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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In 2021, a decision by a judge, Andrew Hanen, of the southern district of Texas, forbade the government from processing new applications, but allowed current Daca recipients, like Hernandez, to retain and renew their protections.
“Thousands of folks and I who have Daca don’t have a plan if he [Trump] decides to terminate it,” said Hernandez.
“We are a population of immigrants who have given our lives and work for this country, and this country doesn’t want to acknowledge us. We should not be living in a time where immigrants are being pointed to as the reason why the government has failed on housing and the economy,” she said.
And Trump’s false and racist claims about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating other people’s pets didn’t stop him winning 55% of the vote in the state.
Haitians qualify for temporary protective status (TPS) because of the ongoing turmoil in their country. Trump previously attempted to terminate TPS for Haitians, referring to the country as a “shithole”, and now threatens to deport those in the US.
Trump has falsely claimed that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating people’s dogs and cats, bringing bipartisan rebukes.
The Haitian Bridge Alliance, an organization providing legal services to migrants near the US-Mexico border, has filed a motion with the Clark county municipal court, in west central Ohio, accusing Trump of criminally disrupting public services, making false alarms, harassment, aggravated menacing and complicity.
“What people don’t tend to understand is the power of his words. And even if there’s no physical violence, the mental pressure, the psychological violence is very detrimental,” Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance said.
Jozef added that many stressed, anxious and traumatized immigrants now “are not sure what the next step will be”.
Separately, Trump has vowed to bar refugees from Gaza and immediately repeat his first-term travel ban on people from several Muslim-majority countries, which faced legal challenges, was backed by the US supreme court, expanded by Trump, and then quashed by Biden. It had caused chaos and heartbreak in the earliest days of his administration as Trump revoked visas and separated families.
“I will ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip, and we will seal our border and bring back the travel ban,” he said in September.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
