Tucsonans prepare for mass deportations: 'It's a sad and painful time'

But as the eldest, U.S.-born daughter of two undocumented parents, Angeles said that sense of responsibility has been weighing on her since Donald Trump won the presidential election, following repeated campaign promises to “launch the largest deportation effort in American history.”

“It’s often in my head, especially at work,” she said, her voice breaking. “I’m just scared to come back one day and not see my parents at my house.”

Instead of feeling excitement about NAU, Angeles says she can’t help but think about the worst-case scenario. If her parents were to be deported, she’s prepared to delay or leave college and start working full-time to support her younger sister until she finishes high school.

Her parents act calm when discussing how their family would deal with such a situation, but Angeles says she knows they’re stressed.

“I see it by looking at their eyes,” said Angeles, who asked the Arizona Daily Star to only use her first name. “We have so much here. We have community. If they do end up getting deported, they would be losing so much.”

Between the twin threats of Trump’s promised mass deportations, and the passage of Proposition 314 in Arizona — which allows local police to arrest people for immigration violations — many in Southern Arizona’s immigrant community are experiencing fear and anxiety reminiscent of the days of SB1070. That’s Arizona’s notorious “show-me-your-papers” law, passed in 2010, which has been largely nullified by the courts.

“The scary part is both the state and federal attacks combined,” said Carolina Silva, director of immigrant-youth-led Scholarships A-Z, which advocates for education equity for undocumented students.

SB1070 offers lessons for organizers today, although, with Trump in the presidency, it’s harder to predict what the reality will look like, Silva said.

“There’s a sense of, we’ve been on a similar train before but, as we know, Trump is a really chaotic individual. He has really anti-immigration people in his cabinet, so we can’t take much safety or comfort” in past experience, she said.

Amid the uncertainty, many are finding solidarity in Tucson advocacy groups, which are mobilizing to inform the immigrant community about their rights and making plans to defend those vulnerable to deportation.

“We’re going to create a plan of accompaniment and ultimately, a plan of resistance,” said immigrant-rights activist Isabel García, an attorney with Coalición de Derechos Humanos — Human Rights Coalition — and co-founder of Tucson’s “Stop the Hate” collective. “We have to protect our brothers and sisters in the community.”

Advocates and experts say mass deportations won’t begin suddenly; there’s time to make emergency plans, organize important documents and contact lawyers.

Any effort to ramp up deportations will face considerable logistical, financial, diplomatic and legal challenges, including the limits of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s capacity to detain people, the willingness of other countries to accept deportations, and the already massive backlog in U.S. immigration courts, experts say.

Most immigrants who are already settled in the U.S., rather than recent arrivals at the border, can’t be deported without a hearing before an immigration judge.

“Any kind of significant ramp up in enforcement will take time. Obtaining new detention capacity will take months or potentially years,” as will hiring more ICE agents, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at immigrant-rights research group American Immigration Council. “Despite Stephen Miller and others talking in terms of a ‘shock-and-awe’ campaign, I’m deeply skeptical the U.S. government has the capacity to do something like that.”

Angeles’ mother, Monica, who asked that the Star only use her first name, said she wishes she could shield her children from the stress they’re experiencing, but Trump’s re-election has forced them to have hard conversations.

Monica, a housekeeper and immigrant-rights advocate, has a wide smile and is quick to laugh. But her eyes fill with tears when talking about leaving Tucson, which now feels more like home than the one she left in Oaxaca, Mexico, nearly 20 years ago.

Speaking to the Star in Spanish on a recent afternoon, a thick braid of hair draped over her shoulder, Monica recalled the years when she kept the shades drawn and always had the suitcases packed in case they had to leave. She’s warned her children to be careful of police officers who might act more aggressively, emboldened by Proposition 314, as she said happened under SB1070.

“Now we have to prepare, as a community,” she said. “It’s a sad and painful time.”

Community mobilizing

As the sun set on Thursday evening, nearly 50 activists and organizers gathered at Coalición de Derechos Humanos’ community center in South Tucson.

