“Who’s Willing to Get Arrested?” Immigrant Activists Ready for Trump Deportation Plans

Donald Trump campaigned on the promise of carrying out the mass detention and deportation of immigrants.

President Joe Biden spent most of his term widening the government’s ability to incarcerate and deport people; inflating the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget by millions; increasing the number of beds in prisons; and expanding the use of private prisons, some of which have been plagued with poor living conditions and allegations of sexual assault and abuse. In this past fiscal year, Biden has deported more than 700,000 people — the most within a single year since 2010, which were largely in response to a major increase in people crossing the border during his term.

Trump is inheriting these boosts to the deportation infrastructure as he looks to fulfill his promises of deporting 1 million people each year with 10,000 new Border Patrol agents and help from the military and local law enforcement. He has announced former ICE director and architect of family separation policy Tom Homan as his “border czar”; Stephen Miller, who previously oversaw both family separation and the Muslim travel ban, will return to be deputy chief of staff for policy as well as Trump’s homeland security adviser.

With less than 50 days until his inauguration, immigrant community groups and rights activists are taking his word for it and bracing for the worst. They face drastically different conditions for organizing, depending on their state and local governments, but share some common struggles: lack of funding and public support compared to Trump’s first term in office, and potential burnout from previous fights against deportation.

Less Funding, More Fatigue

In the initial days after Trump’s first election in 2016, people poured into the streets to protest against Trump’s anti-immigrant threats and his promise to build a border wall.

“And that was connected to a lot of attention, both from philanthropy, as well as from elected officials,” said Shiu-Ming Cheer, deputy director of immigrant and racial justice at the California Immigrant Policy Center. “There’s still definitely interest in defending immigrant communities. But I don’t feel like there’s the same sort of renewed resistance that we saw at the end of 2016 — I hope that changes.”

Cheer said that leading up to this year’s election, organizers across California expressed concern that there wouldn’t be enough money to go around to fund organizations that assist immigrants through the turmoil of a second Trump presidency. Most grants from foundations last just one or two years, she said, which doesn’t give immigrant rights groups enough runway to build and plan for the future.

“I generally sense more fatigue this time, and maybe people are just tired or depressed,” Cheer said. Many people who anchored the fight against Trump’s anti-immigrant policies the first time around have since left the movement, taking with them valuable knowledge and experience built during Trump’s first term.

Among those who have remained in the fight is Lorena Quiroz, a Jackson, Mississippi-based organizer who was among the first to offer aid in August 2019 when ICE tore through six different poultry plants across central Mississippi in a massive raid operation, detaining 680 immigrant workers. After the raid, immigrant rights groups in the region received an injection of much-needed philanthropic funding. From that moment, Quiroz founded the nonprofit Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity. She noted that this time around, fundraising has been more difficult. She said several funders have reached out to Quiroz since the election, saying that they are thinking about her, but have yet to offer donations.

In recent months, her organization has been preparing the community for similar operations, drawing on practices from the past five years. But she said she’s worried about whether her group, which has a small team of six staff, and others in the region will have the capacity to handle another surge in ICE detainments. And she’s aware she’s not the only organization in need of more resources.

“Every state needs help, some more than others. In Texas, they’ve already attacked nonprofits and worker centers — the whole nation is on fire right now,” Quiroz said. “So knowing that, I feel guilty, like, who do I ask for help?”

Anti-Immigrant Movement

Over the past four years, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lonestar has detained more than 500,000 immigrants over the past four years. Abbott has also exploited immigrants as political pawns, bussing more than 100,000 people to Democratic-led cities such as New York, D.C., and Chicago to draw attention to an increase of people crossing the U.S.–Mexico border (crossings at the southern border have since fallen, following stricter policies from the Mexican government and Biden administration).

Abbott has also cracked down on nonprofit organizations supporting immigrant communities in Texas. Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating immigrant aid organizations for allegedly assisting people cross the border illegally in an attempt to close down the aid groups. In August, Paxton sued a longtime Houston-based immigrant rights group, FIEL Houston, for making statements on social media that referred to Trump as “El Hijo Del Diablo,” (son of the Devil) and called Abbott “a violent racist fascist man,” according to the Houston Chronicle. The state’s lawsuit seeks to dissolve the nonprofit.

“We have to be careful in what we do, and how we do it, and how we say it, because the governor is using every tool in their power to destroy nonprofit organizations that are supporting the community,” said José Palma, who lives near Houston and is the coordinator of the National Temporary Protected Status Alliance. His group seeks to preserve the TPS program, which currently allows nearly 1.2 million people who have fled armed conflicts or natural disasters to remain in the U.S., and pushes for legislation that would grant TPS holders a path to citizenship.