Chris Christie has offered many reasons why he is running against his former ally Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary. Since announcing his candidacy, Christie, a former New Jersey governor, has blamed Trump for the chaos at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, for the ballooning national debt and for illegal immigrants "pouring over our southern border."
"It is his fault because he never changed one immigration law in the two years that he had Republican control of Congress," said Christie during his June 6 announcement in New Hampshire. "Not one immigration law did he change. He didn’t build the wall, and Mexico is laughing at the idea that they were going to pay for a wall on their border."
Trump’s immigration policies made a lot of news while he was in office, but Christie is largely correct that Trump did not sign any major immigration law during his presidency. What Christie’s statement dismisses, however, is the impact of Trump’s executive orders and Congress did approve money for a border structure.
Changes during Trump’s tenure increased enforcement and restricted legal immigration, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan policy group.
And Trump’s administration "set an unprecedented pace" for executive actions, notching 472 changes, the institute found in a 2022 report.
"The Trump administration was arguably the first to take full advantage of the executive branch’s vast authority on immigration," the report states.
But a comprehensive change to actual immigration law hasn’t happened in decades — under either Democratic or Republican administrations, even when the White House and Congress were controlled by the same party.
David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said "the executive actions are hugely important, but not as important as laws. Laws are more important because they last for much longer and can’t be reversed by a president."
The last major legalization effort was the 1986 law signed by President Ronald Reagan. Congress passed some other notable immigration laws in the 1990s and 2000s, most recently the 2006 Secure Fence Act, passed after the Senate failed to enact immigration reform. The 2006 bill mandated the construction of 700 miles of a fence on the southern border.
Trump entered the White House promising a southern border wall to stop illegal crossings and saying he’d work with Congress to pass laws to crack down on illegal immigration. Trump failed to complete a border wall, though he did achieve funding for some of it. And Congress failed to pass any immigration bills even when Republicans controlled both chambers.
Rick Su, an immigration law professor at the University of North Carolina, said executive orders can change policies in major ways.
"For example, that is one of the arguments against (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals); that Obama essentially rewrote the law and set up a legal system that was not approved by Congress," Su said. The program deferred deportation for certain people who are in the U.S. illegally but arrived in the U.S. as children and met strict criteria.
Trump viewed executive actions as his best chance to get what he wanted without having to negotiate with Congress or share the credit, Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, previously told PolitiFact.
We emailed a contact for Christie’s campaign and received no response.