The Trump administration was handed another win on Thursday after a federal judge ruled that everyone in the U.S. illegally must register with the federal government and carry documentation.

The Associated Press reported that Judge Trevor Neil McFadden, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, sided with the administration after arguing it was enforcing an existing requirement for everyone in the country who is not a citizen of the U.S.

Rather than rule on the substance of the Trump administration’s arguments, McFadden ruled that the group pushing to stop the requirement did not have standing to pursue their claims.

McFadden’s ruling will go into effect Friday.

NOEM SENDS MESSAGE TO THOSE CONSIDERING ENTERING US ILLEGALLY: ‘DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT’

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Thursday that the deadline to register for anyone who has been in the country for 30 days or more is Friday, adding that the registration requirement will be enforced to the fullest.

“President Trump and I have a clear message for those in our country illegally: leave now. If you leave now, you may have the opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American dream,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in the statement. “The Trump administration will enforce all our immigration laws — we will not pick and choose which laws we will enforce. We must know who is in our country for the safety and security of our homeland and all Americans.”

The DHS began warning illegal immigrants in February that they should leave the country or face serious consequences.

DHS SECRETARY NOEM APPEARS TO ACCUSE ‘CORRUPT’ FBI OF LEAKING LA ICE RAIDS

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visits the Mariposa Port of Entry, Saturday, March 15, 2025, in Nogales, Ariz. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

The secretary said DHS will enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was enacted in 1952 and created several tools to track illegal aliens and compel them to voluntarily leave the U.S.

DHS said the tools include criminal penalties for migrants who choose not to leave the U.S., fail to register with the federal government and get fingerprinted, and fail to notify the federal government of changes to their address.

Illegal immigrants who fail to depart the U.S. will be charged with a crime resulting in a “significant penalty,” DHS said.

NOEM ENDS BIDEN-ERA USE OF CONTROVERSIAL APP TO ALLOW MIGRANTS TO BOARD FLIGHTS, EXCEPT TO SELF-DEPORT

ICE is conducting flights to remove illegal immigrants from the U.S. and back to their home countries. (ICE Seattle)

But migrants who fail to register with the federal government could be fined, imprisoned or both.

Registration is mandatory for anyone 14 and older without legal status. Anyone registering will be required to provide their fingerprints and address.

Canadians are also required to go through the registration process if they have been in the U.S. for more than 30 days – this includes “snowbirds,” who spend winter months in warmer areas like Florida.

While it has long been required for people who live in the U.S. and are not American citizens, the requirement has only been enforced in rare circumstances.

For instance, the requirement was enforced in a limited way after Sept. 11, 2001, when the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System required noncitizen males 16 and older from 25 countries – all but one of them Arab or Muslim – to register with the U.S. government.

Even though the program did not lead to terrorism convictions, it pulled over 13,000 people into deportation proceedings. The program was suspended in 2011 and dissolved in 2016.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

On Wednesday, President Trump abruptly announced a 90-day pause on most of his planned country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs — with the notable exception of the People’s Republic of China. In so strikingly singling out China as the focus of America’s economic and geopolitical ire, Trump was not merely clarifying that the United States views China and its regnant Communist Party as our leading 21st century threat — he was also taking yet another notable step toward fulfilling his own lifelong goal of fundamentally resetting the terms of the U.S.-China bilateral relationship.

As an “outer-borough” native New Yorker from Queens, Trump has long seen things differently than most of his white-shoe brethren and fellow one-percenters living across the (literal and proverbial) river in Manhattan. Throughout virtually his entire career, Trump has served as a “class traitor” archetype — someone who, as I wrote in an essay last year, “may hold ‘elite’ ruling class credentials, but whose hearts, minds, concerns, and general sensibilities are decidedly with the country class.” That is the essence of Trump’s nationalist-populist MAGA political coalition. But it’s also who Trump has been since his earliest interviews with the New York City tabloids and TV hosts all those decades ago.

There is no better example than trade, Trump’s most consistently held political position. In the 1980s, he was alarmed at the rise of Japan as an economic superpower, arguing that America’s trade deficit with Japan was problematic and that the U.S. should respond with crippling tariffs. (It seems that President Reagan, who in 1987 slapped a 100% tariff on many Japanese goods, was listening.) In recent decades, Trump has applied the same logic to the newer threat of China. In 2011, for instance, four years before he launched his successful presidential run, Trump railed against widely practiced Chinese currency manipulation: “They have manipulated their currency so violently towards this country, it is almost impossible for our companies to compete with Chinese companies.”

During the first year of his first presidential term, Trump directed his Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to investigate Chinese trade practices. The subsequent report was damning, and Trump implemented numerous tariffs on Chinese goods — tariffs which, to his rare credit, President Biden largely kept in place and even built upon with further levies on Chinese imports that went into effect last September.

In addition to his first-term tariffs, Trump also filed a formal World Trade Organization case against China, alleging deceptive trade practices and intellectual property theft. As Trump put it at the time in a tweet: “Today I directed the U.S. Trade Representative to take action so that countries stop CHEATING the system at the expense of the USA!”

Trump’s tariff escalation this week against Communist China — even as he paused many other tariffs to allow for bilateral trade negotiations and give jittery bond markets some relief — is a natural culmination of the work to reset the U.S.-China economic relationship that he commenced during his first term. For that matter, it is also the natural culmination of his short-lived third-party presidential run in 2000 with the trade protectionist Reform Party, as well as his 1988 “Oprah Winfrey Show” interview, where he teased a future presidential run that would focus on trade. Immigration may be the issue most readily associated with Trump’s MAGA movement, but there is no issue that has been nearer and dearer to Trump’s heart over the decades than trade — first with Japan, and then with China.

Most important, Trump has not just been outspoken on the issue of trade with China — he has been proven correct.

Ever since President Nixon’s fateful trip to visit Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972, American elites of all political stripes promised that welcoming China into the global economy would be good for all parties involved. American consumers, we were reliably informed, would get cheaper and more abundant goods; American exporters would get a massive and exciting new market to peddle their wares; and the Chinese people themselves would soon reap the rewards of the “political liberalization” that could only come about through “economic liberalization.” This was the dominant thinking when Nixon visited China over a half-century ago, when the George W. Bush administration welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, and when President Obama hosted and toasted Xi Jinping at the White House in 2015.

Suffice it to say it hasn’t exactly all worked out according to plan.

In Shanghai in 2022, amid the communist country’s interminable COVID-19 lockdowns, government drones with loudspeakers blasted: “Control your soul’s thirst for freedom. Do not open your windows and sing.” Chinese companies have engaged in serial intellectual property theft, brazenly stealing American companies’ trade secrets and illegally repackaging them for export at heavily subsidized prices.

TikTok, one particularly problematic Chinese export, is mental fentanyl designed to addict the Western masses and dupe them into poisonous ideologies — and Communist Party spyware, to boot. Speaking of (actual) fentanyl, China is largely responsible for that particular drug killing hundreds of thousands of vulnerable young Americans. Meanwhile, China sends “spy balloons” across the North American continent and routinely allies with the worst state actors on the planet. And if that weren’t bad enough, America’s manufacturing base and national security-critical supply chain infrastructure have been decimated — by China.

For far too long, elites have led America to disaster when it comes to trade with China. They have acted in myopic and ruinous fashion, bringing calamity to the nation they purport to love. America’s trade war with the rogue Chinese superpower must happen. The Chinese Communist Party must be crushed — and there is no one better to crush them than the White House-dwelling class traitor par excellence, Donald Trump. Godspeed, Mr. President.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer