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Again and again the Trump White House has turned to a 73-year-old legal statute to defend its immigration crackdown.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt cited the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 on Tuesday to explain the arrest and planned deportation of a Palestinian activist and legal US resident with a green card.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem cited it in late February when announcing that anyone living in the US illegally would have to register with the federal government.
The act has been mentioned in presidential orders, press releases and speeches.
But what is it?
Why do officials keep talking about the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952?
The act comes up so frequently because it is the legal foundation of modern immigration law, encompassing a vast range of regulations and procedures. It has been amended hundreds of times since it was passed, during the Truman administration.
Decades of sweeping changes in immigration law link back to the act.
“These were all massive public laws in their own standing, but they were all amending” the 1952 legislation, said Niels Frenzen, an immigration expert at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.
The law, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, came amid the anti-communist fears of the early Cold War. While it eased some race-based immigration restrictions, particularly for Asians, it effectively limited most immigration to Europeans. It also codified rules allowing ideology to be used to deny immigration and allow deportation.
How has the Trump administration used the act and its many provisions?
Most recently, the Trump White House used the act as the basis to arrest Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who helped organize campus protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war. Khalil, a Palestinian who was born and raised in Syria, became a legal permanent resident, also known as a green card holder, last year. He is married to an American citizen.
But the administration says he still can be expelled.
“Under the Immigration and Nationality Act the secretary of state has the right to revoke a green card or a visa for individuals who are adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the US, Leavitt told reporters Tuesday.
The reality is more complicated, legal scholars say. The provision the White House is using – Section 237 (a)(4)(C) — is rarely invoked, requires extensive judicial review and is intended for unusual cases when someone’s presence in the US could cause diplomatic turmoil.
“The deportation has to have some seriousness to it,” said Richard Boswell, a University of California San Francisco law professor whose work often focuses on immigration. “The burden is on the government” to show the person should be deported.
Scholars often point back to the Clinton administration for a recent, high-profile example.
Mario Ruiz Massieu was a former deputy attorney general in Mexico when he was arrested in 1995 for trying to leave the US with $26,000 in undeclared cash. Then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher said that not deporting Ruiz-Massieu “would jeopardize our ability to work with Mexico on law enforcement matters.”
When else has the act been invoked?
- Under Section 212(f) , the president may block entry of “any aliens or class of aliens into the United States” whose presence would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” Donald Trump used that broad language to impose a travel ban on people from several Muslim-majority countries during his first term and, on the first day of his second term, laid groundwork for a renewed travel ban. His advisers are expected to make recommendations later this month.
- In late February, Noem said in a statement she would “fully enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act,” and would require anyone living in the US illegally to register with the federal government, with those who don’t facing fines, imprisonment or both.
- Joe Biden used the act’s humanitarian parole provision more than any president to allow temporarily allow people into the US from countries including Ukraine, Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Specifically, it allows the president to admit anyone “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” The Trump administration is facing a lawsuit for ending the long-standing legal tool.

Caribbean leaders this week rejected US accusations of Cuban labor exploitation after the United States announced it will restrict the visas of officials tied to a Cuban government program that sends medics abroad.
The US announced the measure late last month, arguing that the labor export programs run by Cuba’s government, which include many medics, “enrich the Cuban regime.” It further argued that those involved are complicit in the “exploitation and forced labor of Cuban workers.”
Cuba’s leaders, however, reject the US stance as Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “personal agenda... based on falsehoods” and said the measure could affect millions of health care beneficiaries.
Rubio is the son of Cuban immigrants who fled the island to Florida, where President Donald Trump’s top diplomat would later win a Senate seat.
Since Cuba’s 1959 revolution, its medics have been dispatched to countries around the world, treating diseases that wreak havoc on poor countries, from cholera in Haiti to Ebola in West Africa. The program is also a key source of hard cash as the island nation endures its latest deep economic crisis.
Cuba says a decades-long US embargo, opposed by the vast majority of the United Nations, is the key driver of the crisis.
“Out of the blue now, we have been called human traffickers because we hire technical people who we pay top dollar,” said Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Keith Rowley at a hospital event.
Rowley added that he was prepared to lose his US visa.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves noted at least 60 people in the small island nation are on a Cuban-run haemodialysis program used to treat kidney failure.
“If the Cubans are not there, we may not be able to run the service,” he said, adding Cuban personnel are paid the same as locals. “I will prefer to lose my visa than to have 60 poor and working people die.”
Last week, Jamaican Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson Smith told reporters that her government views Cuban medics as important.
“Their presence here is of importance to our health care system,” she said, pointing to 400 doctors, nurses and medical technicians currently working in the country.
In a social media post, Bahamian Foreign Minister Fred Mitchell also vouched for the program, saying his government “follows all international best practices in the recruitment of labor.”