July Immigration Briefing

On Tuesday, July 15th, the Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights hosted a virtual Immigration Briefing, which covered the impact of the federal budget bill on immigrant communities, the ongoing legal challenges to the Trump administration’s executive order contesting birthright citizenship, and more. 

As always, none of the below should be considered legal advice! The federal policy and legal landscape around immigration is changing rapidly, so please be aware that anything you read below may soon be out of date. 

Also: CIRR has a new webpage! Check out our Protecting Immigrant Rights page to see information on the rights and resources for immigrants being targeted by this administration, and opportunities to get involved in protecting our neighbors. 

Budget Bill

For a full reckoning of the enormous impact the federal budget bill will have on immigrants across the country, please read the National Immigrant Justice Center’s analysis. 

Major Cuts to Benefits

The federal budget bill was passed by the Senate, and the impacts it is likely to have on both the immigrant community and all Chicagoans is likely to be devastating. The budget included: 

• ~$1 trillion cut to Medicaid over ten years, which is projected to increase the number of uninsured people by an estimated 12 million nationwide, an estimated half a million in Illinois. Illinois projects that 9 rural hospitals and over 90 nursing homes will likely be closed as a result of these cuts.
  • For more information on changes to Medicaid, ACA, and Medicare, please visit KFF’s website. 

• ~$200 billion cuts to SNAP (food assistance) over 10 years, which would impact an estimated 360,000 families in Illinois and drastically increase food insecurity in our city.
  • For updates to SNAP eligibility under the new law, see Greater Chicago Food Depository’s analysis.

For both Medicaid and SNAP, immigrants who are lawfully present in the United States and were previously eligible for Medicaid and SNAP were intentionally excluded, and will now be left without options for healthcare coverage or food assistance.

Unprecedented Increases to Immigration Enforcement

The budget bill’s provisions for immigration enforcement are truly unprecedented, and deeply alarming. This bill triples the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget, making it the largest law enforcement agency in the country. Its budget is larger than most of the world’s militaries.

The budget includes:

• $45 billion for immigration jails to massively expand mass incarceration. The US already has the largest immigration detention system in the world, with over 57K people in detention, the highest in history. This bill also adds additional funding for family detention, which will imprison children along with their parents as they await prosecution.

• Over $65 billion to resume the wasteful border wall, as well as the resumption of the “Remain in Mexico” campaign, which has well-documented human rights violations.

• $1 billion in diverted military spending to fund Trump’s immigration agenda.

• Over $13 billion in incentives to reward anti-immigrant states for using their own law enforcement agents to join ICE in hunting down their residents.

• Significant roll backs to the asylum and child welfare protections, and funding programs with well-documented human rights violations like the Remain in Mexico program and expedited removal.

• Imposes new and exorbitant fines and fees for crucial immigration protections like asylum, parole, and TPS—essentially charging people who are fleeing violence to take advantage of their legal right to seek asylum.

This massive budget increase comes at a time when ICE’s tactics have grown increasingly reckless and lawless—this bill incentivizes and rewards ICE for terrorizing the residents of this country. This bill will almost certainly lead to more warrantless arrests as ICE agents are given free reign to engage in racial profiling and hunt down long-term residents of our community with no criminal history. 

Public pressure did result in the removal of several provisions that would have made an already bad bill vastly worse, including: 

• Preventing the punishment of states providing healthcare to immigrants with their own funds;
• Preventing the extortion of families by charging sponsors of children up to $8,500;
• Reducing fee for asylum applications (the bill originally included a $1K fee for asylum applications, an impossible standard for most asylum seekers to reach);
• Including fee waivers for abused, abandoned, or neglected children;
• Reducing the role of the military in border enforcement.

Birthright Citizenship

On his first day in office, President Trump filed an executive Order challenging birthright citizenship, a blatant violation of the Constitution. The order claims that children of undocumented immigrants born in the US are not eligible for citizenship. Multiple lawsuits were filed against this arguing the constitutionality of the order and legality under the Immigration and Nationality Act. 

Federal district courts found that the executive order likely violated the Constitution, and issued nationwide injunctions to block the order from taking effect to prevent the Trump Administration from taking away birthright citizenship of children born in the U.S. after Feb 2025.

