The most immediate risk after next week’s U.S. presidential transition isn’t to residents of those nations Donald Trump has mused about invading. It’s to the millions of people inside the United States who are about to enter four years of fear: the undocumented migrants Trump has vowed to deport en masse.
They include young people who arrived as children and whose entire life’s memories exist exclusively inside the U.S.
These people are preparing in myriad ways. They’re downloading a digital panic button to alert loved ones, should federal agents arrive. They’re studying their rights and saving lawyers’ phone numbers.
Families are being encouraged to plan for the worst: to have food, shelter and child care ready should the adults disappear one day.
Their situation will enter the spotlight on Wednesday, when U.S. senators will have a chance to question Trump’s pick to lead the border and deportation agencies at her confirmation hearing for homeland security secretary.
“It’s paralyzing fear,” said Saúl Rascón Salazar, who arrived in the country 18 years ago, when he was five. His Mexican family came on a temporary visa and never left. Now he’s a college graduate and works in fundraising for a California private school.
“I’m saying [this] as someone who hates fear-mongering and who stands completely against it. [But] I don’t think things are looking good. In terms of everything — emotionally, financially, rhetorically. I don’t see this situation getting better.”
These young people didn’t expect to be here again.
Four years ago, they were optimistic. Joe Biden, who was just elected U.S. president, supported a program to let them stay in the country, and talk of a new immigration law lingered in the air.
Those hopes then evaporated. Congress lacked the votes for a law, Trump was re-elected and migrants now face a two-pronged threat — from the next president and the courts.
Reality strikes on election night
Rascón said he felt hopeful, right up to election night. He never believed Trump would win. But the new reality sank in as he took in the Nov. 5 election returns with friends in Arizona.
“It was quite a dour, dark vibe in the room,” he said, recalling how he and his friends started ticking through things that would change.
Rascón is an international relations grad from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, so, he said, his first thoughts drifted abroad to Ukraine and the Middle East, and then to domestic issues like abortion, minority rights and gun laws.
Only after that, he said, did he start thinking about immigration, and he insists it actually took a few days for his own personal reality to truly hit home.
For example, Rascón said, he urges people in families like his, if they use social media like he does, to avoid publishing their specific hangouts and whereabouts.
They should set aside money for lawyers, for moving fees and, in the bleakest scenario, for long-term babysitters, he said.
Trump insists he isn’t eager to deport young people like Rascón.
He is one of the more than half a million people enrolled 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). It indefinitely delays their deportation if they arrived as youngsters, went to school or work and had a clean criminal record.
U.S. 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 his plan and the potential impact.
Trump tries reassuring young ‘Dreamers’
In a recent interview, Trump suggested he’d deport these young people last, referring to them by a common nickname, “Dreamers”; the incoming president even said he’d like Congress to protect them with a permanent law.
“We have to do something about the Dreamers because these are people that have been brought here at a very young age,” Trump told NBC in December.
“They don’t even speak the language of their country. And yes, we’re going to do something about the Dreamers.”
But there’s ample reason for skepticism. “They’re just hollow words,” Rascón said.
After all, in his first term, Trump tried cancelling the DACA program. By his own words, he would even deport entire families where the children were born in the U.S. and are full-fledged American citizens. In addition to that, there’s a legal challenge to DACA winding its way through the courts.
To top it all off, Trump’s allies vow to punish and prosecute people who interfere with deportations.
One young woman, a college student in Texas who was interviewed by CBC News, illustrates the point Trump raised: that this land, the United States, is the only land she remembers. (The CBC has agreed to keep the woman’s name confidential, as she fears being deported for speaking publicly about her experiences).
She described being brought by car from El Salvador at age two. She received permission a few years ago to leave and re-enter the U.S. to see an ailing grandparent in her native country, describing it as a culture shock.
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump unveiled some cabinet picks over the weekend, including vocal immigration hardliners Stephen Miller and Tom Homan — who will be tasked with Trump’s promise to carry out the largest deportation in American history.
The woman recalled one interaction with an El Salvador street vendor who referred to her as “chele,” or white. Others started calling her a Mexican. Although she speaks Spanish well, her language is inflected by the expressions of the many Mexican Americans around her.
As for the possibility of being treated like a criminal now, she calls it cruel.
“I didn’t choose to come to the U.S.,” she said. “How is that 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 sibling are completely undocumented, he’s in the DACA program and his two younger siblings are U.S.-born citizens.
Trump has said whole families like these could be deported. His incoming border czar later clarified that he can’t deport actual U.S. citizens — but if their parents get expelled, they can decide whether to take their kids with them.
It’s not always clear where they’d 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 toddler when her parents took a trip to the U.S. 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 out of class the day after Trump was elected to meet with her parents and a lawyer and discuss next steps, like whether to flee the country and whether to hide.
Her situation has changed dramatically since then: Mahmud just got permanent residency through a relative, which means, in theory, that she’s spared. She’s even allowed to travel internationally and has visited Canada three times.
But on election night, she was stricken by grief, thinking about hundreds of thousands of other Dreamers who lack the safety she’s found.
On her drive home from work that night, she heard of Trump’s early lead on the radio and tried not to weep at the wheel. She got home, opened multiple screens and broke down.
“I cried the entire night,” Mahmud said. “I could not stop.”
She likens it to survivor’s guilt.
Mahmud has promised her friends in the DACA movement that she’ll keep supporting them and protesting with them.
She described texting one friend after the election: “I will be your human shield if I have to be,” Mahmud said, recalling the message.
But she acknowledges that her own situation isn’t guaranteed. Trump and his team have mused about stripping certain people’s residency and challenging the U.S. Constitution’s citizenship rules.
Being a human shield at a protest is not without risks, either. A permanent resident could still face deportation if convicted of certain crimes.
For undocumented migrants and their allies, the four years of fear begin when Trump takes the oath of office in Washington, D.C., on Monday at noon ET.
