President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday will begin issuing a barrage of executive orders including major steps to crack down on immigration and dismantle diversity initiatives in the federal government, his team told reporters, kicking off his presidency with a muscular use of power intended to signal a sharp reversal from existing policies.
Mr. Trump will also act unilaterally to end electric vehicle mandates passed by the Biden administration, walk back protections for transgender students and suspend refugee resettlement for at least four months, they said.
The flurry of executive actions is an effort to roll back of many of President Biden’s most significant domestic policies, primarily on climate and immigration, while also reimposing a Trump agenda that would launch drilling and mining on natural resources and fundamentally upend the United States’ global role as a sanctuary for refugees and immigrants.
Mr. Trump has promised a burst of action once he takes office this afternoon. At a dinner with donors on Sunday night, Mr. Trump said that “within hours of taking office, I will sign dozens of executive orders — close to 100, in fact.” It is unclear if Mr. Trump will sign all of the directives on Monday afternoon, or if more are expected to follow in the coming days.
Some of the orders he will sign will be challenged in court and others will be largely symbolic. But taken together, they will amount to a sharp turn in direction after the Biden administration, an effort to begin to make good on his campaign promises and initial steps toward breaking what he and his aides see as a “deep state” effort to thwart his agenda.
Top advisers briefed reporters on many of them. Here are some of the major elements.
- Close the border to asylum-seeking migrants and end asylum and birthright citizenship. The president cannot change the Constitution on his own, so it’s not yet clear how Trump plans to end the guarantee of citizenship for those born in the United States, which is in the 14th Amendment.
- Involve the U.S. military in border security. This would draw immediate legal challenges because of the strict limits in American law for how the armed forces can be deployed inside the country.
- Declare migrant crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border to be a national emergency, which would allow Mr. Trump to unilaterally unlock federal funding for border wall construction, without approval from Congress, for stricter enforcement efforts.
- Designate drug cartels as “global terrorists.”
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