Bouncing between English and Spanish, community members, legal advocates and social-justice activists pulled chairs into circle and hammered out details of an upcoming “Know Your Rights” clinic for undocumented immigrants and allies.

The network of human-rights groups, led by Coalición de Derechos Humanos, is forming committees — including education, political outreach, emergency response and mental health — and scripting role-playing skits on how to respond if detained and questioned about one’s immigration status.

“We need volunteers to be actors,” organizer Jennifer Cervantes announced at the meeting, joking, “It is a dark comedy.”

They’re also seeking allies, U.S. citizen volunteers willing to show up quickly when someone is detained, or to accompany people to required check-ins with ICE, where they could be vulnerable to arrest.

Organizers, some of whom are undocumented themselves, worry they could be targeted, too, said immigration attorney Alba Jaramillo of the Human Rights Coalition, and co-executive director of the Immigration Law and Justice Network.

“We’re going to have to figure out a way to do this that is safe,” she said. “After Jan. 20, it’s going to have to become an underground movement.”

In times of fear, it’s crucial to empower people with knowledge and tools to defend themselves, said Manuel Ruiz, an activist who is also undocumented.

“I think my family, and all immigrant families, will be greatly impacted by the insecurity of leaving your house and not knowing what will happen,” he said in Spanish. “It’s a chaos and a stress that are affecting us greatly.”

He advises maintaining an “emergency kit” with important documents — such as passports, asylum-petition documentation or birth certificates — in a secure place. Undocumented parents should sign power-of-attorney or guardianship papers to ensure someone they trust could care for their children, in case of a sudden detainment.

If questioned during a traffic stop, assert the 5th Amendment right to remain silent, Silva said.

“Don’t say where you were born, don’t respond to their questions. Say, ‘I’m not allowed to say anything without an attorney present,’” she said.

Local law enforcement

Trump’s team has “two camps” with competing ideas of how mass deportations will be carried out, Reichlin-Melnick said.

On one side is Stephen Miller, Trump’s named deputy chief of staff of policy, who describes detention centers constructed by military, deployment of National Guard troops in immigrant-friendly cities and a sweeping effort to round up undocumented people, with no prioritization of those with criminal records, as is currently the policy under the Biden administration.

Tom Homan, the former ICE director who will be Trump’s “border czar,” envisions a “more restrained operation” akin to current ICE operations targeting criminals, but with more resources, scaled-up detention capacity and “collateral arrests” of people near ICE’s intended targets, Reichlin-Melnick said.

Local officials said it’s not yet clear what mass deportations will actually look like, and what kind of pressure local authorities will face to cooperate.

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, a Democrat who faces a recount in his narrow Nov. 5 election victory, told the Star that sheriff’s deputies here will not participate in immigration enforcement.

“I will say this: If Border Patrol called the Sheriff’s Office and said, ’We need you to help us check on businesses and make sure everybody there has immigration status that’s correct,’ we would never do that,” he said.

Nanos said sheriff’s deputies cannot hold people for immigration violations without a court-ordered warrant transferring them to ICE custody.

If ICE needs more detention space, “we’re not putting them in my jail,” he said. “That’s the federal government’s problem.”

Most of Proposition 314’s provisions will only go into effect if a similar law in Texas survives a court challenge. If enacted, it allows local law enforcement to arrest people for immigration violations, but it’s not a mandate, Nanos said.

“I do not plan to put deputies on the border. I need deputies here on my streets,” he said. “My deputies have a job to do, and it has nothing to do with immigration.”’

Facing hard limits on the number of deportations that can happen in four years, the Trump administration will use fear to push people to leave on their own, Reichlin-Melnick said.

“I think it’s important for people to realize the Trump administration is going to weaponize fear here. They’ll weaponize public relations around raids,” he said in a recent interview on The Majority Report. “We’re going to see a lot of cases in the first six months where ICE carries out a pretty standard operation and rather than a small press release coming out from the ICE Public Affairs office, we’ll see the White House blast out media images of raids. ... The idea there is to send people into the shadows and get them to self-deport.”

Economic, social impacts

Deporting 1 million people annually would cost an average of $88 billion per year, including costs of arrests, detentions, legal processing and removals, according to an October report from the American Immigration Council.

