The millions of migrants who were released into the country during the immigration surge that began in 2021 and peaked in 2023 caused a political firestorm when Republican states transported them to Democratic cities. Now, according to a new analysis, many of them are back working in the states that expelled them.

Many of the migrants turned themselves in to immigration officials when they entered the United States illegally, but avoided immediate removal by claiming a “credible fear” of persecution or torture if they returned home, giving them the right to seek asylum. It can take years to receive an asylum hearing. Others seeking asylum arrived with appointments made through a government app or relied on temporary parole programs while pursuing legal status in court.

Now, amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, these migrants are under increasing pressure, threatened with arrest and detention even when they appear for their court dates. Currently, they can begin to work legally after waiting six months, but the Trump administration is seeking to extend the waiting period to one year.

A Stateline analysis of court records shows that the largest numbers of recent asylum-seekers are in New York, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Utah, all of which have populations that are at least 1% higher than they were in 2020 because of the new migrants. Also in the top 10: Texas, Connecticut, California, Illinois and Colorado. Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas led the charge to transport migrants out of state. Stateline’s analysis counts only those migrants who are not being detained.

The country that is the single largest source of recent asylum-seeking migrants is Venezuela, with 363,000 as of February. The next largest is Mexico (251,000), followed by Guatemala (241,000), Honduras (240,000) and Colombia (235,000). But those nationwide numbers are scrambled in individual states: Ecuadorians predominate in five states, Nicaraguans in four, and Brazilians and Cubans in three each.

The influx of migrants that began escalating when President Joe Biden loosened immigration rules in January 2021 generated a political backlash that intensified after DeSantis and Abbott began busing and flying border migrants to Democratic-led cities, putting a significant strain on their finances. New York City, for example, spent a total of $8.13 billion on shelter and services for the more than 223,000 asylum-seekers and other migrants who arrived between the spring of 2022 and the fall of 2024.

Meanwhile, some established immigrant communities resented what they saw as lenient treatment of the newcomers.

Local news accounts reported anger over competition for jobs in Latino communities in New York City. But Ernesto Castañeda, director of American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, said interviews there showed more resentment over the aid that was offered to the new arrivals.

“For the first time in U.S. history, there were many big programs to temporarily house and feed the newcomers,” Castañeda said. “People (in New York City) talked about the food cards they got, or the free meals, or the hotel rooms, and that took a lot of the media attention locally.”

But many of the new immigrants also have provided much-needed labor, from the streets of New York City and its suburbs to the dairy farms of Idaho.

“All we can do is just work and hope for the best,” said a woman from Ecuador, who asked to be identified only as Rosa. Rosa works in a family food service business in suburban Spring Valley, New York, one of the top five areas in the country for the sheer number of the migrants, with most coming from Ecuador, according to court records.

“It’s hard here but in Ecuador it’s worse — there are gangs blackmailing you,” said another woman who works in a Queens store labeling packets of Ecuadorian herbs. She declined to identify herself.

In suburbs as well as cities, the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda has immigrants worried. About 22% of the newcomers around the country, in and out of detention, have orders of removal from immigration courts, meaning they could be arrested and summarily deported at any time.

“There were a lot of arrests right around here. People who did everything right got detained,” Rosa said in Spanish, glancing around nervously as she worked making traditional Ecuadorian dishes like corviches, fish fritters, and a fish and onion soup called encebollado.

Many of the new arrivals have stopped socializing and stay home when they’re not working, afraid to be caught up in raids that have swept thousands of them up into detention, according to interviews conducted in New York and the District of Columbia by the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies.

Even when much-hated Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was arrested in January and removed to the United States for trial, many Venezuelan asylum-seekers stayed home rather than risk being arrested at public celebrations.

Ecuadorians got less media attention than Venezuelans because they came to a more established community in New York, Castañeda said.

“(Ecuadorians) already had networks, so they were not staying in shelters. They were not in the streets,” he said. “They could work and they were becoming part of the fabric of New York, but now they’re being deported by Trump because ICE knows who they are, where they live and their status is very easy pickings. They’re low-hanging fruit.”

Many Venezuelans would like to go home but face even more chaos after the fall of Maduro, said Héctor Arguinzones, organizer of a Venezuelan immigrant group in New York City.

“Many of us fled Venezuela because our own neighbors were our persecutors,” said Arguinzones. “We’re not trying to, you know, sneak into the United States. A lot of us want to go back. We are full of hope. But we cannot think that this crisis in Venezuela will be solved in three months. We must be patient. What we really need is humanitarian treatment.”

Texas has ended up with the largest number of Venezuelans, an irony noted in a book written by the American University research team. After initially receiving aid in more sympathetic areas such as Colorado, New York City and Washington, D.C., many of the Venezuelans traveled around the country looking for work, but trickled back to Texas where jobs were available and the cost of living was lower.

Living in the U.S. with an immigration court date is a tenuous existence for people fleeing gangs and political oppression in South America and Central America. Fear of returning to a home country can be a valid legal reason to avoid deportation, but it requires legal help and doesn’t prevent detention and pressure to “self-deport.”

“Unfortunately, having an asylum case is not a legal status,” Arguinzones said. “We tell people to keep up with their court cases and keep the paperwork with them, so at least they have something to show. At least it’s something.”

Robin Nice, a Boston attorney, said six of her clients with pending asylum cases were detained in a January sweep called Operation Catch of the Day, and only one had had a brush with the law in the form of a year-old traffic case.

“They were typically on their way to or from work, sometimes just getting into their car after finishing a shift,” Nice said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in an unattributed statement to Stateline, said: “A pending asylum case does NOT confer any type of legal status in the United States. If a person enters our country illegally, they are subject to detention or deportation.”

Some of the asylum-seekers pursuing legal status through the courts have already been detained, but they make up a small fraction of the 2.8 million total cases.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

As the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last week about the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed skeptical.

The order as written applies only to babies born in the future, and the Trump administration has asked the court to exclude current citizens from any decision. Still, the court’s senior liberal justice wasn’t so sure it would work out like that.

“But the logic of your position, if accepted, is that this president or the next president or Congress or someone else could decide that it shouldn’t be prospective,” Sotomayor told U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the government’s top advocate at the court. “There would be nothing limiting that, according to your theory.”

The birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara, is forcing the Supreme Court to confront the prospect of the United States becoming a much different kind of nation — one where Americans risk losing their citizenship and babies could be born effectively stateless. It’s also a nation that would more closely resemble its past, when broad swaths of people were excluded from the coveted title of American.

A majority of the court, including several conservative justices, appeared unpersuaded by the Trump administration’s argument that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified during Reconstruction, doesn’t guarantee citizenship to nearly everyone born on American soil. The court may very well strike down the order, which has never taken effect, later this year.

But whatever the decision, the case has prompted a high-stakes debate over who is an American — and the consequences of that definition — that’s playing out in the courtroom, in court documents and on the steps of the Supreme Court.

“Birthright citizenship is not just a legal principle,” Norman Wong said at a demonstration outside the Supreme Court last week.

Wong is a grandchild of Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco but denied entry back into the country after visiting China more than a century ago. Officials at the time argued he wasn’t a citizen, but he took his case to the Supreme Court and, in a 1898 decision, the justices affirmed that virtually all children born in the United States were guaranteed citizenship.

“It’s a statement about who we are as a nation,” Wong said of birthright citizenship. “It affirms that America is not defined by bloodlines or exclusion, but shared values and equal rights.”

A different view

Trump and some Republicans view birthright citizenship differently. 

The 14th Amendment says “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” 

The Trump administration, which has worked to carry out mass deportations, contends that children born to parents in the country illegally or temporarily are not subject to the country’s jurisdiction. Most historians and legal scholars repudiate that position.

The executive order, signed on Trump’s first day back in office, calls citizenship a privilege — not a right — that’s a “priceless and profound gift.” 

During a recent Oval Office event, Trump told reporters that birthright citizenship was intended to extend citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their children following the Civil War. 

