section_path: First presidency (2017–2021)/Immigration
section_name: Immigration
paragraph_text: Immigration
  
  As president, Trump described illegal immigration as an "invasion" of the United States and drastically escalated immigration enforcement. He implemented harsh policies against asylum seekers and deployed nearly 6,000 troops to the U.S.–Mexico border to stop illegal crossings. He reduced the number of refugees admitted to record lows, from an annual limit of 110,000 before he took office to 15,000 in 2021. Trump also increased restrictions on granting permanent residency to immigrants needing public benefits. One of his central campaign promises was to build a wall along the U.S.–Mexico border; during his first term, the U.S. built 73 miles (117 km) of wall in areas without barriers and 365 miles (587 km) to replace older barriers. In 2018, Trump's refusal to sign any spending bill unless it allocated funding for the border wall resulted in the longest-ever federal government shutdown, for 35 days from December 2018 to January 2019. The shutdown ended after he agreed to fund the government without any funds for the wall. To avoid another shutdown, Congress passed a funding bill with $1.4 billion for border fencing in February. Trump later declared a national emergency on the southern border to divert $6.1 billion of funding to the border wall despite congressional disagreement.
  
  In January 2017, Trump signed an executive order that temporarily denied entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries. The order caused many protests and legal challenges that resulted in nationwide injunctions. A revised order giving some exceptions was also blocked by courts, but the Supreme Court ruled in June that the ban could be enforced on those lacking "a bona fide relationship with a person or entity" in the U.S. Trump replaced the ban in September with a presidential proclamation extending travel bans to North Koreans, Chadians, and some Venezuelan officials, but excluded Iraq and Sudan. The Supreme Court allowed that version to go into effect in December 2017, and ultimately upheld the ban in 2019. From 2017 to 2018, the Trump administration had a policy of family separation that separated over 4,400 children of migrant families from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border, an unprecedented policy sparked public outrage in the country. Despite Trump initially blaming Democrats and insisting he could not stop the policy with an executive order, he acceded to public pressure in June 2018 and mandated that migrant families be detained together unless "there is a concern" of risk for the child. A judge later ordered that the families be reunited and further separations stopped except in limited circumstances, though over 1,000 additional children were separated from their families after the order.