Portside

Since this article went to print, President Donald Trump has taken office and begun his mass deportations campaign. There have been immigration raids in Chicago, New York City, Miami, Atlanta, and several other cities across the United States with as many as 1,179 people arrested in a single day. The Trump Administration has removed restrictions that kept Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers from being able to conduct raids at schools, hospitals, and churches, leaving many fearing that ICE will target children at school, and by extension, their parents. 

Trump has also suspended refugee resettlement programs, leaving as many as 10,000 people in limbo with flights and appointments cancelled. Venezuelans have lost Temporary Protected Status, putting them at risk of deportation. Many undocumented people across the United States are not going to work out of fear of being detained by ICE. 

Ever since Donald Trump accused the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, of “eating the dogs . . . eating the cats” of the city’s other residents, Haitians across the country have been packing their bags.

“Immigrants, Black immigrants, were the scapegoat for the [2024 Trump] campaign and the scapegoat for the election,” Guerline Jozef, the executive director and co-founder of San Diego-based Haitian Bridge Alliance, tells The Progressive. “The fact is, people who hold extreme power have come to dehumanize vulnerable communities for their political gain.”

After Trump made the debunked claim at the September presidential debate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Haitian Bridge Alliance received so much hate and harassment that they had to shut down their office and pull down the hotlines that their community depends upon for support.

“We were forced to hire armed security so that we could reopen the office,” Jozef says, adding that there is now an enormous climate of fear and trauma within the community. “We can’t do any public town halls or community gatherings, because we are so afraid that attacks will continue.”

Ordinarily, the Haitian Bridge Alliance helps more than one million Haitian people across the United States navigate the immigration system and protections such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that allow them to live and work without fear of deportation. While the Haitian community has long experienced discrimination under the U.S. immigration system—they were one of the first communities targeted under the Biden Administration—threats from neo-Nazis have pushed many to seek places where Democrats are in power. This includes cities like Boston, Massachusetts, where there is already a large Haitian population, and where Mayor Michelle Wu has promised that the city will not cooperate with immigration enforcement.

“These are people who fled Haiti, who came here seeking some kind of protection . . . . They found a new home in cities like San Diego and Springfield, Ohio,” Jozef says, adding that amid multiple political crises, Haiti is still unsafe for most to return. “Right now, they are so uncertain about what comes next for them.”

Since winning the election, Trump has doubled down on blaming immigrants for everything from rising housing prices to an uptick in crime across the United States. First, Trump prompted a bizarre debate between factions of the right wing over H-1B visas when he tapped Indian entrepreneur Sriram Krishnan to act as an adviser on artificial intelligence.

MAGA-aligned tech moguls like Elon Musk see the H-1B program as essential to attracting the best and brightest talent, while hardline nativists like Steve Bannon believe that any guest worker program takes jobs away from U.S. citizens. Trump returned to a familiar narrative following the New Orleans terrorism attack and Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion on New Year’s Day, blaming both on “the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy.’ ” Though both attackers were U.S.-born citizens, immigrants and their advocates across the United States are now left to prepare for the worst possible scenario.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘we’ve been here

before,’ ” says Adriana Rivera, director of communication at the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “But the fact of the matter is, we have not been here before.” Over the past few weeks, Rivera has been organizing “Know Your Rights” trainings for Miami’s immigrant community, many of whom are undocumented or fear losing their temporary immigration protections under the new administration.

Rivera points out that since Trump’s first term in office, both he and his administration have had years to regroup and refine their strategy. “The threat is much bigger,” she says. “They’re not just building the plane as they fly it this time.”

It doesn’t matter that Biden’s deportation tally actually surpassed that of Trump’s previous term. It also doesn’t matter that Trump’s claim that mass deportations will solve the housing crisis goes against the logic of supply and demand economics, particularly when most of the construction workers building new homes in housing-boom states like Texas and California are immigrants themselves. Trump has built a compelling narrative that immigrants are pouring over an unguarded border, bringing drug and cartel violence from countries like Mexico and Honduras into communities in the United States.

