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Advocacy groups brace for Trump’s immigration crackdown [1]
['Corrie Boudreaux', 'Cindy Ramirez', 'More Corrie Boudreaux', 'More Cindy Ramirez', 'El Paso Matters', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2025-01-19
Inside the dining room of the Buen Samaritano migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez, families eat lentil soup as posters around them warn of the risks of misinformation and false news.
Sitting at a plastic folding table, a 45-year-old woman from the Mexican state of Michoacán slurps the soup, her husband and son at her side. The family said it has been in Juárez for five months attempting, unsuccessfully, to schedule a CBP One appointment for a chance at asylum in the United States.
“We are afraid,” the woman said last week, hesitating to give her name or any details about her family that might identify them. She recounts the violence and threats they were subjected to in their home state and was holding out hope for an appointment.
She fears the CBP One program – an app that allows migrants in Mexico to schedule appointments to present themselves legally at a U.S. port of entry to seek asylum – will end under President-elect Donald Trump’s aggressive border and immigration agenda.
Trump, who will officially take office at 10 a.m. MST Monday, has outlined a slew of immigration executive orders and policy changes he plans to put forth starting on Day 1.
Supporters say the agenda will control illegal immigration and secure the border. Critics fear it will decimate legal pathways into the country, endanger migrants who’ll seek more dangerous ways into the country, and target immigrants living and working in the United States – including those legally permitted to be here.
Trump promises to roll back Biden administration policies and programs such as CBP One and temporary protected status for immigrants already in the country, and to reintroduce others from his previous term, such as the so-called remain in Mexico program and Title 42 in some form.
“I don’t know what we will do,” the woman at the Mexican shelter said about the possibility of CBP One being canceled. “We can’t go back. It’s impossible to go back.”
Families who are staying at the Buen Samaritano shelter eat lentil soup for lunch, Jan. 14, 2025. Juan Fierro, the shelter director, said that he now believes none of his current families will get a CBP One appointment due to the incoming Trump administration. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
Across the table from her, Mishel, who had been in Juárez with her 2-year-old son for just one week, told of her trek from Venezuela through the Darién Gap and Central America and to Tapachula, a Mexican city near the Guatemalan border. Mishel and her son hid behind a curtain in her room at the Tapachula shelter while armed men searched for migrants to kidnap. The kidnappers ended up taking five people, Mishel said, but she and her son were not spotted. The experience terrified her and she now fears having to remain in Mexico.
“Oh, my God,” she said when asked what she would do if CBP One was done away with. “That has not occurred to me. Can that happen?”
‘Bracing for everything and anything’
Immigrant advocacy groups said though some plans – immediate mass deportations, for example – may not happen as swiftly as promised, they’re preparing for sweeping actions.
“We’re bracing for everything and anything,” said Imelda Maynard, legal director for Estrella del Paso, a ministry of the Catholic Diocese of El Paso that offers free legal services to migrants and refugees. The organization was formerly called Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services.
A mural by artists Kelsey Kilcrease and Nikki Diaz graces the side of the Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services office, now called Estrella del Paso, in Central El Paso. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
“There’s a ton of unknowns, and there’s a ton of things that we’re tracking to see what happens on Day 1,” Maynard said, citing frequent actions under Trump’s first term. “It was very common … for every single Friday to be for there to be a new directive on how immigration policy and procedure was implemented.”
Trump enacted more than 470 administrative changes to immigration through executive orders in his four years in office, according to a Migration Policy Institute report.
More than anything, Maynard said Estrella del Paso is standing ready to defend people’s rights and educate migrants and the community about them.
“People still have rights. Even undocumented folks have rights to see a judge, an immigration judge, to determine whether or not they’re eligible to remain in the U.S.,” she said. “The issue is often whether they know to assert them. … and not just sign a removal order.”
Maynard said she’s also concerned deportations will lead to family separations, immigrants getting lost in the system, and people being detained in unsafe, open-air facilities for long periods of time.