On June 30th, the Supreme Court issued a ruling on one of these lawsuits, Trump vs. Casas. The ruling did not rule on the merits of birthright citizenship, which is clearly established in the 14th Amendment. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the district court exceeded their authority in issuing nationwide injunctions, claiming that its protections were too broad. The result is that the Supreme Court severely limited the district court’s power to issue nationwide injunctions that offered crucial protections against unconstitutional executive orders that violate the civil rights of Americans. People must now either pursue their own litigation—which takes time and resources many don’t have—or depend on a class action lawsuit being brought, or an attorney general of their state bringing a lawsuit.  

There is some good news: on July 10th, a New Hampshire federal judge certified a class of plaintiffs of babies born after February 2025 and issued an injunction that protects the fundamental right to birthright citizenship enshrined in the 14th Amendment. The government has 7 days to appeal this class certification, but in the meantime, enforcement of the executive order has been blocked.

Immigration Policy Updates

Expansion of Notices to Appear

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a Policy Memo in February directing the agency to issue Notices to Appear—a notice that instructs an individual to appear before an immigration judge, and is usually the first step in starting deportation proceedings—much more broadly. People who were previously exempted, including those who are protected by survival-based immigration benefits like the Violence Against Women Act and U and T visas—which are visas issued to those who are victims of a crime or human trafficking—are now subject to deportation. 

The memo also directed the USCIS to treat withdrawn applications as denied applications. This is especially egregious, given that immigration applications can be denied for many reasons, most of which are minor: for instance, if your credit card initially denies your processing fee for security reasons, or if there is a mistake on the form. 

During the past few months, immigration attorneys have seen this memo impact immigrants who qualify for immigration relief and have an active petition in process. In short, it makes it harder for people to pursue legal avenues of gaining permanent status in the U.S., and easier to deport those who are going through that process. 

Immigration attorneys recommend that proceeding with caution and consulting with an attorney when submitting petitions for immigration benefits, since denials may result in a notice to appear.

Department of Justice Civil Penalties

The Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a memo last month, directing Civil Division attorneys to focus their enforcement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the trans community, pro-Palestinian protestors, and immigrants.

The memo also listed categories of naturalized American citizens that should be eligible for denaturalization (i.e. having their American citizenship stripped away), including people who are a potential danger to national security—a vague designation that could easily be used to target people who disagree with the administration politically.

Denaturalization of an American citizen requires a long and extremely complicated process, and given the mass departures of attorneys from the DOJ, the impact of this memo may not come to fruition. But it is likely to have a chilling effect on legal permanent residents and U.S. citizens who are already worried about exercising their basic rights to travel in and out of the country. 

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the DOJ also released a rule that allows them to collect civil penalties for certain immigration violations without the 30-day notice period that was previously in place—telegraphing their intent to include financial penalties and fines as part of their larger campaign to punish immigrants. 

Congressional Support

If you are in the midst of an immigration issue, or if you or a loved one are detained by ICE, you can reach out to your Congressional Representatives for help. They can help with any of the following:

• Submit status inquiries of immigration visa applications;
• Expedite immigration requests if it meets certain criteria;
• Check on someone who filed a petition but did not receive notice;
• Moving immigration interviews from one embassy to another;
• Providing letters of support for non-immigrant visa.

If you or a loved one is detained by ICE, your Congressional Representatives can also advocate on your behalf, including:

• Helping locate where detained person(s) are being held;
• Supporting attorneys in scheduling a call with their detained client;
• Escalating attorney legal requests to ICE;
• Ensuring that those in detention have access to medical support and other necessities.

There are some forms that ICE requires in order for your Congressperson to advocate on your behalf, so please check out the CIRR Guide to find instructions for those forms, and how to contact your Congressional offices.  

Key Takeaways and Calls to Action

If you would like to get involved, you can take the following actions:

• Public pressure is resulting in people getting released from ICE detention, so please keep speaking up and speaking out for those in our community who have been detained;
• Call on your Congressional Representatives to fight back against the budget bill by adding restrictions in the yearly appropriations process;
• Call on your Congressional Representatives to conduct unannounced visits to detention facilities and continue to exercise their oversight roles;
• Visit the CIRR Protecting Immigrant Rights page and Illinois Immigration Info to find out how you can get more involved!

Most importantly: please continue speaking up for immigrant rights! The many voices that have spoken out in support of immigrants and outrage at the Trump administration’s tactics has begun to shift public opinion. The more we speak up about what’s happening to immigrants in our country, the more people are coming around to what we already know: that immigrants make our country stronger, and that their rights should be protected. The next immigration briefing is on Tuesday, August 19th at 1pm. Register at bit.ly/CIRRBriefing!