“I think it works because of this populist rhetoric,” Rivera says. “Who doesn’t want to live in safer communities?” But the devil is in the details. One of Trump’s most attention-grabbing agenda items is his promise to deport between fifteen and twenty million undocumented immigrants—millions more than the estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. While it is tempting to blow this off as another one of Trump’s inflated lies, Rivera warns that it could point to something much more sinister.

“We know that TPS [Temporary Protected Status] will be in grave danger,” she explains, adding the protection—which gives temporary, and often renewable, residency permits to more than 900,000 immigrants from seventeen different countries who have fled war or natural disasters—will almost certainly be stripped from Venezuelan and Haitian immigrants.  

“If you take away protections from people who already have them, those people become undocumented,” Rivera says. She points out that when Trump campaigned on deporting criminals, he didn’t distinguish between those who commit violent crimes such as rape and murder and those whose only crime is being in the country without immigration status. “So it could be someone like your son’s kindergarten teacher from Venezuela who has TPS,” Rivera explains. “Once [Trump] removes that protection from her, he’ll classify her as a criminal and then she’s suddenly deportable.”

Whether blaming immigrants for allegedly eating pets or for terrorist attacks committed by U.S.-born citizens, Trump is tapping into a deep tradition of American xenophobia that has used the law to render “undesirable” immigrants illegal. Chinese railroad workers were vital to westward expansion in the nineteenth century but were banned from coming to work under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The Chinese immigrants were scapegoated as being responsible for declining wages and being detrimental to “American” workers. Over the following decades, immigration laws were used to crack down on people from Southern European, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations, as well as anyone who was not of “Anglo-Saxon stock,” in the form of quotas that went into effect after World War I. With the onset of the Great Depression, U.S. Labor Secretary William Doak blamed “unauthorized” Mexican communities in Los Angeles for taking jobs that could have gone to U.S. citizens. Even if the evidence was flimsy at best, it was enough to prompt the authorities to raid Mexican and Mexican-American communities across California and other border states in the 1930s, rounding people up and putting them on trucks, trains, or buses to Mexico. This was one of the first mass deportations in U.S. history.

In each of these instances, “desirable” immigrants were distinguished from “undesirable” ones. In most cases, the right to enter the country—or stay in it—was stripped from the latter group. Distinctions were usually drawn along race and class lines.

Jozef argues that even the current debate over H-1B visas is designed to privilege wealthy immigrants, and protect them from Trump’s otherwise hateful rhetoric.

“We do not have an immigration issue when it comes to people of European descent,” Jozef puts it. “We have an immigration issue when it comes to Black and brown people.”

Even though Mexican laborers who came into the United States under the Bracero Program were essential to keeping the U.S. economy alive during the labor shortages of World War II, U.S. leaders wasted no time looking for ways to kick them out once their contracts were up. In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower launched Operation Wetback to unleash military raids to facilitate large-scale deportations across the country that terrified Mexican-American communities and separated mixed-status families. Trump has repeatedly spoken about Operation Wetback as his inspiration for military-style mass deportations.

President Richard Nixon’s war on drugs gave police officers an excuse to conduct warrantless searches on any car crossing the border and authorized the Immigration and Naturalization Service to build immigration detention centers that were used to detain Haitians trying to flee by boat from Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship. While Cuban immigrants arriving by boat were seen as refugees fleeing Fidel Castro and communism—and granted almost immediate political asylum and stipends to facilitate their new lives in the United States—Haitian refugees were detained in camps at Guantánamo Bay, long before the island became notorious for torturing terrorism suspects. Detaining them offshore allowed the U.S. government to more easily facilitate their deportation.

“Haitians are discriminated against because of their Blackness and no one pushes back,” Jozef says, speaking to the frequent racial discrimination that Black immigrants face.

Even though the Refugee Act of 1980 was later drafted to ensure that anyone, regardless of where they came from, had the right to request asylum in the United States, Ronald Reagan went on to use it to crackdown on people fleeing Guatemala and El Salvador, claiming that they were actually “economic migrants” and did not qualify for protection. This false distinction has created an ongoing narrative that some immigrants are trying to leech off the system, while giving rise to an immigration detention system that can hold people up until their asylum claims are heard—sometimes for months, or even years, at a time.

