Asian immigrants weigh exit plans as legal ground shifts

Court rulings, executive orders and enforcement campaigns are making immigration status feel increasingly conditional for Asian immigrants and their families across the U.S., pushing tens of thousands to leave and others to prepare for a future outside the country they have long called home.

Immigrants are abandoning their legal cases and leaving the country at least seven times higher than during the last 15 months of the Biden administration, according to the Washington Post, citing from the Vera Institute of Justice. Immigration judges reportedly issued more than 80,000 voluntary departure orders from January 2025 through March 2026, with over 70% of recipients in detention when they made the request.

More than 75,500 asylum cases have received motions to terminate proceedings without a hearing on the merits, as per a CBS News analysis, while roughly 12,300 people have withdrawn claims or agreed to leave voluntarily. Jennifer Peyton, an immigration attorney and former immigration judge, told the Post the trend is less a choice than a pressure campaign. “This type of voluntary departure is not voluntary,” she said. “It’s coerced.”

Behind the departures lies a legal landscape shifting on multiple fronts. President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship would deny it to U.S.-born children of temporary visa holders and unauthorized immigrants. Supreme Court justices, who have expressed broad skepticism, will rule by the end of June or early July. Meanwhile, denaturalization proceedings against hundreds of naturalized Americans are underway.

In Texas, a state appeals court recently lifted a preliminary injunction blocking Senate Bill 4, a 2023 law that classifies unauthorized entry from Mexico as a state misdemeanor and empowers state and local police to arrest people suspected of crossing the border illegally. Immigrants contribute an estimated $225 billion annually to the state’s economy.

Across these fronts, Asian immigrant communities face an outsized share of the risk. The birthright citizenship order would hit Asian immigrants disproportionately hard, given how many hold work or student visas. They also naturalize at higher rates than any other group, leaving communities where prolonged delays or complex documentation may have introduced errors especially exposed to fraud allegations.

Researchers project that the birthright citizenship order could erase nearly $1 trillion in lifetime earnings from future generations alone. Birthright citizenship beneficiaries are projected to contribute $7.7 trillion to the U.S. economy between 1975 and 2074, but for Asian immigrant families now drawing up contingency plans, that future is in doubt.