Donald Trump: The threat of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants arouses fear among them

Nora didn’t sleep during election night. As Donald Trump gained votes and the map of the United States turned red, her fear of deportation grew. Although both of her daughters are U.S. citizens, Nora is undocumented. She came to the United States twenty-four years ago, after Hurricane Mitch devastated her village in Nicaragua.

“I’m up all night, I can’t sleep. The fear has returned,” she said after asking that her identity remain anonymous due to her immigration status.

The Republican campaign insisted on a slogan that sums up the starting point of Trump’s second term on undocumented immigrants: “Mass deportations now!”

This proposal became a daily topic of discussion between Nora, 47, and her daughters Christell and Leah, 30 and 19, during the final weeks of the campaign, during which they decided to develop a family response plan to the eventual triumph of the Republican candidate.

“We sat down and talked because we were very anxious and we were very scared,” Nora recalls. “My daughters told me that if I made the decision to leave the United States, they would come with me.”

Christell and Leah cannot file an immigration application for their mother because she entered irregularly through the southern border. “Trump’s triumph terrifies us,” alarms Nora.

The former president won more than the 270 electoral college votes he needed to cement his position as the winner of the election.

Additionally, Republicans have gained control of the Senate, which will allow Trump to advance his government initiatives.

JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, said in an interview with ABC that the mass deportation of migrants could initially affect a million undocumented immigrants.

However, migration law experts question the cost and feasibility of this proposal. Some estimate that maintaining a plan like the one proposed by Trump would cost around US$100 billion.

Nearly 11 million illegal immigrants lived in the United States through 2022, according to the most recent information released by the Department of Homeland Security.

Nearly half of this population comes from Mexico. It is followed by those of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

Illegal immigrants make up 3.3 percent of U.S. residents, and at least 8.3 million of them are workers, according to the Pew Research Center.

Most undocumented migrants are concentrated in six states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

However, the Pew Research Center warns that this picture may have changed over the past two years due to three factors that are not yet reflected in official statistics:

• the record figure of more than 2 million arrests at the border with Mexico;
• the increase of more than 1 million asylum applications;
• the arrival of 500,000 migrants benefiting from humanitarian permits (speech) from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua.

In 2000, when Nora lost her job after Hurricane Mitch, the hardest decision wasn’t to emigrate to the United States with her husband.

The most painful part was leaving their daughter Christell, who was 6 at the time, with her grandmother.

It took the couple four years to raise the money to get Christell out of Nicaragua and to the United States. A year later, their second daughter, Leah, was born in Miami.

During his first term (2017-2021), Trump responded to the increase in irregular entries of migrants through the southern border, with a controversial order: separate parents from their children to discourage families from emigrating to the United States without follow legal procedures.

This situation has brought so much fear into Nora’s house. Her daughter Leah began publicly defending her against the threat of deportation, even though she was only 12 years old.

Leah Cayasso became “Leah, the Activist” on social media (@LeahTheActivist) and identified herself as a “proud daughter of migrants.”

“They want to take my mother away from me,” Leah said from a stage at an event against Trump’s immigration policies in 2018, near the White House in Washington DC. I don’t like living with this fear. I can’t sleep. I can’t study. I’m stressed,” she said in tears in front of an audience that seemed huge to her.

“I’m afraid they’ll take my mom while she’s at work, driving, or at home,” she said at the time.

Six years after this experience, Leah is no longer involved in activism, although she supports her mother’s cause to find an alternative to obtaining citizenship.

“I had the hope of a very young girl who didn’t quite understand what was happening. It was difficult not to see results and, at a certain point, I lost a little hope. Now “I understand the situation, I think the best option for my mother is for TPS to be approved for Nicaraguans,” Leah says over the phone.

Temporary Protected Status, known by the acronym TPS in English, offers protection to citizens who cannot safely return to their country, as is the case of Cuba, Haiti or Venezuela.

The United States Department of Homeland Security offers TPS to citizens of countries facing three “temporary conditions”: armed conflict, natural or health disasters (such as epidemics), or other “extraordinary” circumstances.

Since Nora’s profile does not match the conditions required by the United States to benefit from the humanitarian permit for Nicaraguans, she considers that the quickest option to obtain legalization is a TPS.

“In these twenty-four years that I have spent in the United States, where I have worked and paid taxes, there has been no other mechanism for me to change my status. How difficult to think of returning to Nicaragua. “

Nora’s immigration status is the biggest concern of the entire family.

In fact, Christell and Leah voted for the first time in this election with the hope that if Kamala Harris won, she could do “something for migrants.”

During her campaign, Harris promised that she would seek to speed up the asylum process and open legal pathways for undocumented immigrants to obtain citizenship.

But since Trump’s victory, Christell and Leah fear they will be forced to separate from their mother.

“I feel a little sad and disappointed to see how many people supported Trump,” assures Christell. “It affects us a lot to know that there is once again a threat to our migrant community, especially to our family.”

In the exercise of imagining the next steps they will take, Christell acknowledges that emigrating from the United States “is a difficult decision.”

However, she hopes Biden will take a last-minute step and decide to grant TPS to Nicaraguans.

Amid the uncertainty, Leah clings to one certainty: “We will do anything for my mom.”