In the first week of the Trump Presidency, the Administration issued a travel ban aimed at seven predominantly Muslim countries. The outcry was swift and immediate, with protesters showing up at airports and many Republicans criticizing the decision. In June, 2018, a third version of the ban was given a green light by a divided Supreme Court. (The first two versions had been blocked by lower courts.) Last month, the Administration extended the ban on immigrant visas to six more countries: Nigeria, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Sudan, and Tanzania. This time, there were no large nationwide protests, and no signs of unease from Republican politicians. The story hardly registered amid an impeachment trial and the Democratic primary campaign.

I recently spoke by phone with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, about Trump’s increasing success in reshaping American immigration policy, from the travel bans to the crackdown on migrants trying to claim asylum at the Mexican border. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed why the security-based rationales for the travel ban aren’t sound, whether a Democratic President would be able to quickly reverse most of Trump’s changes, and the Remain in Mexico policy, which Reichlin-Melnick described as “a stain on the rule of law.”

American immigration history tends to be broken down by eras. When you look at immigration policy over the past three years, do you think we are in a new era?

I’m not sure it’s a new era, because much of what the Trump Administration has done has been to find the hidden weapons in existing immigration law and then use them to the full extent, which no one had ever imagined would ever be done. If anything, what we’re seeing now is the full extent of the last era of immigration, coming to its fruition. By that, I mean the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (I.I.R.I.R.A.). So much of what the Trump Administration has done is to take things created in that act that had never been used and use them. And I don’t know if we’re in a new era because it’s hard to say that all of these changes are going to stick. So it’s a little too early to say “era” yet, I hope.

Is the Trump Administration taking or trying to take steps that will move them beyond working with the existing paradigm, which I assume was formed by both the 1996 law and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.)? Are they content to work within those frameworks, and push them to the very limits of legality, or are there plans to move beyond that?

The Trump Administration wants to move beyond the current paradigm, and they are taking a lot of steps that push the boundaries of what’s already on the books, to create loopholes that let them push beyond what the law says. There’s a reason that so many of the Trump Administration’s policies have been blocked in court, and, even though some of them have been resuscitated by the Supreme Court and are currently in effect, there’s so much more that’s been blocked that barely even makes the national news.

To a large extent, what the Trump Administration has done on immigration that goes beyond the current paradigms has been through a series of international agreements with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which have reshaped the structure of who’s arriving at the southern border in ways that it is still too early to tell what the ultimate effect will be. In many ways, Mexico is the wall for a lot of the people who are arriving at the southern border, or who want to flee to the United States to seek asylum. Mexico has become the wall.

Yes, you hear a lot of jokes on social media and late-night shows about Trump not getting his wall, or the wall not being built at a speed that he expected, but it seems like that may be missing the forest for the trees. Can you explain what you mean by Mexico being the wall?

I think that misses the point for two reasons. The first reason is that, as much as the Trump Administration is mostly installing new wall in places where there previously were border barriers, there’s a huge difference between a four-foot-high vehicle barrier and a thirty-foot-high steel-bollard wall. What we’re seeing is new fences going up in places across the southern border that are going to have huge effects on local communities and on the environment. It is cutting off pathways for endangered species like ocelots and other [non-endangered] species that have cross-border migratory patterns in ways that the previous barriers didn’t do.

On the point about Mexico, the Trump Administration has, in many ways, strong-armed several governments to get them to stop people from ever even making it to the southern border. Until recently, tens of thousands of people annually would come through Guatemala and through Mexico and then arrive at our southern border and seek asylum. A lot of the migration towards the U.S. has been limited by non-U.S. actors, by the brand-new Guatemalan border patrol that the United States helped create, and by the Mexican National Guard, and through a series of regional pacts that the U.S. spent an enormous amount of effort negotiating over the past two years. Whether these pacts are going to last past the Trump Administration remains to be seen, but right now it’s harder than ever for people who are seeking to come to the U.S. who aren’t Mexican to get to the border.

What is your biggest fear about the long-term impact of this? Is it the humanitarian consequences, or is it a legal issue?

It’s a combination of both. We’ve created an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe at the U.S.-Mexico border through the creation of the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols—one of the most Orwellian names for a program that the U.S. has ever run. The Department of Homeland Security says this is a program to increase access to court hearings, but, in reality, what it is doing is forcing sixty-two thousand-plus asylum seekers to wait in appallingly dangerous conditions with no hope that they’ll ever have the opportunity to get a lawyer and virtually impossible chances of ever winning asylum, regardless of the strength of their claims. We know that hundreds of people have been subject to kidnappings and have become the victims of serious crimes like rape, torture, and other really horrific things that the Trump Administration effectively is using as a deterrent.

At the same time that these programs are doing damage to the people who are going through them, they’re also doing damage to the rule of law. Fundamental to a fair system is respecting people’s right to have a fair day in court. Yet what we’re seeing is the Trump Administration effectively ending the asylum system in the United States by making it impossible for anyone to win, through structural obstacles as well as legal obstacles. Trump banned asylum for the vast majority of people who are arriving at the southern border through two separate asylum bans—one of which got blocked, and the other one which is currently in place. They’ve made it impossible for anyone to ever get in touch with a lawyer. As a former immigration lawyer, winning an asylum case is extraordinarily difficult without a lawyer because the immigration-court process is filled with pitfalls. Rather than do the responsible thing and put up signposts to help people navigate those pitfalls and make it through the system and have a fair day in court, the Trump Administration has spent the last year digging as many new pitfalls as they can and filling them with snakes.