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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 10th 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

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