Another concern is the possible dismantling of DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program enacted by President Obama in 2012 that provides legal protections for people who were brought to the country without authorization as children. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the program is illegal, and its ultimate fate may rest with the U.S. Supreme Court.
More than 500,000 people currently are protected from deportation by DACA.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso said the focus of Trump’s immigration principles are two-fold: “We’re not letting anybody in, and those who are here, we’re going to remove.”
“My assumption is that he will reinstate rapid expulsion programs like remain in Mexico, and he’ll want to eliminate (temporary protected status) recipients,” Escobar said. “But we really have not been given a list of what those executive orders will look like, or specifically what he’s going to do on day one.”
Escobar cites mass deportations as an initiative that will require significant resources – funding, personnel and equipment – and won’t happen immediately. She said that might come until after Republicans pass their reconciliation bill – a fast-tracked congressional budget resolution that only requires a simple majority in the Senate to be approved and cannot be filibustered. The bill is focused on immigration, energy, defense and tax cuts and tax credits.
Escobar said she acknowledges everyone wants a better, stronger immigration system – but said Trump’s agenda does not accomplish that.
Escobar voted against the Laken Riley Act, named for a Georgia woman who was killed by a man from Venezuela last year, that passed in the House on Jan. 27. The bill is now in the hands of the Republican-controlled Senate, which is weighing amendments. The legislation would require migrants who are arrested on suspicion of theft-related crimes to be detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement until their cases are resolved.
SEE ALSO: Texas AG takes effort to close El Paso’s Annunciation House to state Supreme Court
The bill would give states, through their attorneys general, powers over federal immigration policy.
“(The act) further breaks a system that is all that is already in need of repair, and by empowering attorneys general like Ken Paxton by outsourcing some of these immigration decisions to people like him, it only will further politicize a system that should not be politicized,” Escobar said.
‘End the lawlessness’
U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican whose Congressional District 23 stretches from San Antonio to El Paso, voted in favor of the Riley Act. He supports Trump’s immigration agenda, saying “we have to end the lawlessness” in a November interview with ABC News. Gonzales has said he supports mass deportations prioritizing “hardened criminals” and not “abuelitas.”
His office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Gonzales has said large-scale deportations would require pulling local, state and federal resources.
The American Immigration Council in October released a study that estimated the cost of a one-time mass deportation operation at $315 billion – conservatively. That would include deporting some 11 million people who as of 2022 lacked permanent legal status, as well as some 2.3 million people who crossed into the U.S. without legal immigration status and were released into the country to await their court hearings by the Department of Homeland Security from January 2023 through April 2024.
The organization states that cost estimate doesn’t take into account the long-term costs of sustained deporations or the “incalculable” costs to acquire capacity to remove millions of people, including building and operating detention centers and increasing transportation such as charter aircraft to remove the deportees.
An estimated 52,000 undocumented immigrants live in El Paso County, a 2019 data analysis by the Migration Policy Institute shows.
Juan Fierro, director of the Buen Samaritano migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez, says that in the coming weeks he expects to tend to deported Mexicans rather than migrants from other countries, Jan. 14, 2025. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
“We’re hearing now about the ‘Great Deportation’ once Trump enters the presidency,” said Pastor Juan Fierro, who runs the Buen Samaritano shelter in Juárez, as he scrolled through a daily count of shelter residents on his computer. On Jan. 14, there were 24, most of them Mexican.
The shelter would typically house 100 to 150 people at this time of year, but stricter enforcement by Mexican officials at the southern border has decreased the number of migrants arriving at the border city, he said.
He said he expects the deportations to focus on Mexicans “because it seems that the president (Sheinbaum) wants only Mexicans.” Mexico would have to agree to accept deportees from other countries, such as Cuba and Venezuela, that generally don’t accept their nationals deported by the United States.
Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum at one point stated she would only accept deportees from that country, but, earlier this month, said Mexico would be open to accepting deportees from other countries, the Associated Press reported. Sheinbaum said Mexico could limit it to certain nationalities or request compensation, according to the AP.
Fierro said the next four years are uncertain when it comes to immigration, advising migrants not to attempt to cross any time soon.
