It’s been more than a hundred years since a former president retook the nation’s top office, and Donald Trump made the most of his first day by declaring a national emergency at the southern border. President Donald J. Trump was sworn into office as the 47th President on Monday by Chief Justice John Roberts. Afterward, Trump was expected to sign a flurry of executive orders, memorandums, and proclamations. Immigration officials are already taking action along the Texas-Mexico border. The American Civil Liberties Union has already filed at least one lawsuit. Monday afternoon, law enforcement closed bridges along the border for “security-related operations,” according to NBC 5’s media partners in El Paso. Moments earlier, the mobile app used to schedule immigration asylum appointments with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped taking applications. “I will declare a national emergency at our southern border,” said Trump. “I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country.” The action gives the executive branch rare powers to police people on American soil. One of the first moves noticed by immigration attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch was shutting down the asylum process. “It’s a departure from 70 years of history in this country where we provide protection to refugees and people who are fleeing persecution around the globe. It’s a departure from who we are and who we have been,” said Lincoln-Goldfinch. She told NBC 5 that she urged her clients to have paperwork on them at all times, showing they’d been in the country for more than two years and that they would be able to access the country’s legal system. Lawsuits will likely pile into the court system, but Trump’s emergency powers will likely continue until the Supreme Court rules otherwise, she said. “With these declarations, he can do things normally considered unconstitutional,” said Lincoln-Goldfinch. Some of the moves revive policies from his first administration, including forcing asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico, cracking down on asylum access, and finishing the border wall. But others will mark sweeping new strategies, like an effort to end automatic citizenship for anyone born in America, pulling the military into border security, and ending the use of a Biden-era app used by nearly a million migrants to enter America. Actual execution of such a far-reaching immigration agenda, expected under several executive orders, is certain to face legal and logistical challenges. And few details have been released so far. Trump also plans to issue an executive order to end birthright citizenship. Out of all of his immigration efforts, that may be the hardest one to implement because that is a right directly spelled out in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Mexico agrees to take back migrants The Trump administration will reinstate its “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forced 70,000 asylum-seekers in his first term to wait there for hearings in U.S. immigration court. Mexico, a country integral to any American effort to limit illegal immigration, indicated Monday that it is prepared to receive asylum-seekers while emphasizing that there should be an online application allowing them to schedule appointments at the U.S. border. Immigration advocates said the policy put migrants at extreme risk in Northern Mexico, where they were easily recognizable to cartels, who kidnapped them and extorted their families for money. “This is déjà vu of the darkest kind,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge. She said policies like “Remain in Mexico” have “exacerbated conditions at the border, stoked fear within U.S. communities, and undermined our global humanitarian leadership role while doing little to address the root causes of migration.” Cartels as foreign terrorist organizations The Trump administration also intends to designate criminal cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Specifically, it aims to crack down on the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and remove its members from the U.S. The homegrown street gang was born in Venezuela but has become a menace even on American soil and exploded into the U.S. presidential campaign amid kidnappings, extortion and other crimes throughout the Western Hemisphere tied to a mass exodus of Venezuelan migrants. Pausing permission for refugees He also intends to suspend refugee resettlement for four months, the official said. For decades, the program has allowed hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and persecution around the world to come to the United States. Trump similarly suspended the refugee program at the beginning of his first term and then, after reinstating it, cut the number of refugees admitted into the country every year. Under Biden, the program was rebuilt to the point that last year about 100,000 refugees were resettled in America — marking a three-decade high.