HomeTop StoriesWith Trump promising to carry out mass deportations, area immigrant communities are...

With Trump promising to carry out mass deportations, area immigrant communities are preparing for impact

Jan. 4—ROCHESTER — Sometime after Donald Trump’s victory in the November presidential election, a group of Hispanic families and students met with an attorney from John Marshall High School to discuss how to plan for the looming possibility of raids in the workplace and mass deportations.

The meeting included people who were at risk of deportation because of their undocumented immigration status but who had lived and worked in the U.S. long enough to raise children who are U.S. citizens, according to a person at the meeting.

The parents planned for a grim, uncertain future and the prospect of being separated from their children if they were caught up in a raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. To prevent their children from ending up in foster care, parents learned how to delegate legal authority to care for their children to a neighbor, family member, or counselor if they ended up in detention and/or deported.

The rally — and dozens of others like it taking place — are signs of lessons learned in previous workplace raids, when undocumented workers were arrested by ICE and children returned from school to find their parents gone and their homes were empty – and the fear and wariness that brought with them. hold in these communities.

“We have to be prepared for anything,” said Miriam Goodson, executive director of the Alliance of Chicanos, Hispanics, and Latin Americans, a nonprofit organization.

Trump, who campaigned on cracking down on illegal immigration, has pledged to begin mass deportations on Day 1 of his second term in the White House, which begins two weeks after his inauguration on Monday, January 20, 2025.

What such a mass deportation effort would look like remains unclear at this time, given the scope, size and costs of such an undertaking, which could include makeshift detention camps and the use of military personnel. Trump has said his administration’s efforts will be spare and will focus on people with criminal histories, but indicated it could go beyond deporting criminals.

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“I think you should do it,” Trump said when asked if he plans to deport every person who has entered the country illegally.

Immigrant advocates assume Trump will make good on his promise — or try to make good — given how central the issue was to his campaign.

“I think we should take the president-elect at his word,” said Robyn Meyer-Thompson, an attorney with the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. “We saw unprecedented things during the first administration, not limited to family separation, where we saw children under the age of 10 being separated from their parents.”

Mass deportations are a not uncommon chapter in American history. A common thread among the largest efforts is the use of high-pressure publicity campaigns to stoke such fear among immigrants that they choose to “self-deport.”

And history shows that sometimes fear is all it takes, Kelly Lytle-Hernandez, a professor of history and African-American studies at UCLA, told Politico in a Dec. 29, 2024 article headlined, “The U.S. has done it before deported immigrants en masse.’

“Strongly encouraging and scaring people to leave will be an important strategy,” Lytle-Hernandez said.

Whether intentional or not, the rhetoric Trump officials are using to describe what will happen in the early days of his administration is increasing fear and tension among immigrant groups. Border czar Tom Homan used the phrase “shock and awe” on a podcast to describe what the public can expect on Day 1 in terms of border and immigration-related enforcement.

It is potentially difficult to imagine that American communities will not be affected by Trump’s actions. There are between 7,500 and 8,000 undocumented immigrants in Southeast Minnesota, estimates Phil Wheeler, former director of the Rochester-Olmsted Planning Department and former chairman of the Southeast Minnesota Interfaith Immigrant Legal Defense Fund.

And just over 42,000 people in Minnesota are seeking asylum in immigration court, according to the Syracuse Transactional Access Clearinghouse. In the vast majority of cases, this does not involve criminal prosecution, but a civil violation of entering the country illegally.

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But even as the Trump administration prioritizes the “low-hanging fruit” of immigrants with criminal convictions, the definition of criminals will be critical to the width of the net. Many undocumented immigrants may have lived in the US for a large part of their lives. They may have married a U.S. citizen, raised a family here and lived a largely blameless life. But if they are caught in a raid and found guilty of a crime twenty years ago, they can also be deported.

And many believe the Trump administration will be given significant leeway to make good on its promise to fix a broken immigration system.

Another challenge for undocumented detainees is that immigration court does not provide the same protections as criminal court. Legally, someone going through the immigration court process should be protected from deportation, immigration attorneys say.

But those protections are not nearly as robust for immigrants in detention. There is no right to a lawyer in the procedure. The burden of proof lies with the suspect, not the state. And they may not know how to apply for a deposit.

And unlike in criminal court, where the suspect usually pays a percentage of the bail, in immigration court the full bail amount of, for example, $5,000 must be paid before the detainee can be released from custody. Faced with a slew of hurdles thrown at them, many of these people are likely to give up and resign themselves to deportation, advocates say.

“The problem is that detention can be very coercive,” Meyer-Thompson said. “What we worry about is that someone could be arrested and told that their case is not very strong and that they are not going to win their case. And if people are not aware of their rights and options, they could sign away their right to appear in court.”

It is the main reason that immigration lawyers advise people to consult an immigration lawyer so that they can know their immigration options.

The situation is sparking conversations among local pro-immigration and faith groups about how to best support such people. Southeast Minnesota Interfaith Immigrant Legal Defense Fund (SMIILD), established during the first Trump administration, dedicates its resources solely to providing attorneys to people in ICE custody. But now it is considering a change in strategy. Instead of using its resources to hire lawyers, it is debating whether to pay for immigration clinics to advise people in this uncertain terrain, Wheeler said.

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“We’re talking about what people need, what would be a good idea,” Wheeler said.

It’s not the only idea being discussed. A Zoom meeting hosted by SMIILD that included immigration attorneys, religious leaders, Rochester Public School officials and immigration groups discussed a range of ideas on how to help people at risk of deportation and their families.

For example, one attorney emphasized the need for children of immigrant parents to obtain passports so that they can return to the U.S. if their parents are deported and they come with them. They also grappled with the dire situation that many families will find themselves in if the main breadwinner is deported. They are much more likely to depend on the government for their basic needs.

Another idea was to provide backpacks to people threatened with deportation. One of the participants in the Zoom meeting was a representative of Conversations With Friends, a pro-immigration group that provides “Dignity” backpacks to people expecting deportation. The backpacks contain clothing, bottled water, hygiene products and space for their legal documents.

Often deported with little more than the clothes on their backs, the backpacks give the immigrant basic necessities during a stressful time, said Steve Kraemer, a leader of the group.

Conversations with Friends gives away 200 backpacks every year, but he expects this number to increase dramatically.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but all I know is that the demand for more resources for Conversations with Friends could grow dramatically, and somehow I need to find funding to do that,” said Kraemer.

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