SAN DIEGO — “Build the wall” was Donald Trump’s rallying cry in 2016, and he followed through on his promise, using military budgets for hundreds of miles of wall along the border with Mexico. “Mass deportation” was the buzzword that galvanized supporters for his 2024 bid for the White House.

Trump’s victory sets the stage for a swift crackdown after a AP VoteCast poll showed that the president-elect’s supporters focused largely on immigration and inflation — issues the Republican has hammered throughout his campaign.

How and when Trump’s immigration actions will take shape is uncertain.

While Trump and his advisers provided outlines, many questions remain about how they would deport anywhere near the 11 million people estimated to be in the country illegally. How would immigrants be identified? Where would they be held? If their countries refuse to take them back? Where would Trump find the money and trained officers to carry out his deportation?

Trump said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used law from 1798 that allows the president to deport any non-citizen from a country the US is at war with. He talked about deploying the National Guard, which can be activated on the orders of a governor. Stephen Miller, a top Trump adviser, said troops under sympathetic Republican governors would send troops to nearby states that refuse to participate.

Trump, who has repeatedly referred to immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the United States, has tapped into fear in immigrant communities with words alone.

Julie Moreno, an American citizen who has been married for seven years to a Mexican man who is in the country illegally, is adjusting to the idea that she may have to live apart from her husband, who came to the United States in 2004. She can was moving to Mexico from New Jersey, but it would be nearly impossible to continue his business importing boxing gloves.

“I don’t have words yet, too many feelings,” Moreno said, his voice cracking as he spoke of Trump’s victory on Wednesday. “I am very scared for my husband’s safety. … If I hold him back, what will happen?”

Moreno’s husband, Neftali Juarez, ran a construction business and feels he has contributed to the country by paying taxes and providing jobs through his company. “Unfortunately, the sentiment of those who voted is different,” he said. “I feel terrible when I lose my wife.”

Some policy experts expect Trump’s first immigration moves to be at the border. He can put pressure on Mexico to continue blocking migrants to reach the US border, as it has since December. He could lean on Mexico to restore a Trump-era policy that made asylum seekers wait in Mexico for hearings in US immigration court.

Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports immigration restrictions, pointed to Vice President-elect JD Vance’s campaign remarks that deporting millions of people would be done step by step, not all at once.

“You’re not talking about a net,” Arthur, a former immigration judge, told The Associated Press. “You can’t do it. The first thing you need to do is seal the border and then you can address the interior. All of that will be guided by the resources you have at your disposal.”

Elena, a 46-year-old Nicaraguan who has lived in the United States illegally for 25 years, couldn’t sleep after Trump’s victory, crying over what to do if she and her 50-year-old husband are deported. They have two adult daughters, both US citizens, who had stomach pains and breathing problems due to election anxiety.

“It’s so hard for me to tear myself away from the country that I saw as my home,” said Elena, who lives in South Florida and gave only her first name for fear of deportation. “I put down roots here and it’s difficult to leave everything behind to start over.”

Advocates are looking at where deportation arrests might take place and are watching closely to see if authorities adhere to a longstanding policy of avoiding schools, hospitals, places of worship and disaster relief centers, said Heidi Altman, federal director of advocacy for the National Immigration Law. Center’s Immigrant Justice Fund.

“We take it very seriously,” Altman said. “We all need to keep our eyes wide open to the fact that it’s not 2016. Trump and Stephen Miller have learned a lot from their first administration. The courts look a lot different than they did four years ago.”

Trump is expected to pick up other far-reaching policies from his first term and back off on key Biden moves. These include:

—Trump has sharply criticized Biden’s policies to create and expand legal entry routes, including an online application called CBP One that has allowed nearly 1 million people to enter land crossings with Mexico since January 2023. Another policy allowed more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to fly into the country with financial sponsors.

— Trump has cut the number of refugees being screened abroad by the United Nations and the State Department for U.S. settlement to the lowest level since Congress established the program in 1980. Biden rebuilt it, setting an annual cap of 125,000, up from 18,000 under Trump.

— Trump sought to end the Obama era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protected people who came to the US as young children from deportation. A lawsuit by Republican governors that appeared headed for the Supreme Court is challenging DACA. For now, hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients can renew their status, but new applications are not being accepted.

—Trump has dramatically scaled back the use of temporary protected status, created under a 1990 law to allow people who were already in the United States to stay if their home countries are deemed unsafe. Biden suddenly expanded the use of TPS, including to hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans.

Maribel Hernandez, a Venezuelan on TPS, which allows her to stay in the United States until April 2025, burst into tears as her 2-year-old son slept in a stroller outside the Roosevelt Hotel in New York in as immigrants discussed the aftermath of the election on Wednesday.

“Imagine if they end it,” she said.

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Salomon reported from Miami. AP reporter Cedar Attanasio contributed from New York.