The Republican Party are intent on making immigration their key issue in the forthcoming US Election. The 2024 Republican Party platform and Trump’s nomination acceptance speech make that abundantly clear. But what would Donald Trump’s immigration policies look like in practice?

Out of the 20 priorities in the 2024 Republican platform, the first two relate solely to immigration policy:

In addition:

Seal the border and stop the migrant invasion

No doubt Trump would want to complete his pet project of building a wall at the border with Mexico. The total length of the US-Mexico border is 1,954 miles, a substantial portion of which is formed by the Rio Grande River. In 2015-16, Trump had promised to build a 1,000 miles wall, presumably excluding the River.

Prior to being elected in 2016, there were 654 miles of border wall (including various forms of fencing). During his first term, 452 miles of border wall was built but most of this was reinforcing existing wall. Only 80 miles of totally new wall was built of which 47 miles was primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall. This was at a cost of around $US15 Billion. None of this was paid for by Mexico as Trump had promised.

How much more wall is to be built and/or reinforced is not clear but if Trump controls the US Congress, he may well get whatever billions of dollars he wants to continue building the wall and the extra border agents needed to patrol the wall (something Trump ensured the US Congress would deny President Biden even though there was bi-partisan support for this).

The Republican platform states that other law enforcement officials as well as the military may be used to patrol the border. The feasibility of this will be tested.

But building a wall and patrolling it will not be sufficient to stop border ‘encounters’ as they are termed in the US. There are 26 legal points of crossing along the border, some of which have amongst the largest traffic volumes of any land international border crossings in the World.

Given the volume of daily legal people movements over the US-Mexico border, there will continue to be large numbers of ‘encounters’ of undocumented migrants crossing with people who hold visas (as well as of those who find ways over the wall).

Encounters in the US are divided into two types:

Title 42 was a rarely used provision prior to the outbreak of covid. The Trump Administration used Title 42 extensively with over 80 percent of encounters being expelled (mainly back into Mexico). The Biden Administration continued to use Title 42 but to a lesser degree than the Trump Administration. For example, in March 2022, around 51 percent of encounters led to expulsion under Title 42.

The Biden Administration ceased using Title 42 from May 2023 (even though the covid risk ended much earlier) with all encounters now managed under Title 8. The overall number of encounters continued to rise under the Biden Administration, reaching over 200,000 in many months. Given limited detention........

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