship into a framework for understanding the legal, historical, and economic dimensions of immigration.
The 163-page book, he said, is intended to be “fair-minded,” taking opposing arguments seriously while offering principled responses. It covers topics from temporary versus permanent migration to the role of history in policy and the need for the immigrant rights movement to engage with economic inequality.
“It’s certainly the book I would give to someone from another planet if they landed in the United States and said, what is going on here,” he said.
For Motomura, the stakes in the immigration debate are not just about who gets to stay or go, but about the kind of country the U.S. chooses to be — and whether it uses law as a tool for inclusion or exclusion.
