Sowing terror, Trump’s anti-immigrant strategy

David Brooks and Jim Cason

Correspondents

La Jornada Newspaper
Friday, January 17, 2025, p. 5

New York and Washington. They must feel afraidrepeat the next czar border, making it clear that sowing fear among migrants is at the center of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant strategy, which is already having an effect throughout the country even before he reaches the White House.

Parents are forced to prepare contingency plans for their homes. Throughout the country, conversations are repeated with their children about what to do if the migra arrives, or if the parents do not return home from work or if they cannot pick up their children when they leave school, because they were detained. Apparently, the incoming government is dedicated to scaring children.

Tom Homan, appointed czar Trump’s border guard, this week proposed a hotline for citizens to report immigrants they believe are illegal and that they have committed crimes (and something similar already exists), as another initiative to generate fear, along with the warning of massive raids and other forms of persecution. To a large extent, the objective is made clear by Homan: that immigrants are afraid.

An elementary school teacher in a New York public school tells how she was forced to alert her third-grade students – that is, eight years old – that a day might come when she would be absent. I wanted them to hear it from me, and not someone else who would have to explain why I disappeared.. She works legally under the DACA program, which benefits more than half a million undocumented immigrants brought to the country by their parents when they were still children, but Trump and his team threaten to annul that measure.

An Ecuadorian who cleans houses half jokes that, after Trump returns to power, many homes will be dirty, since could be the last time you see me. His nine-year-old son was born in the United States and what worries him most is what to do with him if they take me.

Undocumented agricultural laborers on the east coast of the country are wondering if this will be the last year that they work the tomato fields and other crops, and that perhaps they should consider returning to their countries.

Those who are dedicated to delivering food, medicine and more – the delivery–, who along with cooks, waiters, supermarket and distribution workers were described as essential workers during the pandemic and were key in keeping entire cities functioning, they suddenly face an increasingly ominous future full of potential danger. Thanks could be a deportation order.

The atmosphere generated by the constant verbal attack of the incoming government and repeated during more than a year of electoral campaign is increasingly ominous for all undocumented migrants (according to new calculations, some 13 million in the United States, with the largest group of Mexicans ).

Immigration lawyers across the country are preparing for the offensive against their clients, who express anxiety and anguish about what awaits their families. José Pertierra, veteran immigration lawyer in Washington, comments to The Day that the strategy of Trump and his people is sow terror in the immigrant community… And the strategy has worked, they are terrified. And that is what he is going to try to do from his first day with the executive orders that he is going to sign: sow terror.

Pertierra affirms that in the long term this will not prosper. “What I try to do when they come to the office terrified is tell them: ‘this is going to take time, you won’t be able to massively deport everyone you say you want to deport.’ People still have the right to go to court and hear their cases… Also, over time, the American people themselves will turn against measures that are inhumane, be they businessmen who need workers in their restaurants, hotels and camps. this country, as if under construction – who is going to rebuild Los Angeles? There is an economic need that will generate support for migrants, we must have confidence that this will happen and try to generate it while continuing to litigate before the courts to defend ourselves against this atrocity.”

Communities prepare

Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, director of the Center for Mexican Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and advisor to migrant organizations, including the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations, commented that the community is preparing for Trump’s threats.

I was in Oxnard working with the migrant indigenous community, mostly Mixtecs from Oaxaca and Guerrero, where a forum was organized to inform the community what to do to resist the coming raids. Without a doubt, people are very concerned, but there is an incredible response. In that forum, that community organization had lawyers and training such as the massive distribution of the well-known red card, which has the rights of people without documents printed on it, including not opening their doors to the immigration authorities without a search warrant, etc. And also what to do in case they are deported to be preparedreported in an interview with The Day.

“The feeling is that this is coming, Trump is going to take office on Monday and we have to be prepared… Immigration is very visible. Given this, a network of observation and measures to take care of oneself is being formed. “People are very attentive, very willing to inform themselves,” he added, emphasizing that the agents and officials of the Trump administration “are not going to find a passive, desperate victim, but rather a community that is informed and many are developing specific plans to protect themselves.” how to resist….” Also There is a lot of reflection on what happened: these are the consequences of the elections, and therefore, they are resuming their conviction of the need to change things, look towards the next elections and take it very seriously, there was a lot of talk about the abstentionism that so much It hurt the Democrats. All this impacts the entire Mexican community.

Now, moving forward, says Rivera Salgado, visibility, massive protest will be important, but above all how political resistance is remade in the face of the incoming government’s offensive.