“It would be like throwing money in the trash because Trump’s policies will not change,” he said. “Maybe they can think about going back in four years.”
Last week, Gonzales and Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, introduced the Remain in Mexico Act – Trump’s 2019 policy that allowed the government to return to Mexico migrants who entered the country illegally through the southern border to await their immigration proceedings. Formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, the program sent more than 70,000 people back to Mexico during Trump’s first term.
Mexico would have to agree to the program, as then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador did during Trump’s first term. Human rights activists said the program led to widespread kidnapping, extortion and sexual assaults of migrants in Mexico.
Escobar said the U.S. has long depended on Mexico as a tool to control migration – often unsuccessfully. She said much of that under Trump’s first term was more “bullying” than a diplomatic effort to work together.
“We’re not going to see an end to migration,” she said about Trump’s policies. “We’re going to see an increase in human smugglers using other routes and other ways to get people in. And we have to have a strong, positive partnership with Mexico in order to address this and to confront it.”
‘Building a wall of obstacles’
Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, which focuses on research and advocacy on migrant and human rights, rattled off a list of orders, policies and initiatives the organization is closely following: Mass deportations, the Laken Riley Act, Remain in Mexico, the Congressional reconciliation spending package, the reinstatement of Title 42.
“They’re going to use everything they can to get rid of any chance of getting asylum at the border,” Isacson said. “They’ll make it so there is just about no reason ever to turn yourself into a Border Patrol agent. And if you do, and you try to get asylum, you risk deportation, either to your home country or, increasingly, to Mexico. And this is all while they’re physically trying to deport everybody from the U.S. interior also.”
That will lead to people seeking more dangerous ways to migrate, he said, including dehydration in the desert or in the hands of smugglers.
“What else will you have? There will be no humanitarian parole. There’ll be no CBP One. There’s reports of attempts of a new Title 42 over any disease,” he said of the public health order that quickly expelled migrants to Mexico enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“They’re building a wall of obstacles all around the immigration and nationality act that gives people the right to apply for asylum,” he said.
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At the Union Plaza Park at the eastern edge of Downtown El Paso, a 27-year-old from Venezuela bundled up with layers of hoodies as the sun set Jan. 15. He would only give his name as Paco, saying he crossed into the United States a few days prior without turning himself into Border Patrol.
“We had to come and take our chances now before Trump,” he said, explaining he “paid a lot of money” to come in through southern New Mexico, avoiding the Texas National Guard and Department of Public Safety troopers guarding the border in El Paso.
“I don’t know if it would be worse to be caught and deported now or after living here for several years,” he said in Spanish.
He hadn’t connected with the cousin he was supposed to meet here, and said he planned to travel to meet other family in California with or without him over the weekend. “Aver si no se quemó todo,” he said. “Let’s see if it hasn’t all burned down.”
That military presence Paco sought to avoid at the border might be bolstered under the Trump administration, Isacson said. What El Paso and other border communities can expect when it comes to militarizing the border, he said, won’t be totally unfamiliar.
“El Paso knows exactly what that looks like,” Isacson said. “You already have this huge (Texas) National Guard deployment on the line, shooting pepper balls at migrants and their children, putting up wire, buoys, walls.”
LEARN MORE: DPS jeopardizes El Paso safety with high-speed chases, county attorney says
Isacon said border security could become federalized, though state support might be bolstered under the incoming administration. He said other border states – California, Arizona, New Mexico – might follow Texas in its initiatives.
“Operation Lone Star could end up being a start, could end up being the proof of concept, for the larger efforts,” he said of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s controversial border security initiative.
Abbott and other Texas Republicans repeatedly state the program was necessary because of Biden’s failure to secure the border.
Under that rationale, Escobar said, “one would anticipate that having Donald Trump in the White House and having a Republican trifecta would mean that Operation Lone Star would no longer need to exist.”
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[1] Url:
https://elpasomatters.org/2025/01/19/trump-inauguration-mass-deportations-immigration-policies-impact/
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