CNN
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Far beyond the Washington clamor of executive actions and lawsuits, and the dueling press releases between Donald Trump allies and adversaries, the arrival of the new president’s immigration regime is already changing life on the ground for millions of people — undocumented immigrants, their kids, their family, friends and neighbors, teachers and principals, local government and law enforcement.
In the days before Trump’s second inauguration last week, anxious families seeking advice from the most prominent immigrant rights group in Los Angeles had one question above all.
“The number one thing they want to talk about is family separation,” Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), told me about the thousands of undocumented immigrants who have contacted her office since Trump’s election. “Individuals are really worried about who is going to take care of their children” if they are detained or deported.
There were dozens of other painfully practical questions when hundreds of people gathered last Tuesday night, at the end of Trump’s first full day of his second term, for a “know your rights” forum CHIRLA sponsored at the office of United Teachers Los Angeles, the LA teachers’ union. One man wanted to know what his obligations were as an owner if federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up at his business demanding to talk to his workers. Another woman wanted to know whether the group had materials she could provide to inform the blind and deaf people she works with about their rights if stopped by ICE. Someone else asked if they can safely still provide their nationality to hospitals when they ask for it on a birth certificate.
The concerns raised at the meeting spoke not to big questions of national policy but intimate realities of daily life. Can I safely send my kids to school? Can I still visit a doctor? What are my rights if ICE stops me in the street?
When Salas spoke to the large crowd last Tuesday night, her main message was that people worried about Trump’s mass deportation pledge needed to stay strong both in their determination to protect their individual rights and their commitment to joining collectively to protest his policies. “They cannot overcome us with fear,” she insisted. “They cannot stop us from protecting our human rights.”
The crowd of community members, local unions and civil rights group that assembled on Tuesday night was energetic, the chants of “si se puede” always vigorous, the emotion impassioned at a candlelight vigil that dozens attended at sunset outside a church across the street. And yet, there was no mistaking the anxiety and apprehension bubbling through all of it.
“I work for the local school and a lot of our parents are feeling a lot of fear,” Erica Granados told me as the event began. When the evening was ending, Myrla Baldonado, who works with a group that advocates for domestic workers, told me that she saw three young Latina woman that morning running from a metro station yelling, “They are coming, they are coming.” It turned out to be a false alarm, she said, but more telling was that no one had to ask the women who “they” were.
Salas lives in one of the neighborhoods threatened by the wildfires that swept through Los Angeles earlier this month. As she packed a bag and tried to gather valuables in case she needed to evacuate, she was struck by the similarities between the advice she was hearing from local emergency officials on television and the guidance she gives undocumented immigrants in her office. “You are thinking it through like it’s a disaster plan,” she told me. Like the fires or an earthquake, she said, “to a certain extent it’s rather random” who gets picked up in a raid.
“We tell people very practically: save some money so the individual who is deported can have some resources,” Salas told me. “Pack a little bag or be able to send them both money and clothing, especially if they are picked up with just pajamas.”
Her group impresses on undocumented immigrants and their families, including those with legal status, the importance of making basic legal arrangements. “We have been doing countless consultations with individuals so at least … we can have some of their basic information – their name, date of birth,” she said. Without that basic information, it can be so difficult to track down detainees, Salas said, that there’s a risk people can be removed from the US before their families even determine where they are being held. “Especially if you live in border regions, the deportation is very swift,” she said
Salas above all encourages parents with minor children to fill out what’s called a “Caregiver’s Authorization Affidavit.” With that document, a parent authorizes someone else – a friend, relative, even an older sibling – to care for their children if they are removed from the country. The authority granted by the parents through the document, Salas told me, “is enough to be able to keep a child enrolled in school or authorize any medical care if the child gets sick and has to go to the doctor.”
The issue of how much to tell kids about these contingencies is a difficult one. Parents “usually talk to the older kids and they tell them very practical things: I’m leaving some money here, if I’m picked up this is who you call, here’s where we put away some money,” Salas told me. “I always remember the story of our mayor here in Pasadena, whose parents were undocumented; his parents told him his money was in the coffee jar, just go in there if anything happens to them.”
Just explaining these preparations can be traumatic for younger children, Salas said. She knows from personal experience: her mother, who was undocumented, was deported when Salas was 11. Although her mother eventually returned to California under a class action lawsuit that allowed her family to obtain legal status, “this is something that stays with you for the rest of your life,” Salas said. “And it is absolutely traumatic. Even having the parent detained is traumatic.”
CHIRLA has helped thousands of undocumented immigrants fill out caregiver affidavits over the years, with the pace notably picking up since Trump won the election. The group is working with the teachers’ union and the Los Angeles Unified School District to train teachers to spot kids who feel stressed about what may happen to their parents (even if the kids are US citizens themselves.) At the forum Tuesday, Karla Griego, an LAUSD board member, said the school district was conducting several days of training this week for school principals about what ICE can and cannot demand on school grounds, with the principals then directed to instruct all their teachers and staff. “Everybody is going to be trained,” she said. (That pledge seemed especially relevant for the audience, given that the Trump administration has rescinded long-standing guidance prohibiting immigration enforcement operations at sensitive locations including hospitals and schools.)
