SOURCE : GUARDIAN- Fear is rippling through undocumented communities across the US as Donald Trump prepares to take the White House, promising record deportations after an election campaign filled with xenophobic hate speech and a first term marked by anti-immigration crackdowns.
In the final run-up to the presidential election, Areli Hernandez traveled to Phoenix to talk to voters about what mass deportations and, for many, a new form of family separation could mean for millions.
Hernandez said it was her own story that inspired her to sign up for the volunteer work in Arizona: as an undocumented person, her life in the US was on the line too.
“I remember when Donald Trump first came into power, every immigrant in my community was afraid to get picked up by immigration officials,” said Hernandez, who was born in Mexico and brought to California as a child in the late 1980s.
“And I know now that there’s a lot of people scared, asking themselves: ‘What am I going to do?’”
With Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, he’s expected to fulfill his campaign pledge to unleash the biggest mass deportation of undocumented people “in US history”.
He frequently calls people crossing the US-Mexico border without authorization “an invasion”, including those requesting asylum from oppression, war, gang violence, domestic violence or climate crisis-driven poverty, referring to the US as “an occupied country”, and falsely blaming migrants for crime and economic woes.
Many families in the US now face being torn apart.
It’s estimated that a million deportations a year could cost $967.9bn in federal spending over a decade, according to the American Immigration Council, which would require congressional approval and trigger an “economic disaster”. And Trump told Time earlier this year: “If I thought things were getting out of control, I would have no problem using the military.”
Immigration experts acknowledge that Trump’s notion will require major infrastructure, including new detentions camps, and they expect him to do what he says he plans to do.
“There are a lot of people in our community living in mixed-status families, so mass deportations are a direct threat,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a social justice law firm based in Los Angeles that serves people facing deportation.
She added: “The [2016] Trump administration has shown a disdain for immigrant children in the past, so it’s going to require organizers working with lawyers, working with communities, and we intend to challenge him in the courts.”
There are at least 11 million undocumented people living in the US, according to the Pew Research Center. As of 2022, about 4.4 million US-born children under 18 live with an unauthorized immigrant parent.
In 2023, a California judge approved a court settlement that will prohibit immigration officials from reviving the first Trump administration’s so-called zero-tolerance policy of separating families immediately at the border, for the next eight years.
Advocates warned that in his attempt to “secure the border”, Trump was likely to fulfill his pledge to restore many of his controversial immigration programs, such as the policy known as Remain in Mexico, which Joe Biden ended.
The program forced people seeking asylum in the US to wait in Mexico while their claims were processed. Between January 2019 and June 2021, 74,000 asylum seekers were sent back to Mexico, vulnerable to kidnapping, extortion and sexual violence.
“We believe that the program violated US law because of the lack of allowing people access to counsel, so we will continue to challenge that program,” Toczylowski said.
“The Trump administration saw that program as a way for them to keep asylum seekers out of sight and out of mind, but what we saw was that people’s lives were in danger. Women were raped,” she added.
Trump’s return to White House could also mean the end of the 2012 Obama policy known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), which, in the absence of Congress passing comprehensive immigration reform, lifted the threat of deportation for approximately 825,000 individuals, known as Dreamers, who had been previously brought to the US as children.
Despite Trump’s previous attempts to slash the program, Daca prevails on a knife edge and Dreamers fear fresh peril.
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Tap jump fence for get inna di people and dem place!
Law and order me say!
If the voice of the people is the voice of God then why you people are so hateful of the fact that Trump is president or its only the voice of God when your preferred candidate is elected.
I listened to 99.1 this morning and a lady named Avril had to most nasty things to say about Trump and even nasty name calling. Ironically is the same Avril who wants respect to be showed to the office of PM by others here in Antigua when he aint a far shade from Trump.
Who do you all think America should open its border like that and have a flood of migrants or have persons living there illegally. That sort of thinking defies logic.
America cannot survive without so called illegal immigrants. They are the nuts and bolts which hold Norrh America together.
It is not the way I wanted millions to enter into my office. But happy people are taking actions to get themself legal here.
I am literally afraid for a lot of people as in a Trump administration immigration benefits and relief from deportation like prosecutorial discretion, differed action and humanitarian parole etcetera, doesn’t exist anymore.
Those discretionary reliefs, gone. Substantial increase in people being placed in removal proceedings.
I literally have not been able to take my mind off of current clients of mine and I mean this sincerely.
Do you know that Obama deported more illegal/unauthorized/undocumented (whatever term you want to use) immigrants than Trump did in his first presidency? Obama deported 1.18 million people in his first three years in office but I don’t remember nearly as much drama about it compared to now. Supposedly, there are an estimated 11-12 million illegal immigrants in the US. Those illegal immigrants who have committed additional crimes while in the country will definitely feel the heat first and be the focus of a lot of attention but removing all 11-12 million of them is never going to happen for several reasons.
Most of what been said about Trump is not unfounded; he’s one of the nastiest humans alive and he doesn’t even have a mind of his own, just trying extremely hard to be like Gaston.