This article appears in the February 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Across the country, some Americans are steeling themselves for the moment when agents of the federal government, whether from the military or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), storm into their communities and deport anyone suspected of lacking legal documentation. These preparations are happening across a wide scale, with nonprofits and legal organizations dusting off strategies from the first Trump administration, teachers discussing plans in break rooms, and mixed-status couples marrying to get their documents in order.
During the 2024 campaign, President Trump promised to enact the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history. Such an act would take an immense coordination of federal, state, and local law enforcement entities, including the National Guard and local police departments. Democratic-governed states would almost certainly throw sand in the gears, as some are already planning to do.
Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, has said that any immigrants who pose “public safety and national security threats” will be targeted for deportation first. Rhetoric that paints America’s 45 million immigrants as “threats” to public safety is a key Republican strategy to drum up support for mass deportations. One of the first bills passed by the Republican House in the new Congress was the Laken Riley Act, after the 22-year-old nursing student who was killed in February 2024 by a Venezuelan man who had entered the country illegally. The bill would require any undocumented person or DACA recipient arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting-related offenses to be detained, even if they are ultimately never charged with a crime.
The criminal justice system has long been a mechanism for deportations. Since 2015, 82 percent of ICE arrests have occurred within a local, state, or federal jail, according to Immigration Impact. During the second Trump administration, this connection between ICE and the prison system may be strengthened, with local sheriffs empowered to detain those suspected of being undocumented during even routine stops. Though much of their rhetoric has focused on immigrants already involved with the criminal justice system, Trump, Homan, and other advisers have given no indication that they’d stop there.
Some experts suggest that mass deportations of the sort Trump and his advisers have promised are improbable if not impossible. Despite that, the administration might enact a number of deportation efforts that, though far short of a full-scale mass deportation, would jeopardize the perceived security of immigrant communities, forcing undocumented people into the shadows and out of public life. Rumors have been floated of a high-profile workplace raid in the D.C. area, to instill just this level of fear.
Now, Americans everywhere are preparing for the worst, whether within their families, in the halls of state legislatures, or at nonprofit and legal organizations that work in immigrant communities.
PRISCILLA MONICO MARÍN, THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of the New Jersey Consortium for Immigrant Children (NJCIC), told the Prospect that the group is deep in contingency planning, taking the lessons learned from the first Trump term to hit the ground running on day one of the second. NJCIC represents unaccompanied children and other youth in need of immigration legal help across New Jersey. Founded in 2015 to respond to the 80 percent increase in unaccompanied children in New Jersey over just one year, NJCIC weathered the family separation crisis and operated under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
“Immigration law can and does greatly change and shift from one administration to the next and immigration practitioners must be trained, nimble, and unified,” Monico Marín said. In the lead-up to Trump’s inauguration, NJCIC has been broadening the scope of its legal services, now including rapid response efforts. “This means increased on-the-ground lawyering for young immigrants facing immediate and dangerous consequences stemming from the ripple effect of federal administration policies designed to disenfranchise, detain, and deport,” she explained.
For everyone who manages to find safety and status over the next four years, there will be someone else without the same security.
In the coming months, Monico Marín says that the group will set up Know Your Rights trainings and mobile legal services to support families facing immediate danger of detention or separation. When asked what community groups can do to protect their undocumented members, she emphasized the importance of “sensitive location” designations. “Churches, schools, funeral homes, hospitals, and the like are designated as sensitive locations where, as per current policy, ICE enforcement will not take place. The incoming administration has plans to scrap these designations, which could be catastrophic for immigrant communities as they seek critical and necessary community services,” she said. If these designations are rescinded, Monico Marín recommends that community groups designate certain areas of buildings as “private” and receive training on how to respond to warrants.
