Within hours of his inauguration on January 20, 2025, US President Donald Trump declared an emergency at the southern border, suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program, and reiterated a plan for mass deportations of people seeking safety.

The impact was immediate. Asylum seekers at the Mexico-US border saw long-awaited appointments disappear before their eyes as US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) removed the scheduling function of the CBP One™ mobile app. All pending appointments for eight southwest border points of entry were cancelled. According to media reports, about 280,000 people in Mexico were logging onto the app daily in hopes of obtaining an appointment. 

President Trump’s mass deportation campaign targets millions of immigrants and people seeking safety. His plans will rely on mass arrests, mass detention, and mass removals of both longstanding community members and recently arrived people. It will:

• deprive people of the opportunity to ask for safety
• throw people into arbitrary detention
• return people to harm
• separate families and tear apart communities
• subject people to racial profiling
• spread fear and undermine human security

This reckless disregard for people’s dignity, well-being, and human rights will jeopardize millions of people who sought refuge and shared opportunity in the US and devastate towns and cities across the country where they built new lives, raised families, and contributed to the shared prosperity of their communities. As of 2024, there are approximately 13 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and millions more living under temporary statuses that President Trump has promised to terminate.

Sign the petition urging President Trump to respect the human rights of immigrants and people seeking safety and abandon his mass deportation campaign.

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SAFETY OF MILLIONS AT RISK IN MASS DEPORTATION CAMPAIGN

The US government has an obligation under international law to ensure that its laws, policies, and practices do not place immigrants and people seeking safety at an increased risk of human rights abuses. While the US, like all countries, has the power to regulate the entry and stay of non-nationals in its territory, it can only do so within the limits of its human rights obligations.

The US is trading fear and cruelty for human rights, pushing the country even further away from the decades’-old international obligations to uphold the human right to seek asylum and not send people back to the very harms that they fled. All people have the human right not to be returned to a country where they would be at real risk of torture or other serious human rights harms. To protect against that, people have the right under international law to seek and enjoy asylum – regardless of their manner of entry.