From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Tuesday, January twenty eighth. Leaders from around the world have joined Holocaust survivors in commemorating the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The Nazi death camp in Poland is the enduring symbol of Adolf Hitler's murder of six million Jews, along with millions more from ethnic and other minorities. Peter Dutton government would push for reforms to the United Nations.
After a front bench reshuffle, new Foreign Affairs spokesman David Coleman is taking aim at Foreign Minister Penny Wong for her dealings with the UN. That's an exclusive live now at the Australian dot com au. Donald Trump has defeated the first significant challenge to his sweeping immigration crackdown. The President is on a mission to expel illegal immigrants and deter others from attempting to reach the United States of America.
Bardies had to stare down a protest from one of the country's hess is causing the problem.
Just because we were founded by immigrants doesn't mean the two hundred and forty years later that we have to have the dumbest immigration policy in the world.
That's JD. Vance and this is what he's talking about. A first wake of the Donald Trump presidency that's living up to tame. Trump's promise to go big.
America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.
I think it's going to be shock and awe.
A blizzard of executive orders.
He declared a national emergency at the border.
Immigration and Customs enforcement officials are accused of carrying out a quote unconstitutional.
Raid shackle detainees boarding a military cargo.
Trump has swept into office with energy levels that belie his status as the oldest man ever to be elected to the White House. And first up is illegal immigration, an issue that's helped him get elected twice and which he's framed as a national emergency.
Trump now has to deliver.
Joe Kelly is the Australian's correspondent in Washington, DC.
Pere Research has done surveys on this. It's found that three quarters of US adults are at least somewhat concerned about the number of illegal immigrants entering the country. The majority support mass deportations, and Trump has been able to tap into this to masterful political effect. And one of the reasons for that is that the Joe Biden administration was weak on the borders. I think they had terrible failings in this regard. So during the entire Biden administration,
there were more than ten million encounters with migrants. That includes those who are entering illegally as well as those who were trying to enter legally but found to be inadmissible, and eight million of those encounters were at that southern border. Now you compare that to the first Trump administration, and there were two point four million encounters at that southern border. So I think Trump has to deliver. He knows that, and he's a showman about it as well. That's why
he signed all the orders on day one. I think there's probably a bunch of people in America right now who think because Trump signed all those orders in such a you know, a showman like way on the first day, that he's already delivered for them.
After a week, the President has announced the southern border with Mexico closed. We're going to build a wall. It's going to be built. Believe it or not.
It's not even a difficult thing to do.
Donald Trump has been promising to stop people in during via the southern border. Since before he was elected the first time around, and since George Bush Senior in the nineties, American presidents have been building walls and fences along the three thousand kilometer border. In Trump's first term, he got locked in a series of battles to secure funding to build his giant wall in Congress and in the courts.
Joe Biden initially halted border construction, then had to restart it after migrant crossings rows.
A free for all at the US Mexico border, hundreds of migrants storming into al Paso, Texas right past Mexican authorities. President Biden has long been dead set against border walls, but today he's clearing the way for miles of new fancy.
On day one in the job, Trump signed an executive order that is an action he seeks to take his president without the need for congressional approval on birthright citizenship.
This next order relates to the definition of birthright citizens under the fourteenth Amendment of the United States.
Yeah, that's a good one. Birth rate, that's a big one. We're the only country in the world that does this with birthright As you know, and it's just absolutely ridiculous.
The executive order aims to remove the automatic right to an American passport for children born to parents who are in the country illegally. Joe, the idea that everyone born in America has the right to US citizenship, that's such a big part of the American story. How significant is Trump's move to remove that right as a shift in thinking about what makes somebody American? Or do you think this is just gesture politics, it's more about signaling and sending a big message.
No, I don't think it's just an exercise in gesture politics. I think we need to take Trump seriously. And if you look at the executive order, this was called protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship. This is a profound change and it seeks to limit the way the fourteenth Amendment has been interpreted for a long time, for over one hundred years. So if this executive order holds, and that's very doubtful, it's estimated to effect about one
hundred and fifty thousand children. It applies to children born from February nineteen, and it's not retrospective. Now he's arguing that basically someone born to illegal migrants in the US is not actually subject to US jurisdiction, and it's very contentious. There are twenty two states, along with a couple of cities that have already launched challenges to this executive order, And just a few days after it was signed, there was a federal district court judge in Seattle and he
said that it was blatantly unconstitutional. So I expect what's going to happen to this is that it's going to end up in the Supreme Court. This is Donald Trump trying to test the limits of his presidential powers. He's trying to test the limits of the US Constitution, and he's prepared to take actions, sign orders which are going to be seen as legally contentious, and defend them into
the Supreme Court. I think Trump is serious, and I think he's going to fight it, and he's going to fight it hard.
Coming up after the break, how one nation tested Trump's resolve. Deportations are a regular part of US immigration policy. Donald Trump came to power talking about a dramatic escalation in this. He called it a mass deportation, and he's already begun using the military for missions like deportation flights, which previously
used civilian aircraft. On Monday, Columbia said it would not accept military flights unless, as Colombia's president said, the US provided a process to treat its citizens with dignity and respect. That prompted a dramatic response.
Trump vowed to unleash retaliatory measures, including trade tariffs and sanctions against Columbia today after the South American country rejected two flights carrying undocumented emigrants back from the UAS.
What's your sense of how he's using this big, dramatic moment to send his message.
Well, it's the new World Trump using tariffs and armor of economic policy to achieve an objective in a totally unrelated policy area relating to border security. So look, I think there's a lot of theater to this. As you mentioned, deportation flights a pretty normal, pretty routine. The Wall Street Journal says that so far in January there have been ninety forty eight to Guatemala and Honduras, fourteen to Mexico, and eight to Colombia. But we have the president of Columbia,
Gustavo Petro. You know, he is a left wing president. He's formerly a member of a Marxist Gorilla group, and I think really what we're seeing is a challenge to US global power, a challenge to Trump's migration crackdown, and a test of his use of these tariffs. So you know, Trump will not back down.
He didn't have to. Columbia crumbled within the day and said it would in fact accept the military flights.
Joe.
It's all reminding me of one of the big moments in Australian immigration policy in two thousand and one, when John Howard declared, we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come. What are your thoughts as an Australian with that experience watching the way this is playing out now in the US.
Challenge in America is it's much more difficult to enforce Claire. So that's the key difference. You know, America has this porous southern border and just to sketch out the challenge, this would be something that Australians I don't think would really be able to found them properly. But the new borders are Tom Herman says that there are seven hundred thousand illegal migrants currently in the United States who have
committed a crime, who should be removed. That's a lot, and that's only a small fraction of the number of illegal migrants in the United States.
Joe Kelly is The Australian's correspondent in Washington, DC. You can read all his reporting anytime in The Australian, and if you subscribe to The Australian, you also get full digital access to all thejournalism of our sister publication, The Wall Street Journal, and it's only a dollar a week for the first four weeks. Check us out at the Australian dot com dot au