“The reason was it had to do with the babies of slaves,” Trump said.

Some Republicans have embraced a conception of the U.S. as a nation bound by a distinct cultural heritage — sometimes in language that celebrates European settlers — as opposed to a people brought together by the idea of America or a set of common principles. Like Trump, they advocate for a restrictive approach to immigration.

At a conference last fall on national conservatism — the name sometimes given to this perspective — U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, called America a “a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.”

Schmitt filed a brief with the Supreme Court in January, along with Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, in support of the executive order. 

“The Citizenship Clause applies only to those who have been allowed to adopt our country as their permanent and lawful home,” the brief says.

Revoking citizenship?

At the Supreme Court last week, Sotomayor pressed Sauer on a 1923 Supreme Court decision, U.S. vs. Thind. In that case, the justices ruled that a Sikh man from India, Bhagat Singh Thind, wasn’t eligible for citizenship. 

Thind argued that he was a “free white person,” a category of person allowed to naturalize under federal law at the time. The court found that Thind didn’t meet that definition under the common understanding of the phrase. The federal government revoked the citizenship of dozens of South Asian Americans following the decision.

Sauer reiterated that the Trump administration was only asking for “prospective relief,” prompting Sotomayor to interject.

“No, what I’m saying to you (is), yeah, that’s what you’re asking for relief right now,” Sotomayor said. “I’m asking whether the logic of your theory would permit what happened after the court’s decision in Thind, that the government could move to unnaturalize people who were born here of illegal residents.”

Sauer responded no, before concluding that “we are not asking for any retroactive relief.”

The exchange spotlighted the scenario that many advocates for immigrants fear if the Supreme Court strips away birthright citizenship. 

In a court brief, the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, which uses litigation to advance racial justice, and more than 70 other nonprofit groups warned that upholding the order would invite efforts to revoke the citizenship of countless Americans.

While the order is styled as only forward-looking, the groups said it threatens much deeper harms. To uphold Trump’s order, the Supreme Court would need to conclude that birth on U.S. soil doesn’t guarantee citizenship. Once that happens, they argue, “it is all too easy” to imagine the government retroactively removing citizenship.

“In that scenario, without further intervention from Congress, the affected individuals would become undocumented, with many or most becoming stateless,” the brief says.

American Civil Liberties Union national legal director Cecillia Wang, arguing against the order at the Supreme Court, said the 14th Amendment has provided a “fixed, bright-line rule” on citizenship that has contributed to the growth and thriving of the nation. 

She cautioned that the order would render whole swaths of American laws senseless.

“Thousands of American babies will immediately lose their citizenship,” Wang said. “And if you credit the government’s theory, the citizenship of millions of Americans — past, present and future — could be called into question.”

Ariana Figueroa contributed to this report. 

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Monday said it will hear oral arguments in April in two cases brought by immigrants hailing from Syria and Haiti after the Trump administration tried to end their temporary protections, initially granted because their countries had been deemed too dangerous for return. 

Monday’s order consolidates two cases, one brought on behalf of 6,000 Syrians with Temporary Protected Status and another from 350,000 Haitians. 

The justices also declined to grant the Trump administration’s request to stay a lower court order that prevented the end of TPS for those two countries, meaning that protections from deportation will remain for now for those immigrants. 

The justices will hear arguments for the cases in the last week of April, with final briefs due by April 20. A specific date has not yet been set.

Congress created TPS to allow immigrants from countries dealing with war, natural disasters, political violence or other instabilities to remain and work in the United States on a temporary basis, ranging from six months to 18 months. 

The TPS holders who sued the Trump administration have argued that their countries’ conditions were not considered when the Department of Homeland Security determined their protections should end. 

The Trump administration has sought to cancel legal protections for immigrants, so far revoking TPS status for 13 of the 17 countries that were designated at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. 

Those 13 countries are Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.  

