Areli Hernandez was born in Mexico, but she came to the United States without documentation when she was just four years old. She grew up in California, graduated from high school and college, got involved in the immigrant rights movement, and – in 2012 – applied for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
“When it first was announced that June morning in 2012, I could not believe it,” she told KNX News’ daily political show Countdown 2024.
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Thanks to DACA, Hernandez has been able to work in the U.S. and avoid deportation for more than a decade. But all of that could change when President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in.
“One of the things I'm constantly doing is looking over my shoulder,” Hernandez said. “I don't know who is behind me and who is looking for me, because we've seen in the past that operations happen when folks are driving, when folks are living their daily lives, and though I'm protected, I have a card that says that I will not be deported, I still carry the fear of deportation.”
Trump has promised to launch the largest deportation operation in American history. If he delivers on this promise, millions of undocumented immigrants could be deported – many of them, like Hernandez, to countries they haven’t stepped foot in since they were toddlers.
But will it actually happen? According to former federal immigration judge Dana Leigh Marks, immigration law experts think Trump’s plan is “completely unrealistic.”
“The majority of people who have lived in the United States in an undocumented manner have been here for more than a decade,” she told Countdown 2024. “There are many barriers to President Trump's plan to try to deport millions – there are resource problems, there is legal bars that exist to many of the plans he has suggested."
Marks said many state governments and foreign countries have signaled they won’t cooperate with Trump’s deportations. She also noted that undocumented immigrants are guaranteed due process, and there’s already a backlog of more than 3 million immigration cases pending in court.
But does that mean the fear among undocumented immigrants is unwarranted? Yes and no, Marks said.
“I do believe that in the short term, there's going to be a tremendous amount of chaos. There's going to be efforts by the new administration to try to take people into custody and to try to remove them,” she said. “There will be legal challenges that will last for years, perhaps even beyond the Trump administration, which will prevent that, because our law often requires that the status quo be maintained during a lengthy litigation.”
And while legal challenges and the backlog of immigration cases may slow things down, Hernandez noted that not everyone who faces deportation will go before a judge.
“One of the practices that we have sadly seen is that immigration will come after someone and they will use different tactics to get them to sign a voluntary departure,” she said. “Many times, folks don't have an attorney. This happens very quickly by the time that they are apprehended and you know, put before an intimidating situation, and they're asked to sign a document not knowing what it is, and it’s actually a document that is giving away their right to see a judge.”
Despite L.A.’s new sanctuary city ordinance, federal immigration officials can still operate in the city. Hernandez said that during the last Trump administration, some people in the L.A. area were deported “within hours.”
“And [the sanctuary law] also doesn't protect the U.S. citizens, spouses and children of individuals who are targeted in these kinds of sweeps,” Marks added. “Their family is broken up. It is just as bad as the family separation that occurred at the U.S. border in the past administration when families were separated.”
Listen to the full interview above, and catch new episodes of Countdown 2024 every weekday at 2:30 p.m.
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