Lucas Guttentag, a professor at Stanford Law School who founded the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and recently served as a senior immigration advisor in the Obama administration, agrees. “I think we’re going to see Attorney General Sessions taking much more aggressive action both on criminal prosecutions, which he’s threatened, but also on reinterpreting the immigration laws and how they apply,” Guttentag told Truthout.

He added that Sessions has certain authority in that respect and is likely to issue decisions that reinterpret the law in ways that “might not get huge attention right away but will have really, really pervasive consequences.” For example, Guttentag said, Sessions could try to erode domestic violence as a basis for getting political asylum in the United States.

Guttentag’s perception is that the Trump administration is also trying to gradually change the culture within the Department of Homeland Security. “Everything’s gone out the window — it’s a free for all,” he told Truthout. He explained that even though the Trump administration has retreated somewhat in the face of legal challenges to its sweeping orders, damage has already been done in the message sent to ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers.

“What happened in the sanctuary litigation is the government went into court and said, ‘Oh, we’re not really going to cut off everybody’s funding … we’re only going to go after cities after giving them notice,'” Guttentag said.

This kind of erratic behavior, which has become a hallmark of this administration, is often not easily constrained by the US Constitution, since the executive orders are often vague, though Trump’s intent is clear. The result of this combination of this erratic behavior with newly aggressive enforcement and litigation is increasing fear. Guttentag believes this is deliberate: “I think part of the Trump administration’s strategy is to make people so afraid that they’ll leave. It’s causing people to abandon jobs, homes, schools, even their kids in some instances where they have US-citizen kids. I think that’s a conscious strategy to create as much fear as possible.”

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In the face of the retrenchment of racist exclusionary practices, however, Guttentag said there is also some good news: The movement against these practices “has broadened and deepened the voices in support of immigrant communities, and made those communities feel there is a larger movement supporting them and that immigrants are not alone.”