The four remaining countries with TPS expiring this year without an extension are El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan and Ukraine.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump repeated his hardline stance on immigration during his record-long State of the Union on Tuesday, previewing a potential midterm campaign message as his party faces an uphill battle to keep a majority in the House.

“The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens,” Trump said.

His nearly two-hour speech before Congress came on the 11th day of a partial government shutdown affecting the Department of Homeland Security. He called on Democrats to immediately fund the agency. 

Democrats have refused to approve new funding for DHS unless changes are made to enforcement tactics following the deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis at the hands of federal immigration officers. 

Another vote to move forward on approving funding for DHS failed, 50-45, Tuesday mere hours before the president’s address to Congress.

Immigration enforcement has continued during the shutdown because the department has a separate funding stream Congress provided last year through the massive tax cuts and spending package. 

Rhetoric remains

Despite the controversy the months-long immigration operation in Minneapolis has created, Trump defended the operation and his views on immigration more generally, possibly signalling he does not plan to tone down his rhetoric in an election year.

He made racist remarks about the Somali refugee population in Minneapolis, referring to them as “Somali pirates” and accusing them of widespread fraud. 

He blamed the Biden administration for “importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders.” 

“We will take care of this problem,” he said.  

Trump also made another racist remark that immigrants “don’t speak English,” and called on Congress to pass legislation to bar immigrants in the country without legal authorization from obtaining commercial drivers licenses.

He also called for Congress to end so-called sanctuary cities, local jurisdictions that have policies to bar cooperation with the federal government’s immigration enforcement. 

Trump also called for Congress to pass a national voter ID requirement law to require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. 

The president did give a passing endorsement of legal immigration, saying early in the speech he would “always allow people to come in legally, people that will love our country and will work hard to maintain our country.”

Many of the groups he has targeted as president, though, including Minnesota’s Somali population, have legal authorization to be in the country.

Padilla blasts Trump approach

Democrats have seized on the unpopularity of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, where residential areas have experienced masked immigration agents and roving patrols. 

In a rebuke to Trump’s Speech, California Sen. Alex Padilla gave the Democratic response that aired across Spanish networks. 

“This country has always been shaped by people who were told they did not belong, but who persevered and kept moving forward,” he said in Spanish.

Last summer, federal law enforcement officials forcibly removed and handcuffed Padilla at a press conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in Los Angeles during protests against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the city.

The incident represented a stark escalation of tensions between Democrats and the Trump administration after the president ordered 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to quell the protests in Los Angeles. 

After Padilla, California’s first Latino senator, was released, he gave an emotional speech on the Senate floor that accused the president of using his home state as a testing ground for deploying the U.S. military domestically. 

In his response Tuesday, he addressed the incident at the Noem press conference.   

“They may have knocked me down for a moment, but I got right back up,” Padilla said. “As our parents taught us, if you fall seven times, get up eight. I am still here. Standing. Still fighting. And I know you are still standing and still fighting too.”

Pedestrians walk through the streets of the Little Haiti neighborhood on June 06, 2025 in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A federal judge late Monday blocked the termination of temporary protections for roughly 350,000 Haitians from taking effect, a move that prevents the Trump administration from acting to deport them as litigation continues. 

In a searing 83-page order, District of Columbia federal Judge Ana C. Reyes found that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem does not have “unbounded discretion” to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haiti and rejected the Trump administration’s arguments that ending the status is  in the public interest. 

“Secretary Noem complains of strains unlawful immigrants place on our immigration-enforcement system. Her answer? Turn 352,959 lawful immigrants into unlawful immigrants overnight,” Reyes wrote. “She complains of strains to our economy. Her answer? Turn employed lawful immigrants who contribute billions in taxes into the legally unemployable. This approach is many things—in the public interest is not one of them.”

The decision came the day before hundreds of thousands of Haitians were at risk of losing their work permits and deportation protections, opening them up to removal. 

The Trump administration has moved to strip the legal status of immigrants, as many as 1.5 million, by ending the TPS designation and revoking humanitarian protections initially granted under the Biden administration. So far, Noem has ended TPS for 12 countries.  