Today, immigration detention has become a $3 billion industry that fuses for-profit prisons with immigration policies built around “securing” the border. During his first term, Trump became infamous for separating parents from their children at the border as part of his “zero tolerance” policy toward unauthorized entry. But in reality, the immigration system separated families long before Trump. Trump’s Muslim ban also separated U.S. citizens from family members in affected countries, and deportations—whether under Trump, Biden, or anyone else—have separated thousands of families across borders since the United States first started deporting people, around the time that it started excluding people.

Rivera points out that this doesn’t just impact families and households—it affects entire communities and economies.

“We are so intertwined that if you take one of those threads and unravel it, the whole thing comes undone,” she says, noting how her organization’s home state of Florida is utterly reliant on immigrant labor. “If you deport farm workers, who is going to pick the food? What about construction? What about hospitality and all of the theme park industry in Central Florida?” Rivera points out that Bahamians built the city of Coconut Grove, what is today part of Miami, and that immigrants continue to keep the hospitality industry in Key West and all of the port cities afloat. In states like Texas and California, the largely undocumented workforce powering construction booms is poised to help solve the housing crisis—if the workers aren’t deported first.

“It’s such a huge part of our economy that we’re going to be in for a really rude awakening if this ends up happening the way that it’s been promised,” Rivera says.

Now, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan—who served as the head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s notorious family separation policy—is proposing that U.S. citizens who face having their partners or parents deported should leave the United States with them. “Families can be deported together,” he told Cecilia Vega of 60 Minutes. Rarely is it that simple. What happens when you have built your entire life—and have a community—in the United States? What happens when this country feels more like your country than the one you left behind decades ago or, in the case of U.S.-citizen children or childhood arrivals, is the only one that you have ever known? Trump’s allies might argue that these people made the choice to be in the country illegally, but along with blaming the victim, this ignores the fact that it is the law that makes people “illegal,” not immigrants themselves.

If Trump rescinds birthright citizenship, as he has threatened, he will make it so that the children of undocumented immigrants are not automatically U.S. citizens, even if they are born in and spend their entire lives in the United States. (It is also in contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.) Along with signaling that one must have an American bloodline to be truly “American,” these kinds of laws have a track record of creating bureaucratic nightmares. The children of African migrants in Italy, for example, have a small window of time in which they can petition for their citizenship, which has led to an epidemic of statelessness. It sends a message that undocumented people and their children will be punished, whether or not they ever broke a law.

Still, these laws can just as easily offer protection. If an undocumented immigrant marries a U.S. citizen, they can adjust their status and even become a U.S. citizen themselves, so long as they didn’t originally enter the country illegally. If a protection like TPS is extended rather than revoked, people can continue to live and work without fear of being uprooted from their communities or separated from their families. Birthright citizenship grants citizenship, just as rescinding it takes it away.

“Part of our work right now is parsing out what is likely to happen from the bombastic allegations that Trump is making,” Aaron C. Morris, the executive director of Immigration Equality, explains, pointing out that it would cost $88 billion to deport one million people—never mind the promised twenty million people.

Several of Trump’s most outrageous plans will inevitably be tied up in court. However, it is important to remember that he has changed policy with the stroke of a pen in the past, and is potentially more than ready to do so again.

According to Morris, who works predominantly with LGBTQ+ migrants seeking asylum in the United States on the basis of persecution due to their sexual orientation or gender identity, it is most effective to view this through the lens of triage. While naturalized citizens and those with green cards have little to worry about, he is most concerned about those with ongoing asylum cases or those who have a status that could be taken away, like TPS.

“If someone has TPS, we’re advising them to explore other options,” Morris continues. “Could they apply for asylum, or are they in a position to marry someone and get a marriage-based green card?”

For people who do not have legal recourse to change their status, Rivera advises planning for the worst: “Write out a detailed plan, in case you are deported.” She adds that they should include detailed instructions with who could look after their children, their property, and their businesses. “Create a little folder with all of your family’s documents. If your children are U.S. citizens, make sure to have their passports.” 

[Anna Lekas Miller is an award-winning writer and journalist who covers how conflict and migration shape lives around the world. Her first book, Love Across Borders, recently won a 2024 Arab American Book Award.]