Seven Experts on What Keeps Them Up at Night Ahead of Mass Deportations

Perspectives from important stakeholders across the country on what might be just around the corner.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

EARLY NEXT WEEK, WE WILL FIND OUT EXACTLY WHAT “mass deportation” means to Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the gang. But as I’ve tried to anticipate and report on what is likely to come, I keep going back to a piece of writing that awakened us to another great unknown. It wasn’t an article on immigration—it was about climate change.

In 2017, New York magazine published “The Uninhabitable Earth,” an essay exploring how famine, economic collapse, and a sun that cooks us could wreak havoc on the Earth. The author, David Wallace-Wells, told the story in a novel way. He spoke to scientists to get beyond, in his words, the “timid language of scientific probabilities.” The goal was to go deeper on communicating how dire individual threats really were by examining both what they would mean for us and what we would have to do to prepare for them.

My hope today is to do something similar. I have asked seven important stakeholders in different spaces around the country to share their most pressing concerns on mass deportation as Trump takes power once again.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.)

Rep. Castro chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus during the second half of Trump’s term, held the first rally in the country against family separation in 2018, led delegations on border and detention center visits, and successfully pushed legislation to block emergency border wall funding—legislation that Trump vetoed.

Castro: There are long memories in San Antonio and around the country of the last two mass deportation campaigns where between one and two million Hispanic American citizens ended up being deported to Mexico during the Great Depression and with Operation Wetback in 1954. So my greatest concern is that this will turn into an ugly dragnet that will rope in people who have a right to be in this country and folks like DACA recipients who have been here almost all of their lives and are functionally Americans and are going to find themselves in a strange land.

Pastor Emma Lozano, Lincoln United Methodist Church

The pastor and immigrant rights activist was a key voice in a Chicago Tribune piece I featured at the end of the first newsletter; she chose to end in-person Spanish-language services at her church because of fears over mass deportation. Parishioners now attend Spanish-language services on Zoom to protect her largely immigrant flock.

Lozano: My main concern is for mixed-status families [those families with members here legally and unlawfully]. Some people say it’s all talk. Well we don’t know that. It’s the fear and anxiety that really preys on us. We worry about what’s going to happen to our families, to our children if there is a factory raid, and the kids are in school.

People are getting doorbell cameras to know who is at the door, and we’re telling them, Don’t let people in, keep the doors locked. We hold “Know your rights” meetings because you have the right not to let someone into your house without a warrant from a judge.

This is a sanctuary city, and Chicago police said they will not cooperate with immigration requests. This has always been a sanctuary church, even during the pandemic, where people could worship together but apart. This time, it’s not a virus, it’s racism.

In 2006, when they ramped up work raids after 9/11, [human rights activist] Elvira Arellano was caught cleaning planes in O’Hare airport, arrested, and put in deportation proceedings. She ended up asking our church for sanctuary and defying her deportation because she said she was a worker not a criminal. She stayed in our church for a year.

During Trump’s first term, Francisca Lino, a mother of five U.S. citizens, whose husband is a citizen, was put in deportation proceedings and lived in our church for three years, going home when Joe Biden was elected. Now she asks ‘Que me va pasar a mi, yo tengo mucho miedo’—“What’s going to happen to me? I’m very scared.” She has a February 13 immigration meeting, when Trump will be president.

Both women are still part of the church. I tell them we have to have faith.

Leon Krauze, Washington Post Columnist

Krauze is a native of Mexico and one of the most respected Spanish-language journalists in the country. In 2018, he became the first journalist from a U.S. outlet chosen to moderate a presidential debate in Mexico.

Krauze: My main concern is whether Mexico is prepared for what lies ahead. Even in an optimistic scenario, Trump’s punitive policies could lead to an unprecedented number of deportations of Mexicans who have built lives in the United States. These are individuals who have established families and businesses, pay their taxes on time, and have sent their children to college. They are not only Americans but exemplary ones—except for a piece of paper.

Now they may be in the crosshairs of the new administration’s deportation machinery. If these people are deported en masse, Mexico will need to find a way to receive them. Easier said than done. The sudden return of a community of this size and with these characteristics presents a multifaceted challenge. Mexico is already a nightmare for Central American migrants and others crossing northward. Organized crime operates sophisticated and voracious extortion networks. What, for instance, awaits an entrepreneur from southern Texas, Michigan, or Arizona who suddenly finds himself deported? To think that criminals are not preparing to exploit this tragedy to its fullest is either naive or cruel.

Although the Mexican government has made efforts to hastily prepare, I fear these will prove insufficient and ineffective. The result could be an unimaginable humanitarian crisis on both sides of the border.

Juliana Regina Macedo do Nascimento, United We Dream

The deputy director of federal advocacy for the immigrant youth-led network United We Dream, Macedo do Nascimento lives in Baltimore and is an undocumented activist leader. She, like other advocates in the Washington D.C. area, has been preparing for possible “showcase” raids in Maryland and Virginia since the idea was floated by the Trump transition team.

