The most immediate risk after next week’s U.S. presidential transition does not concern residents of countries that Donald Trump has considered invading. It’s about the millions of people in the United States who are about to enter four years of fear: the undocumented migrants whom Trump has vowed to deport en masse.
These include young people who arrived as children and whose memories of their entire lives exist exclusively in the United States.
These people prepare in many ways. They download a digital panic button to alert relatives in the event of the arrival of federal agents. They study their rights and save the phone numbers of lawyers.
Families are encouraged to prepare for the worst: to have food, shelter and child care available if the adults ever go missing.
Their plight will be in the spotlight Wednesday, when U.S. senators have a chance to question Trump’s choice to head border and deportation agencies during his confirmation hearing for security secretary interior.
“It’s a paralyzing fear,” said Saúl Rascón Salazar, who arrived in the country 18 years ago, when he was five. Her Mexican family arrived on a temporary visa and never left. He is now a college graduate and works fundraising for a private school in California.
“I say [this] as someone who hates fear mongering and is completely opposed to it. [But] I don’t think things are looking good. Emotionally, financially and rhetorically. I don’t see this situation getting any better.”
These young people did not expect to come back here.
Four years ago they were optimistic. Joe Biden, who has just been elected president of the United States, supported a program to let them stay in the countryand talk of a new immigration law persisted in the air.
These hopes then evaporated. Congress the voices were missing for a law, Trump was re-elected and migrants now face a double threat: that of the next president and that of the next president. the courts.
Reality hits on election night
Rascón said he was hopeful until election night. He never believed Trump would win. But the new reality set in as he watched the Nov. 5 election results with friends in Arizona.
“It was a pretty dour, dark vibe in the room,” he said, recalling how he and his friends began going over things that would change.
Rascón has a degree in international relations from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. So, he says, his first thoughts drifted to Ukraine and the Middle East, then to domestic issues such as abortion, minority rights and gun laws.
Only after that, he says, did he start thinking about immigration, and he insists it took a few days for his personal reality to really sink in.
For example, Rascón said, he urges members of families like his, if they use social media like he does, to avoid posting their specific meeting locations and movements.
They should budget money for lawyers, for moving expenses and, in the worst-case scenario, for long-term babysitters, he said.
Trump insists he has no desire to deport young people like Rascón.
He is one of the most half a million people enshrined in a program created by Barack Obama in 2012, suspended by Trump when he was president in his first term, and revived by Biden known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This indefinitely delays their deportation if they arrived young, went to school or work and have a clean criminal record.
US President-elect Donald Trump is promising the “largest deportation program” in American history when he takes office, but what could it mean for Canada? The National’s Adrienne Arsenault asks CBC’s Paul Hunter and Catherine Cullen to break down her plan and its potential impacts.
Trump tries to reassure young “dreamers”
In a recent interview, Trump suggested he would deport these young people last, referring to them by a common nickname, “Dreamers”; the new president even said he would like Congress to protect them with permanent law.
“We have to do something for the Dreamers because these are people who were brought here very young,” Trump told NBC in December.
“They don’t even speak the language of their country. And yes, we are going to do something for the Dreamers.”
But there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. “These are just empty words,” Rascón said.
After all, during his first term, Trump tried to cancel the DACA program. In his own words, he even expel entire families where the children are born in the United States and are full U.S. citizens. On top of that, a legal challenge to DACA is underway. by the courts.
To top it off, Trump’s allies pledge to punish and prosecute people who interfere with evictions.
A young woman, a student in Texas, interviewed by CBC News, illustrates the point made by Trump: that this country, the United States, is the only country she remembers. (CBC has agreed to keep the woman’s name confidential because she fears she could be deported for speaking publicly about her experiences).
She described being brought by car from El Salvador at the age of two. She received permission a few years ago to leave and return to the United States to see an ailing grandparent in her homeland, describing it as a culture shock.
United States President-elect Donald Trump unveiled his cabinet picks over the weekend, including staunch immigration hardliners Stephen Miller and Tom Homan who will be in charge of Trump’s promise to carry out the largest deportation in American history.
The woman recalls an interaction with a street vendor from El Salvador who called her “chele,” or white. Others started calling her Mexican. Although she speaks Spanish well, her language is influenced by the expressions of the many Mexican Americans around her.
As for the possibility of now being treated like a criminal, she describes it as cruel.
“I didn’t choose to come to the United States,” she said. “How is this 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 brother are completely undocumented, he is in the DACA program, and his two younger siblings are native-born citizens. -United.
Trump said entire families like these could be deported. His next border tsar later clarified that he could not expel real American citizens – but if their parents are deported, they can decide whether or not to take their children with them.
We don’t always know 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 little girl 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 in Michigan as a caregiver.
In 2016, she was called back to class the day after Trump’s election to meet with her parents and a lawyer and discuss next steps, such as whether to flee the country or go into hiding.
Since then, her situation has changed radically: Mahmud has just obtained permanent residence thanks to a relative, which means, in theory, that she is spared. She is even allowed to travel abroad and has visited Canada three times.
But on election night, she was struck by grief, thinking of the hundreds of thousands of other Dreamers who don’t have the security she found.
Driving home from work that evening, she heard about Trump’s first advance on the radio and tried not to cry while driving. She came home, opened several screens and crashed.
“I cried all night,” Mahmud said. “I couldn’t stop.”
She compares it to survivor’s guilt.
Mahmud promised her friends in the DACA movement that she would continue to support them and protest alongside them.
She described texting a friend after the election: “I will be your human shield if I have to be,” Mahmud said, remembering the message.
But she recognizes that her own situation is not guaranteed. Trump and his team have I thought about undressing residence of certain people and challenging the US Constitution citizenship rules.
Being a human shield during a demonstration is also not without risk. A permanent resident could still be deported if found guilty of certain crimes.
For undocumented immigrants and their allies, the four years of fear begin when Trump takes the oath of office in Washington, D.C., Monday at noon ET.
