The Mass Deportation Reign of Fear Takes Shape

Maribel Hastings

Posted on Nov. 28, 2024

While President-elect Donald Trump finetunes his promise of mass deportations, civil rights and immigrant defense groups at the national, state, and local levels are discussing how to mount a defense against a plan about which few specifics are known, but which has the potential to generate humanitarian, economic, legal, and constitutional chaos in the United States.

Trump plans to declare a national emergency in order to have various tools at his disposal. One of them is the use of the military to implement his plan for mass deportations, including setting up installations to house the greatest number of immigrants possible. On top of that, the military would assist ICE agents and the state national guards to detain people, all under the Insurrection Act which allows him to deploy the armed forces to suppress riots, or when the implementation of laws is being obstructed.

It’s a law that has not been updated in more than 150 years and carries grave risks for civil rights violations and which, in the past, has been used to suppress demonstrations and strikes.

Still, some question whether this nightmare will concretize and if the United States is ready to write another ugly chapter in its history. Only the idea of having military and police forces roaming neighborhoods should alarm anyone.

In a nation where minorities are the majority, how are they going to know who the undocumented people are? How many citizens will end up ensnared in some immigration raid or deported? Prior to the elections, various media outlets quoted naturalized Hispanics who voted for Trump despite having undocumented spouses or relatives, and they said that Trump’s plan wouldn’t touch them because the president-elect will focus on “criminals.” The “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, reiterated last week that no undocumented person is off the table.

Anti-immigrant laws have been tried in some states, with disastrous results.

I was in Arizona and Alabama when the anti-immigrant laws SB 1070 and HB 56 were implemented, in 2010 and 2011 respectively. In Arizona, the use of racial profiling against citizens and authorized residents was rampant. The damage to the economy, evident.

I spent more time in Alabama and saw the terror that this type of law generates, not only among undocumented people, but among their citizen and permanent resident relatives. I saw US citizen children who had to stop going to school or seeing a doctor when sick, because their parents were afraid to leave the house for fear of being detained and deported. Who went hungry because their parents were afraid to go to the supermarket, and depended on the charity of churches and community based groups. I spoke with farmers whose crops rotted because their farm workers stopped working. I interviewed business owners who supported the law at first, during the initial furor fueled by prejudice, but later lost customers who frequented their barber shops, restaurants, supermarkets, and many other businesses. I saw neighborhoods revived by immigrants turn into ghost towns.

And on more than one occasion I witnessed entire families, including US citizen children who only spoke English, packing their belongings into cars and leaving in the middle of the night en route to another state and, in some cases, on to México.

But the persecution Trump proposes is national. And it is not limited to undocumented people with a criminal history or who recently arrived at the border, but those who have been living and working in the country for decades, paying taxes, married to U.S. citizens, with children and sometimes grandchildren who are citizens. This includes immigrants protected by TPS, DACA, humanitarian parole, and asylum seekers. And there’s no doubt that citizens will be the victims of raids and deportations.

It has happened before. The repatriation of Mexicans in the 1930s to “free up” jobs for Americans in the middle of the Great Depression resulted in the deportation of 2 million people, 60% of whom were U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, reported Time magazine. The Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his “Operation Wetback” from the 1950s removed more than a million Mexicans from the country, including U.S. citizens.

Trump is looking to stop issuing identity documents like passports and Social Security cards to children born in the United States to undocumented parents, The New York Times reported.

Trump’s picks for his cabinet are the best sign that law and order are not priorities for this president. The people he chooses are just rubber stamps for extremism. They say be careful what you wish for, and even those who supported Trump could see themselves affected by the tentacles of his mass deportations reign of fear — and its devastating effect on the economy, civil rights, families, and communities.

Maribel Hastings is a Senior Advisor to América’s Voice.