The most immediate risk after the US presidential transition next week is not to residents of the countries that Donald Trump has considered invading. It’s about the millions of people in the United States who are facing four years of fear: the illegal migrants that Trump wants to deport en masse.
These include young people who arrived as children and whose entire life memories exist exclusively in the USA
These people prepare in a variety of ways. You download one digital panic button to alert family members if federal agents arrive. They check their rights and save the phone numbers of the lawyers.
Families are encouraged to plan for the worst: have food, shelter and child care ready in case the adults disappear one day.
Their situation will come into the spotlight on Wednesday, when U.S. senators will have an opportunity to question Trump’s choice to lead the border and deportation agencies at their confirmation hearing for homeland security secretary.
“It’s a paralyzing fear,” said Saúl Rascón Salazar, who came to the country 18 years ago when he was five years old. His Mexican family came on a temporary visa and never left the country. Now he has a college degree and works in fundraising for a California private school.
“I say (this) as someone who hates scaremongering and is completely against it. (But) I don’t think things are looking good. In relation to everything – emotional, financial, rhetorical. I don’t.” I see this situation improving.
These young people did not expect to be here again.
Four years ago they were optimistic. Joe Biden, who was just elected US President, supported a program to let them stay in the countryand talks about a new immigration law were in the air.
These hopes then evaporated. congress the votes were missing For a law Trump was re-elected and migrants now face a two-pronged threat – from the next president and the courts.
Reality hits on election night
Rascón said he was hopeful until election night. He never thought Trump would win. But the new reality became clear to him as he watched the Nov. 5 election results with friends in Arizona.
“There was a pretty dark, gloomy atmosphere in the room,” he said, recalling how he and his friends started going over things that were going to change.
Rascón is a graduate of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and has a degree in international relations. His first thoughts, he said, went abroad, to Ukraine and the Middle East, and then to domestic issues such as abortion, minority rights and gun laws.
Only then did he start thinking about immigration, and he emphasizes that it actually took a few days for his personal reality to really become clear to him.
For example, Rascón said he urges people in families like his to avoid publishing their specific meeting places and whereabouts if they use social media like he does.
They should set aside money for lawyers, moving costs and, in the worst case scenario, long-term babysitters, he said.
Trump insists he is not eager to deport young people like Rascón.
He is one of the more than half a million people participated in a program created by Barack Obama in 2012 that was suspended by Trump when he was president in his first term and revived by Biden, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). It delays their deportation indefinitely if they arrived as juveniles, went to school or work and had no criminal record.
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Trump is trying to reassure young “dreamers.”
In a recent interview, Trump suggested he would deport these young people last, referring to them by the common nickname “Dreamers.” The new president even said he wanted Congress to protect them with permanent law.
“We have to do something about the Dreamers because they are people who were brought here at a very young age,” Trump told NBC in December.
“They don’t even speak the language of their country. And yes, we will do something about the Dreamers.”
But there is plenty of reason for skepticism. “These are just empty words,” said Rascón.
Finally, Trump tried to cancel the DACA program in his first term. In fact, in his own words, he would deport entire families where the children were born in the USA and are full American citizens. Additionally, there is a legal challenge to the development of DACA through the courts.
To top it off, Trump’s allies are vowing to punish and prosecute people who obstruct deportations.
A young woman, a student in Texas, interviewed by CBC News illustrates the point Trump was making: that this country, the United States, is the only country she remembers. (The CBC has agreed to keep the woman’s name confidential because she fears she will be deported for speaking publicly about her experiences.)
She described being taken by car from El Salvador when she was two years old. A few years ago, she received permission to leave and re-enter the U.S. to visit her ailing grandparents in her home country, which she described as a culture shock.
US President-elect Donald Trump announced several Cabinet members over the weekend, including vocal immigration hardliners Stephen Miller and Tom Homan – who will be tasked with Trump’s promise to carry out the largest deportation in American history.
The woman recalled an interaction with a street vendor from El Salvador who referred to her as “chele” (white). Others called her a Mexican. Although she speaks Spanish well, her speech is colored by the facial expressions of the many Mexican Americans around her.
She calls the possibility of now being treated like a criminal cruel.
“I didn’t choose to come to the United States,” she said. “How is that fair?”
Same family, different status
One of the big unknowns is the fate of mixed-status households like Rascón’s: his parents and an older sibling are undocumented, he is a participant in the DACA program, and his two younger siblings are U.S.-born citizens.
Trump has said entire families like this could be deported. His later border czar made it clear that he cannot deport real US citizens – but if their parents are deported, they can decide whether to take their children with them.
It is not always clear where they would go. Take the case of Marina Mahmud.
She was born in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to a Syrian father and a Ukrainian mother. Her family’s common language at home is Russian.
Mahmud was a toddler when her parents took a trip to the United States 20 years ago and never returned home. She now has a college degree and works as a nurse in Michigan.
In 2016, she was called out of class the day after Trump’s election to meet with her parents and a lawyer to discuss next steps, such as whether she should flee the country or go into hiding.
Her situation has changed dramatically since then: Mahmud has just received a permanent residence permit through a relative, which theoretically means she will be spared. She is even allowed to travel internationally and has visited Canada three times.
But on election night, she was overcome with grief and thought of hundreds of thousands of other Dreamers who lack the security she found.
As she drove home from work that evening, she heard about Trump’s early tip-off on the radio and tried not to cry at the wheel. She came home, opened several screens and collapsed.
“I cried all night,” Mahmoud said. “I couldn’t stop.”
She compares it to survivor’s guilt.
Mahmud has promised her friends in the DACA movement that she will continue to support and protest with them.
She described texting a friend after the election: “I will be your human shield if I need to be,” Mahmoud recalled of the message.
But she recognizes that her own situation is not guaranteed. Trump and his team did it thought about stripping the residence of certain people and the challenge to the US Constitution Citizenship rules.
The role of a human shield during a protest also entails risks. A permanent resident could still face deportation if convicted certain crimes.
For undocumented migrants and their allies, four years of fear begin as Trump takes the oath of office on Monday at noon ET in Washington, DC.