For all this outreach, Granados, whose job involves fostering a positive learning climate, says she believes most of the undocumented parents she works with at the nearby Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools (located on the site of the Ambassador Hotel, where RFK was assassinated in 1968) have no idea that they need a caregiver affidavit. She was planning to take copies of it from the meeting to copy and place at a parents’ resource room in the school. “A lot of our parents have a really big fighting spirit,” she said, “but it really is about preparing for potential trauma.”
All the work CHIRLA is doing with undocumented immigrants amounts to stacking sandbags against a coming storm. It and other immigrant rights groups around the country have been systematically putting other preparations in place as Trump and his team launched his mass deportation program with a series of stepped-up enforcement actions over the weekend from Chicago and Atlanta to Austin and Los Angeles.
The Trump administration portrays this heightened enforcement as the overdue corrective to policies from former President Joe Biden that they argue surrendered control of the border and unsustainably flooded cities with undocumented immigrants. In an interview with CNN, White House ‘border czar’ Tom Homan called Sunday’s enforcement actions in Chicago “a good day” and a “gamechanger.”
“We had all of government law enforcement today to focus on public safety and national security threats in Chicago,” said Homan, who maintained it was a “criminal operation.”
Sunday’s offensive is likely just a preview of sustained pressure to come on immigrant communities: ICE field offices have been told to meet a quota of 75 arrests per day, CNN reported Sunday, paving the way to surpassing the number of daily arrests in the past year.
The response from immigrant advocates, needless to say, cannot compare in magnitude. Organizations working in immigrant communities have established a national toll-free number for people to call any time they believe an ICE enforcement is unfolding. Groups in multiple states are building out rapid response teams that include lawyers, community organizers and videographers, to rush to the site if such operations are confirmed.
Chicago, where the administration focused a major sweep on Sunday involving five government agencies, is one of the places where that work has been most urgent. “It is really a comprehensive network of whatever families may need in that moment,” Lawrence Benito, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, told me. “Our teams are also ready to document and pose the question to the American people about the brutality of what these enforcement policies can look like and is this what people really want to see happen?” On Sunday, as federal law enforcement massed in Chicago, the group’s rapid response teams “were going pretty much all day,” Brandon Lee, the coalition’s communications director, told me.
Immigrant advocacy groups are also pressing local officials in blue cities and states to provide the administration no more cooperation than absolutely required by federal law, even as Homan and the Justice Department are loudly threatening to prosecute those who resist their efforts. “We are ready to meet the moment of our members and our communities, but the responsibility also lies on state and local officials,” Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream Action, said on a call with reporters last week. “They have responsibilities to protect. They have responsibilities to protect our schools, our churches, our hospitals.”
David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me that Homan’s threats to prosecute local officials under a federal law that prohibits “harboring” an undocumented immigrant aren’t supported by the law. “There is nothing in the statute that backs up what Homan is saying,” Leopold insists. But, he adds, there are also severe limits on how much local officials in practice can impede ICE operations.
In a variety of ways, local governments can choose not to cooperate with ICE, mostly by refusing to provide them information or assistance from their own personnel, but even in states and cities that view themselves as sanctuaries, officials have no authority to block legally authorized federal immigration enforcement operations, he points out. “Even in quote-unquote sanctuary cities, immigration law can be enforced, is enforced,” Leopold told me. “There is no place in the United States where a non-citizen who is wanted by ICE can be immune from enforcement by ICE.”
That is the daunting boundary on all the efforts by advocates for undocumented immigrants, and their blue city and state allies, to prepare for what Trump is planning. “For what we can control, we’re on the right track,” Benito told me. “We’ve been doing all the right things in terms of training people for knowing their rights, building out rapid response teams, continuing to protect local welcoming ordinances. What we don’t know with this next administration, which is more experienced now, is the level they will go to.”
Trump’s initial actions — including an attempt to end birthright citizenship through executive order (that has already been enjoined by a federal court), the deployment of more active-duty military troops to the southern border, the rescinding of the guidance prohibiting immigration enforcement in sensitive locations like schools and hospitals, and the directive to US attorneys to investigate local officials who obstruct his plans — suggest he plans to take his hardline immigration agenda to a very high level of confrontation.
“This country has been forged by people who have been willing to resist,” Salas told her audience in LA last week. In the coming months, those determined to resist Trump’s immigration crackdown may feel, like the iconic Chinese demonstrator in Tiananmen square a generation ago, as if they are facing off against a line of tanks rolling remorselessly in their direction.
