It’s a cloudy Friday morning and there are few men milling around the parking lot at Southside Presbyterian Church. This is where day laborers, many of them undocumented immigrants, congregate hoping to get an offer to work for the day.
While they worry daily if they will work or not, if you talk to the workers, you’ll find their worries run deeper: their future. Specifically, they are concerned about what will come after Jan. 20 when Donald Trump takes office.
“Trump is scaring people,” said Humberto Lopez Robles, a day laborer.
With the inauguration of our next president days away, the concerns and worries among many immigrants are unmistakable. Will Trump the candidate be Trump the president? Will deportations, already a concern, tick upward? Will local law enforcement, emboldened by a more aggressive immigration policy, ramp up stops of Latino motorists? And will Trump’s campaign racist rhetoric become a new political staple for Trump supporters inside and outside government?
Lopez Robles is willing to cut the President-elect some slack for now. Not everything he says he’ll be able to do because Trump changes from one day to another, said the Sonoran-born migrant worker. But Trump remains an uncertainty which worries immigrants, including himself, Lopez Robles added.
“I worry about being detained,” he added in Spanish.
To alleviate the concerns among Mexican immigrants and to answer their many questions, a coalition of community groups planned a forum Saturday afternoon at the John D. Valenzuela Youth Center in South Tucson, about six blocks east of Southside Presbyterian Church.
“We want the community to know their rights,” said Belem Chagolla, a member of Paisanos Unidos, one of the groups in the coalition. “With the change in the presidency we want to bring some calm to people and answer their questions.”
From Chagolla’s and Lopez Robles’ perspectives, their concerns are valid and real.
Trump initiated his improbable campaign lashing out at Mexican immigrants and a promise to build a big wall on the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border. And throughout his campaign, his bellicose promises to get tough on Mexican immigrants, as well as Muslims, and to repeal President Obama’s temporary residency relief for young undocumented immigrants known as DACA, fueled his jingoistic campaign.
Initially many Mexican and Latino immigrants might have laughed off Trump’s presidential campaign as they took turns batting around Trump piñatas but as his campaign took wind in the Republican primaries, his words built up dark clouds over immigrant families. In August, a day after meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, a blustery Trump landed in Phoenix and in a speech rocked his base with his commitment to close the border. And since his Electoral College victory, Trump, who lost the popular vote, has not rolled back on his promises.
“What is going to happen to the Dreamers?” asked Chagolla in a telephone interview, referring to the young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country when they were children and who were given temporary work and residency permits.
Chagolla takes Trump’s words seriously. He has called for a “deportation force,” which has instilled widespread uncertainty among families and individuals who have little legal protection.
But undocumented immigrants do, in fact, have rights, although too many are unaware that they do.
“I’m afraid but I have rights,” said Chagolla who is not a legal resident although her husband is and their children are U.S. citizens. Those legal rights include a hearing before an immigration judge which can keep undocumented immigrants from being immediately deported and allow them to be released on bond.
“The Constitution and laws protect me,” Chagolla added.
The few legal rights afforded to undocumented workers just might be a sufficient wall of protection. That’s the beautiful wall that the President-elect will have to climb over.
