Executive Immigration Decisions, ICE Enforcement Protections of Undocumented Migrants : A Comparative Study of the Obama and Trump Administrations

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how executive immigration enforcement changed between the Obama and Trump administrations and how these changes affected legal protections of undocumented migrants. Using Bacchis What's the problem represented to be? (WPR) framework, this study analyzes Executive Order 13768 and the Morton Memo to examine how each administration constructed undocumented migrants as a policy problem. The analysis draws on Agamben's concepts of zoe and bios, the state of exception as well as the concept of populism and populist constitutionalism, to examine how the problem representation positions migrations within the legal and political order. The findings show that the Obama administration framed undocumented migrants as a resource management challenge, positioning migrants closer to bios through individual assessment and prosecutorial discretion. The Trump administration instead framed undocumented presence itself as a threat to public safety, shifting migrants closer to zoe trough categorical enforcement and removal of individual recognition. The study concludes that executive immigration distinctions can reshape legal protections without formal constitutional change and that the language of policy documents plays a role in who is governed through protections and who is governed through exclusion.