The past week has been one of shock and awe and boundless ugliness, as Donald Trump issued a series of boundary-pushing executive orders and ordered the release of violent convicted insurrectionists.

The new orders have fallen hardest on some of the nation’s most vulnerable, including immigrants, migrants, asylum-seekers, and others who have done nothing more awful than believe in the promise of the American dream. Among the barrage of executive actions unleashed in the first hours of Trump’s presidency were 10 immigration-related orders, sealing borders against lawful migrants and cracking down on immigrants lacking permanent legal status who are already in the United States. Trump also threatened to prosecute local officials for resisting his edicts and supercharged the militarization of immigration enforcement. It’s been hard to keep up, but some clear themes are emerging.

On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick spoke to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow and former policy director at the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group, to get a clearer view of those themes and what all this might mean for immigrants and immigration law.

Dahlia Lithwick: The Trump administration has issued threats to go after local officials who resist doing immigration crackdowns. The acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, has directed prosecutors across the country to investigate, and potentially bring criminal charges against, any officials in sanctuary jurisdictions for harboring undocumented immigrants or withholding immigration information from federal authorities. It is my recollection that Printz v. United States and the 10^th Amendment say you cannot commandeer local officials to do federal law. But what do I know? Is this just throat-clearing and chest-thumping, or is there an actual possibility that local officials are going to be conscripted to do crackdowns?

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: Before I get into the specifics of that, I think it is worth highlighting the broad aims of the interior-enforcement executive orders. What Trump wants to create is something similar, at least in name, to what the United Kingdom called the hostile environment policy. The goal is to strip undocumented immigrants of any access to protections and to make their lives in the United States more difficult, with the goal that they will “self-deport.”

What is a little bit different from the U.K. is a further effort by the Trump administration to also provide a hostile environment to anyone who might resist this in any way, including by raising legal claims, asserting their own constitutional rights, or indeed simply claiming that they don’t want to get involved with this.

Sitting on the sidelines is, in their view, taking a position against them. So, beyond the additional legal authorities that the Trump administration wants to use against immigrants themselves, the executive orders contain two provisions aiming to create this hostile environment for anyone who tries to resist.

One is the threat to use the Justice Department against any local or state officials who oppose them, as well as a call for the federal government to strip all funding, even funding completely unrelated to immigration, from any jurisdiction that does not comply.

That’s unconstitutional. Just, quite clearly, in black-letter law, the federal government cannot force states to do certain things, including using state-law enforcement for federal purposes without the permission of the state government. States have their own police powers, they get to control how they use their law enforcement, and they cannot be co-opted by the federal government without their consent. This is very clear, and in fact, multiple courts have held in the past, and during the last Trump administration, that a lot of locations with sanctuary policies are not violating the law but are exercising their rights as separate sovereigns to choose how to use their law-enforcement agencies and what resources they want to spend on assisting the federal government with federal immigration enforcement.

Nevertheless, we fully expect that the DOJ will be weaponized in these actions. The question, again, will be: How do courts respond, and how does the internal DOJ respond? Will there be one or two splashy lawsuits filed that really don’t go anywhere much? It’s possible that it just ends up looking like that—more threats, not actual successful lawsuits. But I think they are hoping that the threat of lawsuits in and of itself causes people to change their behavior. And certainly we have been hearing from state and local governments that many of them are now worried.

This is going further than just the DOJ. We are now seeing efforts in other places to punish anyone who disagrees at the local level. In Tennessee, the state GOP is introducing a bill that could potentially make it a crime for a local official to vote for a sanctuary policy—not even to put in effect a policy that’s unlawful, simply to vote to have one. That’s obviously unconstitutional. You cannot throw a legislator in jail for voting for a law. That is absurd. And yet this is where a lot of the opponents of undocumented immigrants are going. They want to criminalize dissent, but beyond that, they want to criminalize simply sitting on the sidelines and not giving full-throated support. I hope that the courts hold in these matters. A lot of this is so obviously unlawful that it should be struck down, but as always, it will remain to be seen.

It’s not just local and state officials who are being targeted in this way; it’s also nonprofits that assist the federal government. One of the executive orders calls for an audit of every contract and grant between the federal government and any nonprofit organization that provides any services to removable aliens—that’s not just undocumented immigrants; that’s also people with green cards who are facing deportation proceedings. Not only does it call for an audit of those contracts, but it also says all such contracts shall be frozen until the audit is completed.

This is already happening. Currently, in many ICE detention centers, Congress has provided that there is a limited set of funds for nonprofits to provide basic “Know Your Rights” presentations. There’s also something called the Immigration Court Helpdesk, which connects people with lawyers if they don’t have one. It’s pretty basic small-government stuff—helping people get a lawyer and know their rights. Those contracts have already received stop work orders, so “Know Your Rights” presentations at ICE detention centers have been halted. Efforts to help people find lawyers in the immigration courts have been halted. The chilling effect of this is already happening, and you can see their effort here is to go after anyone who has the audacity to try to resist by asserting their legal rights. Whether this will succeed—again, time is going to tell.

Last week we talked to professor Pam Karlan from Stanford about a question we’ve been wrangling with: what one does as a government lawyer in this moment, when you have to make these choices about sticking around, trying to mitigate harms, or being conscripted into a regime that is doing harm. One of the things that occurs to me from reading these executive orders is the degree to which this is really different from 2017, because I would argue that there’s an actual government purge going on. Government lawyers are being asked to report on one another, and whole programs are being shuttered or paused. It certainly appears that getting rid of everyone but the loyalists is at the heart of this administration’s effort to rethink the federal government.

There have already been resignations from the Department of Justice. In fact, before I did policy, I was briefly an immigration litigator at my organization and worked on lawsuits seeking to vindicate rights under the law for immigrants. On Wednesday night, I got a court notification that one of the DOJ attorneys on a case from a while ago had left the department. Obviously, I can’t confirm why that person left, but I have certainly heard internally that many people are thinking of leaving.

This also has a counterproductive effect. They are still going to need to have lawyers in courtrooms to defend these policies and to prosecute these policies. If a lot of people in the DOJ quit, they are not going to be able to replace them all that quickly. There are obviously some people who are going to be willing to join, but they’re going to be losing decades of institutional knowledge. They’re going to be losing relationships with judges, and they are going to really be sending a message to the judiciary that things aren’t normal.

When it comes to the federal government, there’s the presumption of regularity. It’s core to a lot of government-related lawsuits that the government is presumed to be acting in good faith and on a normal basis. If there are widespread resignations, then, really, a message is being sent up from the DOJ to the judiciary that things are not normal, and we may get some significant pushback from the courts. But we won’t know it until we see it, and it remains to be seen how the judiciary responds to this.