Other judges found Noem overreached

Reyes said the Trump administration would face no harm by allowing TPS recipients from Haiti to keep their legal status while they challenge Noem’s move to end their status. 

Last year, Noem initially tried to remove extended protections for TPS holders from Haiti granted under the Biden administration, which meant protections would end by August. But several judges found that move from Noem an overreach of her authority. 

TPS is usually granted for 18 months to nationals who hail from a country deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence and instability. 

In her order, Reyes cited contradictions by the Trump administration in its attempts to end TPS for Haiti. She pointed to Noem’s argument that conditions in Haiti have improved, but at the same time the State Department has a “do not travel” advisory for Haiti because of violence. 

There has been escalating gang violence in Haiti since the assassination of the country’s president in 2021. 

“There is an old adage among lawyers. If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table,” Reyes wrote. “Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither and bringing the adage into the 21st century, she pounds X (f/k/a Twitter).”

Reyes was nominated by former President Joe Biden.

‘Hostility to nonwhite immigrants’

Reyes added that one of the arguments from the plaintiffs – Haitian TPS recipients – that Noem “preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants,” is likely substantial.   

Reyes also pointed to the 2024 presidential campaign, where President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance spread false rumors claiming Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, ate residents’ pets. 

In her order, she said Trump referred to those Haitians with TPS as being in the country without legal authorization, despite their legal status, and recalled how the president vowed to revoke “Haiti’s TPS designation and send ‘them back to their country.’”

There are five Haitian TPS recipients who are plaintiffs in the case. They argued that Noem violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the process of how agencies issue regulations, by ending TPS for Haiti. 

Those recipients include Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, who is a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease who has had TPS since 2011; Rudolph Civil, a software engineer at a national bank who was granted TPS in 2010; Marlene Gail Noble, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department who’s been a TPS recipient since 2024; Marica Merline Laguerre, an economics major at Hunter College and a TPS holder since 2010; and Vilbrun Dorsainvil, a full-time registered nurse and TPS holder since 2021.

A reprieve

This is not the first time the Trump administration has tried to end the TPS designation for Haiti, but the courts blocked those attempts in 2018.

Monday’s decision came as a brief relief for immigrants and advocates in Springfield, Ohio. 

“This 11th hour reprieve is, of course, welcome,” Ohio Immigrant Alliance Executive Director Lynn Tramonte said in a statement. “But people can’t live their lives like this, pegging their families’ futures to a court case. The least this country can do is honor their strength and contributions by giving them a permanent home.” 

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Unauthorized immigrants are not eligible for federally or state-funded health coverage in Wisconsin. 

That includes Medicaid, Medicare and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and coverage purchased through the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) marketplaces.

Unauthorized immigrants also are not eligible for Wisconsin Medicaid or BadgerCare Plus.

Fourteen states, including Illinois and Minnesota, use state Medicaid funds to cover unauthorized immigrants, but Wisconsin does not.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on Dec. 5 vetoed a Republican-backed bill that would have banned public money from going toward health care coverage for unauthorized immigrants.

Republicans said the bill was meant to be pre-emptive.

On Dec. 10, Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who is running for governor in 2026, incorrectly said Evers’ veto allowed unauthorized immigrants “to continue to get taxpayer-funded health care.”

When Evers vetoed the bill he criticized it for “trying to push polarizing political rhetoric.”

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Wisconsin Watch Do tens of millions of unauthorized immigrants receive federal health benefits?
• Wisconsin Health Services Department Medicaid: Health Care Coverage for Noncitizens
• Wisconsin Watch Are unauthorized immigrants eligible for federal Medicaid coverage?
• WPR Evers vetoes bill to block Medicaid funds from undocumented residents
• Wisconsin Legislature Assembly Bill 308
• Rep. Alex Dallman Testimony in Favor of Assembly Bill 308
• Gov. Tony Evers Veto message
• Wisconsin Watch Here are 8 claims related to health care and immigration … and the facts

Did Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers allow unauthorized immigrants to get taxpayer-funded health care? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.