Since taking office for a second time in early 2025, Donald Trump’s administration has sought to ‘flood the zone’ by signing dozens of executive orders in an effort to overwhelm those who oppose his agenda. The White House has termed these changes as happening at ‘Trump speed’. One area of sustained focus and attack has been immigration, in particular humanitarian streams including asylum. Members of the University of Toronto community gathered on a grey afternoon in November to learn from Dr. Luis Campos, a lawyer and activist working at the frontlines of asylum law in the United States. As the room quickly grew dark, courtesy of the end of daylight savings time a few days earlier, the resulting ambience suited the presentation’s grim content, as Dr. Campos described the multipronged attack on immigration he is witnessing across the United States.
Dr. Campos approaches the situation unfolding along the border not only as a trained lawyer and now activist, but also as a self-identified ‘child of the borderlands’. Growing up with a parent from Mexico and another from the United States, Dr. Campos recalls crossing the southern border of the United States as routine, normalized, and mundane. While efforts to control migration, particularly racialized migrants, are nothing new, this frenetic and relentless approach pursued by the Trump administration has contributed to the dismantling of this version of the southern U.S. border that Dr. Campos and so many others grew up with.
Representing People Seeking Asylum
As a lawyer, Dr. Campos provided an introduction to the kinds of cases that he is working on. They noted that broadly there are three categories through which people claiming asylum arrive to the United States – they may arrive at a port of entry, cross between a port of entry without inspection, or, previously, through the use of the CBP1 Mobile App (no longer in use, now transformed to CBP Home). Across these modes, Dr. Campos notes that accessing asylum has become increasingly disordered, a result of deliberate policy decisions.
In areas such as the Arizona-Sonora border there has been a significant ramping up of enforcement. This includes the deployment of 8,000 military troops to this region with the specific remit of patrolling the areas between ports of entry. ‘This is now a militarized zone’ according to Dr. Campos, and these efforts are ‘effectively sealing the border to asylum-seekers’. Yet, people are still arriving. These entries, however, are now taking people further and further into the desert, increasing the riskiness of these journeys, as well as the costs (as smugglers will require a higher fee for these longer journeys across more treacherous terrain). While there is effective organizing happening to support people on these journeys from groups such as the Samaritans, tragically, these policies continue to result in exposing people to harm, and sometimes death.
For Dr. Campos, his clients who are able to pursue an asylum claim enter into a severely overloaded legal system, including a backlog of 4 million pending removal cases. Despite this backlog, the Trump administration removed a number of immigration judges, widely considered a ‘political purge’. To make up the deficit, they have brought in military lawyers. Dr. Campos posits this contributes to the narrative that asylum-seekers are dangerous, ‘invading terrorists’ – so dangerous they require the military to handle their cases.
The War on Asylum
The political moves that restrict access to asylum across the United States have been multipronged. Dr. Campos detailed the administration’s attack on asylum through five mechanisms:
- Seal and militarize the border
- Intensify interior enforcement
- Conduct expedited removal of asylum seekers
- Create in-court techniques to obstruct asylum claims
- Expand mandatory detention
Many of these have played out very visibly. The administration, rather than trying to hide these actions, instead celebrates them. ICE agents and Border Patrol are seen grabbing people off streets and placed in unmarked vehicles. Events that are meant to celebrate joy, family, and community, such as Halloween, are instead opportunities for these agencies to arrest more people out in the open. The federal government and its immigration agencies seem unconcerned when such moments of violence are recorded on cell phones and uploaded to Tik Tok and other social media, instead they welcome it as furthering their efforts to deter migrants.
The Archive as Resistance
This move to ‘flood the zone’ has created a proliferation of paper. Executive order after executive order, each with their own revealing names; ‘Securing Our Borders’, ‘Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship’, ‘Protecting the American People Against Invasion’, collectively create an archive of this attack on asylum.
Paper can be salvation or damnation for many migrants. Having ‘your papers’ might mean you are able to stay in the United States, but increasingly people’s statuses, their ‘papers’, are being taken away (such as the efforts to cancel categories like Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole). People who re-enter the U.S. after a removal can be charged with a felony – a new kind of paper in the form of a criminal record, which will haunt their efforts to remain in the United States or secure employment. In an age of surveillance and digitization, we are all more ‘papered’ then ever before. As one audience wryly noted: those who have no status and termed ‘undocumented’ are, in fact, heavily documented.
In addition to these papers the administration is producing, Dr. Campos seeks value in the production of another side to the archive. Describing his current role as being a kind of documentarian, as an attorney he seeks to establish a recording in all of his proceedings. By making arguments, entering evidence, even in cases where he knows they will not be successful, he hopes to leave a paper trail, one that shows how there are those railing against the detention and deportation machine currently in place. The archive can then become a means of resistance. For Dr. Campos the paper is temporary, but the impact is generational. ‘I hope someday we will have an accounting of all of this’.