For his part, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who called a special legislative session after Trump was elected to plan the state’s resistance strategies, has crafted a rough draft of how the state could respond to mass deportations. The Los Angeles Times reported on a fact sheet titled “Immigrant Support Network Concept,” which describes Newsom’s plan to mobilize California state resources. If the plan goes into action, the California Department of Social Services will create regional hubs to connect “at-risk individuals, their families and communities” with legal services, local government assistance, and other resources. The fact sheet also says that the Social Services Department would direct funding toward nonprofits that can aid in community outreach and legal services.
“While there is a robust network of immigrant-serving organizations and other community supports, there is no centralized coordination mechanism, which limits the ability of providers to effectively leverage available resources; share critical information and expertise; and identify (and adopt) best practices,” the fact sheet states.
SOME AMERICANS DON’T FEEL COMFORTABLE relying on their state or local governments to protect them in case of mass deportation. John and Maria (names changed to protect their identities) are high school sweethearts, now 23 and living together in New Jersey. Maria was born in Brazil but came to the United States with her family when she was 14. The family—Maria, her parents, and her younger sister—overstayed a tourist visa, making them officially undocumented residents in the country.
Growing up, Maria’s family and close friends knew her immigration status, but she rarely told anyone outside of that tight circle, fearing that her family would be vulnerable if word got out. When she and John began dating in their senior year of high school, she waited four months to tell him that she was undocumented.
“I actually didn’t want to tell him,” she said. “My grandmother was here at the time, and she just wanted me to be completely honest, but I was very nervous and scared.”
John laughed as he told his side of the story: “You know, we were in the car, and she’s just crying, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh no, is she moving?’ And then she was like, ‘I’m undocumented.’ And I was like, ‘Oh thank God. That is the least of my worries!’”
Trump’s rise to power has coincided with Maria and John’s biggest milestones. Maria had just moved to the U.S. when he came into office for the first time. John voted for the first time in 2020 after years of being opposed to Trump’s policies and rhetoric. “Before he even won his first election, when he was campaigning, he’s calling Mexicans rapists and criminals and doing the Muslim ban and all this stuff. So I was completely disgusted by everything [he] and his supporters stood for at that point,” he said.
Less than two weeks after Trump won the 2024 election, John and Maria got married. “We got engaged in August, and up until the day of the election, at 9 p.m., we were confident Kamala supporters,” John said. “And frankly, we knew it could happen, but we didn’t think it would. And then reality set in, and we had our marriage date set already by that point.”
Trump’s rhetoric and conservative immigration policy throughout the country had the couple on edge. “We knew there had been talks of that judge in Texas in the Federal Circuit that was shutting down parole in place for green cards and things like that,” said John, referring to a ruling that vacated the Biden administration’s “Keeping Families Together” policy two days after the 2024 election. The policy was created to let the spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens remain in the country while applying for permanent status. “We just knew that it would be good to [get married] as soon as possible, just in case. But we were going to do it no matter what.”
Steered by an immigration lawyer, John and Maria are on their way to securing a green card, and eventually citizenship, for Maria. Once Maria gets her green card, she said, she can apply for her parents and younger sister, allowing them to live in the country legally as well. A successful outcome would grant Maria and her family a sense of security that they haven’t had since their move to the U.S. But the process is difficult and often lonely. “People at Maria’s church have … gone through [the process], but nobody really close in age, or anyone that we talk to. So in a way, it does kind of feel like we’re doing it ourselves. There’s nobody to really help us walk through this other than the immigration lawyer,” said John.
Maria mentioned that some of the other immigrants who attend her church voted for Trump in 2024. “They didn’t experience what me and my family experienced,” she said. “It’s upsetting to see that they don’t really care about the people like their friends that are in different situations.”
For now, the couple will continue their careers and the legal process. Maria works as a nursing assistant while going to grad school for nursing, and John teaches third grade. His school has over 250 bilingual students, nearly all of whom are immigrants who have arrived within the last year. “There’s talk amongst other teachers like, what if all our students get deported, or what if they start leaving because they’re scared of getting deported?” John said. For everyone who manages to find safety and status over the next four years, there will be someone else without the same security.
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