Macedo do Nascimento: It’s 100 percent a concern that Trump will target activists at protests and public events. During Trump’s first term, I was at some of the Black Lives Matter protests and we all saw how aggressively they fought back against that.

Personally, I don’t know that it would stop me from going to protest but we take extra precautions—we don’t bring our phones, we write phone numbers on our arms. We want to be responsive for inauguration, there’s a people’s march, but we heard DHS will be doing raids in the D.C. area, so we fear we will be targeted. And we don’t want to be doing their jobs for them bringing a bunch of undocumented people where they will know we will be. So we’re having a conversation on how to protect ourselves, while not being intimidated. There’s a balance to reach there.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, American Immigration Council

A senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, Reichlin-Melnick is one of the top immigration law experts.

Reichlin-Melnick: The first [concern] is ICE going rogue. When you see the recent raids in Bakersfield, California, you realize these enforcement efforts are independently structured, they’re run by individual sectors and field offices, like a police precinct. That makes the Trump administration running a public relations campaign about mass deportation more difficult than they believe because they’re not going to be holding the hand of every ICE officer in a world where there are cameras on every corner. It’s one thing to write a memo directing them to carry out enforcement, it’s another entirely to expect agents to perfectly follow those directives in ways that are TV friendly.

Second, the administration wants to expand detention. But the private companies that run these centers are focused on cost cutting, and one thing they’re terrible at is offering health care. Private prisons tend to be low bid for health contractors, and the providers they use tend to be the same that do health care for the general prison system. Many of those companies have seen scandals through the years where we’ve seen basic health problems neglected, medication not provided, and many instances of people who died because of low quality health care in prison and detention.

When you’re detaining children, things can go wrong, even if the Trump administration is acting in good faith. With overcrowding, it’s easy for people to fall through the cracks, ignored as they slowly die, which was the case with 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez. [Editor’s note: Footage from ProPublica showed the agonizing final moments of Hernández Vásquez’s time in border patrol custody in south Texas, where he died in May 2019. He was found to have the flu and complications from other infections.]

Brittney Rodriguez, The Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce

At a time when it seems like Latinos and immigrants are under fire, business groups and Hispanic small businesses are seen as key bellwethers within the community. Rodriguez, the chief operating officer of the Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, is one of the key local leaders who belongs to the national United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Rodriguez: As a Latina and small business owner, what bothers me most are the social implications for families and the effect on future generations of Latinos, who as of 2021 are the largest population in Texas. Latinos who believed they were naturalized citizens or here legally are looking at each other asking, Am I safe? Am I next? Are my children safe?

Mass deportation would cripple the Texas economy, no matter your industry. A Trump-supporting dairy farmer outlined on CNN how the country’s food supply could only go two days without the assistance of undocumented workers before everything went awry. We’ve never needed the support of workers more and the likelihood of people leaving is terrifying.

Carlos Garcia, Mijente

Carlos Garcia is one of the most respected immigrant rights leaders in the nation, particularly in Arizona, where he’s worked to stop the deportations of individuals for the last seventeen years. He serves as the national capacity director for Mijente, a digital hub for Latino and Chicano individuals.

Garcia: What’s keeping me up is: Are our people going to be inspired and willing to fight back? Our job is to inspire that. The only way mass deportations happen is if we don’t fight back. People are going to suffer. But my focus is looking inward towards our community, rather than guessing what Trump is going to do.

I started my work during the [George W.] Bush era, fighting [Sheriff Joe] Arpaio, and now we’re taking on Trump. But after fighting SB1070, Arizona passed an anti-immigrant ordinance last year. The new Maricopa County sheriff, Jerry Sheridan, was Arpaio’s deputy and wants to bring back tent cities. So what we have called victories over the last decade, have been rescinded. Now we have a senator in Ruben Gallego who is sponsoring Laken Riley and acting just like [former Sen. Kyrsten] Sinema was. When you see those conditions, you think people will run for the hills. Instead, there’s a ‘let’s get back in the trenches’ mentality.

We know from the Arpaio and [Barack] Obama days that those whose deportation cases we successfully fought will probably be the first people targeted. That’s why I’m helping build our deportation defense team, a rapid response team of regional organizers around the country. In the past, people would sign their deportation form because they were scared their puppy was home alone. So we’re creating plans: If something happens to me, this is where you can get my keys because I have a puppy at home. Here’s a letter to go pick up my kids if I get picked up by immigration agents. Here are funds to pay for bail if I get arrested.

One Last Thing

It’s important to keep reporting the gulf between the administration’s words and the reality of what’s happening. The Washington Post is out Thursday with a deep look, noting that incoming border czar Tom Homan wants to prioritize deporting 1.4 million immigrants who have received deportation orders. But ICE data shows nearly half of that pool is ineligible to be sent home because they were granted a reprieve or deferral, or because their home countries won’t take them back. The administration will surely try to deport them anyway, but these are some of the obstacles they will face in the attempt.