Trump’s immigration orders designed to sow chaos – ‘he wants you to feel afraid’

Donald Trump began to enact his promised immigration crackdown just hours after taking power, issuing a barrage of executive actions that have incited panic and chaos across the US and at its borders. But much of the orders’ content will be difficult to enforce, and many will face strong legal challenges.

Trump’s executive orders on immigration didn’t read like presidential actions so much as a “stream-of-consciousness mess … strung together in a lattice of nonsense”, wrote the political and legal geographer Austin Kocher, who had been issuing hourly immigration policy updates on his blog throughout inauguration day.

In the hours after Trump signed the orders, Kocher and many others – lawyers, civil rights organizations and immigrant advocates – are scrambling to sort out what exactly these policies would do, and what it means for millions of immigrants and their families.

The president’s day one actions included a national emergency declaration to deploy the military to the border, and a brazen attempt to end birthright citizenship, which would upend a key tenet of the country’s constitution. Another order rescinded a taskforce to reunite families deliberately separated at the border during Trump’s first term. Yet another order proclaims that people crossing the US border threaten public health – while offering few specifics about what those threats would be.

On Tuesday, Kocher, was still sorting out those questions. But he spoke with the Guardian about how the executive actions, rife with half-baked ideas and formatting errors, can nonetheless fuel turmoil and fear, and will affect the lives of countless individuals. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You wrote that Trump’s day one immigration orders amounted to “the federal policy equivalent of the Fyre festival” – referencing the ill-fated music festival that crumbled into chaos. What was your first impression of the policies?

They seemed to me like a wishlist of things that he would like to see happen in a movie version of the next six months. If you read most executive orders, they’re very precise about what they want, what they have the authority to change, and what they are changing. And yes, sometimes they are proclamations that are more discursive and ambitious in tone. But executive orders are, in general, directives that are executable – not just paint thrown on the wall.

These executive orders feel to me more blustery – like performative documents. They contain a lot of assertions in them that are either demonstrably untrue, highly questionable or simply not established. There are parts that are poorly structured, that leave out normal numbering. If you were to turn this in as a brief to your professor in the first year of law school, you would get dinged for basic errors.

It seems like there are also quirks in the specifics of some of these orders that raise difficult questions with unclear answers.

It’s so perplexing they would include certain things. The executive order on birthright citizenship, for example, aims to limit eligibility to citizenship based on someone’s biological parents [“biological progenitors”, specifically].

But anyone who works in family law or immigration law knows there are a number of people in this country whose connections to both biological parents are not well established or don’t really exist. And we have to think about what this means for anyone who is conceived through in vitro fertilization or born from donated sperm or eggs.

Overall, it’s almost like some things included are so broad as to be nonsense, and then some things are so specific. It’s a bit of a clown show.

Why would Trump and his administration put out such confusing orders?

Chaos has always been central to Trump’s political style and to his approach to presidential politics. It stirs up folks like me who are going to comment on this and say that this is absurd and it’s disconnected from reality. And it stirs up the media. That, in turn, could push supporters to embrace these ideas and policies even more, because they view themselves as oppositional.

People watch Donald Trump’s inauguration speech on TV. Photograph: Zaydee Sanchez/Reuters

I also think there is a strategy to shifting the Overton window – the spectrum of acceptable polices. Even if there are legal challenges, some versions of these policies will stick in the popular discourse. I don’t think Trump ever really knows in advance what will or won’t stick – but if he puts enough out there, some of it will.

When does confusion and chaos within these orders become part of their impact?

Some of these actions will have some immediate effects. But I don’t think that there is always going to be a direct line between the executive order and action at government agencies. And that’s because any serious agency director who sees these things also won’t necessarily make sense of them. But they’re going to ramp up immigration enforcement whether or not it is directly connected to one of the executive orders.

But beyond that, the chaos itself and the messiness of the executive orders are going to fuel a rising tide of misinformation. And that’s going to affect immigrant communities who are going to now feel more afraid and more uncertain.

What we know from research, including my own research on the ground, is that migrants, immigrants, non-citizens – and even some citizens will feel targeted, and they will change their everyday behaviors. We’re going to see people becoming very careful about where they drive, of people not wanting to be in public because they fear immigration enforcement.

Right – if even experts are racing to understand the legal and practical implications of some of these orders, it feels impossible and overwhelming for the public to start to grapple with what they mean.

For the vast majority of people, I would actually advise, don’t try to obsess over every little thing that happens every single day. The truth is, even those of us who are in the know don’t know what exactly these orders mean yet. They’re all going to be litigated – and they’re going to be processed through the courts over the coming months and years.

It’s good for people to take a little bit of a step back, because what we don’t want is to get engulfed in anxiety and chaos and misinformation. Because that’s what the Trump administration wants. It wants people to feel so afraid and so confused and enraptured in the chaos that we’re not able to live our lives in community, and in some kind of peaceful way.

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