President Donald Trump is calling on Congress to pass sweeping new immigration legislation designed to make it substantially harder for a future president to reverse his administration’s border-enforcement policies.
Trump announced the proposal Wednesday night during his nearly two-hour address at the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas, where he outlined several priorities he wants Congress to pursue if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate in November.
The president said the legislation would be called the “No Invasion of Our Country Act.”
“We will make it legally impossible for any future president to destroy our country by having the right to open the border again,” Trump told the crowd. “We will pass a No Invasion of Our Country Act.”
Trump did not provide detailed legislative language during the speech, and no publicly available bill text matching that title had surfaced as of Thursday.
Trump: "We will make it legally impossible for any future president to destroy our country by having the right to open our border again. We will pass a No Invasion of Our Country Act." pic.twitter.com/Q475kHGOvk
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) September 10, 2026
That means it remains unclear precisely which immigration authorities Trump wants Congress to restrict, what enforcement measures would become mandatory or what penalties or legal remedies would apply if a future administration declined to enforce the law in the manner envisioned by the current White House.
The broader goal, however, is clear: Trump wants to convert major elements of his current border policy from executive actions into federal statute.
Many of the administration’s immigration policies since Trump returned to office in January 2025 have relied on presidential proclamations, executive orders and existing powers delegated to the executive branch under federal immigration law.
On his first day back in office, Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border and ordered federal agencies to prioritize preventing unauthorized entry. The proclamation also directed the Defense and Homeland Security departments to take steps supporting construction of additional barriers and other border-security operations.
Trump separately issued an executive order directing the government to end what his administration described as “catch-and-release” policies and increase detention and removal of migrants who enter the country unlawfully.
Those policies have coincided with a sharp decline in illegal border crossings.
Customs and Border Protection reported in August that the administration had recorded 15 consecutive months without releasing migrants encountered at the border into the United States. CBP also said daily apprehensions were approximately 94% lower than the average recorded during the previous administration.
The administration has cited those figures as evidence that aggressive enforcement and detention policies have fundamentally changed conditions at the southern border.
Trump now wants Congress to make at least some of those changes more difficult for a future White House to undo.
That issue has become particularly important to Republicans because immigration policy can shift substantially from one administration to another.
Presidents possess significant authority to determine how existing immigration statutes are enforced, including decisions involving enforcement priorities, detention resources, parole authority and restrictions on the admission of certain foreign nationals.
But Congress has the primary constitutional authority to write the nation’s immigration laws. The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized Congress as possessing exceptionally broad power over who may enter or remain in the United States.
That distinction matters for Trump’s proposal.
An executive order can generally be revoked or replaced by a later president. A federal statute cannot be eliminated through a new executive order alone.
If Congress wrote specific border requirements into law, a future president would be legally obligated to operate within that statutory framework unless Congress later amended or repealed it or a court struck it down.
Still, Trump’s assertion that the legislation would make it “legally impossible” for any future president to reopen the border should not be understood literally as preventing immigration policy from ever changing again.
A future Congress could amend or repeal such a law, and future presidents would retain whatever discretion the eventual statute left to the executive branch. Courts could also determine whether particular provisions were constitutional or consistent with other federal laws.
The actual effect would therefore depend heavily on the language Congress adopted.
