As President-elect Donald Trump gets ready to take office for a second term, immigrants and immigration lawyers are preparing for what he’s said will be the “largest deportation in US history.”
In the wake of Trump’s White House victory, immigration groups and lawyers have said they’re being swamped with new clients who are seeking protections.
National immigration lawyer and scholar Elizabeth Ricci shared with the Latin Times that she’s seen a “marked increase in folks trying to legalize and legal folks trying to obtain a more permanent status.”
Based in Florida, Ricci says that Trump’s recent deportation-related announcements have driven those who are undocumented to “live deeper in the shadows” while others are making “an effort to document their lives to be able to show deep roots.”
Trump has tapped several immigration hardliners, Stephen Miller to be his deputy chief of staff for policy and former acting ICE director Tom Homan to be his border czar.
While discussing Homan with The Guardian, Vanessa Cardenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, shared that she sees it as a sign of how Trump is going to handle immigration.
“Trump’s going to try to go big and portray his effort as focused on criminals,” Cardenas said. “But of course, they’re blurring the lines on who is considered a criminal.”
Ricci shared that families are also “preparing for deportation” with Homan’s past stance on zero tolerance and the separation of parents from children. Because of this, Ricci says parents are “putting powers of attorney in place so that their children are taken care of, and their accounts can be accessed, in case they’re arrested and removed.”
Gina Amato Lough, the Directing Attorney of Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, also spoke with the Latin Times about the situation, sharing that she’s been seeing a “higher demand” in clients with a growing “fear that people are feeling as we move toward inauguration.”
“Folks are scrambling right now to assess whether or not they’re eligible for some form of immigration relief. Even people who are currently in status are scrambling to find another status to apply for to protect themselves,” Lough said, adding that “the avenues for relief are really limited.”
To put more perspective into how wide-reaching Trump’s policies could be, a recent study from the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration advocacy group, found that an estimated 4 million mixed-status families could be separated.
Trump’s comments on immigration have been extremely broad throughout his campaign and in the weeks since his victory. During his sit down with NBC’s “Meet the Press” this month, Trump said he would look to end birthright citizenship as a means to stop those with undocumented parents who have their child in the US from having citizenship, but also said he doesn’t want to break up families that have mixed immigration status.
“I don’t want to be breaking up families,” Trump said. “So the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together, and you have to send them all back.”
When it comes to Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who entered the US as children nearly 20 or more years ago and are covered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, Trump said he doesn’t want to see them go.
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“We have to do something about the Dreamers because these are people that have been brought here at a very young age, and many of these are middle-aged people now. They don’t even speak the language of their country,” Trump said before adding that he would “work with the Democrats on a plan.”
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