Jan. 4—ROCHESTER — Some time after Donald Trump’s presidential election victory in November, a group of Hispanic families and students met with an attorney at John Marshall High School to discuss how to plan for the looming possibility of workplace raids and mass deportations.
The gathering included those at risk of deportation due to their undocumented immigration status but who had lived and worked in the U.S. long enough to raise children who are U.S. citizens, according to a person present at the meeting.
The parents were planning for a grim, uncertain future and the prospect of being separated from their children should they be swept up in a raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. To avoid having their children end up in foster care, the parents were learning how to delegate to a neighbor, relative or person of trust the legal authority to care for their children should they end up in detention and/or deported.
The meeting — and scores of others like it taking place — are signs of the lessons learned in past workplace raids when undocumented workers were detained by ICE and children returned from school and found their parents gone and their homes empty — and the fear and wariness taking hold in these communities.
“We need to be ready for anything,” Miriam Goodson, executive director of Alliance of Chicanos, Hispanics, and Latin Americans, a nonprofit organization.
Trump, who campaigned on cracking down on illegal immigration, has pledged to begin a mass deportation effort on Day 1 of his second White House term, which begins in two weeks after his inauguration on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.
What such a mass deportation effort would look like remains unclear at the moment given the scope, scale and cost of such an undertaking that could include makeshift detention camps and deployment of military personnel. Trump has said his administration’s efforts will spare no expense and target people with criminal histories, but indicated it could go beyond deporting criminals.
“I think you have to do it,” Trump said when asked whether he plans to deport every person who has entered the country illegally.
Immigrant attorneys are operating on the assumption that Trump will make good — or attempt to make good — on his pledge given how central the issue was to his campaign.
“I think that we have to take the president-elect at his word,” said Robyn Meyer-Thompson, an attorney at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. “We saw unprecedented things in the first administration, not limited to family separation where we saw children younger than 10 years old being separated from their parents.”
Mass deportations are a not uncommon chapter in U.S. history. A common thread to the biggest efforts have involved the use of high-pressure publicity campaigns to stoke such fear among immigrants that they choose to “self-deport.”
And history demonstrates that fear is sometimes all that’s needed, Kelly Lytle-Hernandez, a professor of history and African American studies at UCLA, told Politico in a Dec. 29, 2024, article headlined “The US has Deported Immigrants En Masse Before.”
“Strongly encouraging and frightening people into leaving will be a main strategy,” Lytle-Hernandez said.
Whether by design or not, the rhetoric used by Trump officials to describe what will happen in the early days of his administration is ramping up fear and tension among immigrant groups. Border czar Tom Homan used the phrase “shock and awe” on a podcast to describe what the public can expect to see on Day 1 in terms of border and immigration-related enforcement.
Potentially, it’s hard to imagine any U.S. communities that won’t be affected by Trump’s measures. There are between 7,500 and 8,000 undocumented people in Southeastern Minnesota, estimates Phil Wheeler, a former director of the Rochester-Olmsted Planning Department and past chair of the Southeast Minnesota Interfaith Immigrant Legal Defense Fund.
And slightly more than 42,000 people in Minnesota are seeking asylum in immigration court, according to the Syracuse Transactional Access Clearinghouse. The vast majority of the cases do not involve criminal charges but a civil violation of entering the country illegally.
But even if the Trump administration prioritizes the “low-hanging fruit” of immigrants with criminal convictions, how criminals are defined will be key to how wide the net is cast. Many undocumented people may have lived in the U.S. much of their lives. They may have married a U.S. citizen, raised a family here and lived a largely blameless life. But if they get scooped up in a raid and found to be guilty of a misdemeanor assault 20 years ago, they could face deportation, too.
And many believe that the Trump administration will be given considerable leeway to carry his pledge to fix a broken immigration system.
Another challenge for the undocumented who are detained is that the immigration court process does not afford the same protections as criminal court. Legally speaking, a person going through the immigration court process should be protected from deportation, immigration attorneys say.
But those protections are not nearly as robust for immigrants in detention. There is no right to an attorney in the process. The burden of proof rests with the defendant, not the state. And they may be unfamiliar with how to request a bond.
And unlike in criminal court where the defendant usually pays a percentage of the bond that is posted, in immigration court the full bond of, say, $5,000 must be paid for the detainee to be released from custody. Faced with an array of hurdles stacked against them, many such people may likely give up and acquiesce to being deported, attorneys say.
“The problem is that detention can be very coercive,” Meyer-Thompson said. “What we worry about is that a person might be arrested and told their case isn’t very strong and that they’re not going to win their case. And so if people aren’t aware of their rights and their options, then they might sign away their right to appear before a judge.”
It is the primary reason that immigration attorneys are advising people to consult with an immigration attorney so they can know their immigration options.
The situation is prompting conversations among local pro-immigration and faith groups on how they can best support such people. Southeast Minnesota Interfaith Immigrant Legal Defense Fund (SMIILD), founded during the first Trump Administration, devotes its resources solely to providing attorneys to people in ICE custody. But now it is considering a shift in strategy. Instead of using its resources to hire attorneys, it is debating paying for immigration clinics to advise people on this uncertain terrain, said Wheeler
“We’re talking about what people need, what would be a good idea,” Wheeler said.
It’s not the only idea being bandied about. During a zoom meeting hosted by SMIILD that included immigration attorneys, religious leaders, Rochester Public School officials and immigration groups, a range of ideas was discussed on how to assist those at risk of deportation and their families.
For example, one attorney emphasized the need for children of immigrant parents to get passports, so they can return to the U.S. if their parents are deported and they go with them. They also grappled with the predicament many families will find themselves in if the primary breadwinner is deported. They are much more likely to be dependent on the government for basic necessities.
Providing people facing deportation with backpacks was another idea. One of the participants in the Zoom meeting was a representative with Conversations With Friends, a pro-immigration group that provides “Dignity” backpacks to people who expect to be deported. The backpacks contain clothing, bottled water, hygiene products and space for their legal documents.
Often deported with little more than the clothes on their backs, the backpacks give the immigrant the basics at a stressful time, said Steve Kraemer, a leader of the group.
Conversations with Friends gives away 200 backpacks a year, but he expects the number to increase dramatically.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but all I know is that the demand for greater resources for Conversations with Friends could grow dramatically, and somehow I need to find funding to be able to do that,” Kraemer said.