The U.S. economy also stands to lose the billions in revenue that undocumented immigrants contribute through sales, income and property taxes.

In 2022, undocumented workers contributed $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes, according to a July study from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. (People without Social Security numbers can pay taxes using Individual Tax Identification Numbers, issued by the Internal Revenue Service.)

That includes $25.7 billion for Social Security and $6.4 billion for Medicare, programs for which undocumented workers are not eligible themselves.

And in Arizona, undocumented immigrants paid $706 million in state and local taxes in 2022.

The Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce is trying to educate Arizona’s U.S. legislators on what mass deportations would mean for the economy, particularly in industries like agriculture, construction and hospitality, said Robert Elias, chamber CEO.

Work shortages in the farming sector could increase reliance on automation and reduce jobs in the long-term, as well as increase food prices, he said.

“Arizona’s economy heavily relies on undocumented immigrant labor,” Elias said. “I don’t believe anybody who says they care about the economy can be for this type of (deportation) policy, regardless of whether they’re Democrat, Republican or Independent.”

Housing advocates say construction workforce shortages could exacerbate housing costs by slowing new homebuilding.

“We are monitoring the situation closely,” David Godlewski, president and CEO of the Southern Arizona Home Builders Association, said in an email. “The home building industry recognizes the importance of a robust and reliable workforce which is integral in meeting the current and future housing needs of our region. It’s a balancing act that requires investing in the workforce training, increasing the number of visas and exploring comprehensive immigration reform.”

U.S. citizens affected, too

Deportations have a ripple effect on the finances of entire households, and the wider community, said Geoff Boyce, research affiliate at the University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute.

In a 2020 study based on interviews with 125 Tucson households, Boyce calculated families incurred an average loss of $24,000 per arrest following a deportation, including lost income and legal fees. Two-thirds of family members in the survey were U.S. citizens, part of mixed-status families, he said.

“What we find is the majority of people impacted by deportations are in fact U.S. citizens,” Boyce said. “That’s a reflection of how undocumented people are not a population that’s isolated and lives apart from the rest of the community. They’re part of our families, our neighborhoods and our lives.”

Using a sports metaphor, Boyce said mass deportation can be understood as an “own goal,” that is, “our own government sabotaging the health and well-being of the people it is supposed to serve and represent.”

Workplace raids don’t usually net large numbers of deportations, relative to the massive amount of resources needed to carry them out, Reichlin-Melnick said. But they could be an effective P.R. strategy for Trump, he said.

Workplace raids are experienced locally as disasters, said Liz Oglesby, associate professor in the UA’s Center for Latin American Studies. Between 2007 and 2013 Oglesby interviewed residents of three U.S. cities hit by large-scale raids, carried out like military operations, under Republican President George W. Bush.

In the small town of Postville, Iowa, the children of Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants were the only reason some local schools had been able to stay open, Oglesby said. The town lost one-third of its population when its foreign-born residents fled, following a raid led by 800 ICE agents that picked up nearly 400 undocumented workers at a meat-packing plant.

In Postville, “the response in the community became bipartisan, in the sense that across the political spectrum people stood up and said, ‘No, we don’t want this kind of disaster in our community,’” Oglesby said. “It tore apart the social fabric of the community.”

Impact on children

About 11 million undocumented residents live in the U.S., and about 4.4 million U.S.-born children live with an undocumented parent, according to the Pew Research Center.

A 2017 study estimated the cost of foster care for U.S.-born children of deported parents to be $118 billion, assuming one-third of affected children remained in the U.S. instead of leaving with their parent.

In Arizona, about 8.6% of U.S.-born children live with a foreign-born parent, and deportation threats cause tremendous stress, said Pima County Supervisor Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.

In Tucson under SB1070, the wave of fear that spread through the community led to high rates of absenteeism at schools, as parents kept their children home. Ultimately, the Tucson Unified School District lost about 15,000 enrolled students as families fled Arizona, said Grijalva, a former TUSD Governing Board member.

Most Pima County schools now have emergency protocols for if a student’s parent is detained, mostly involving crisis-response teams, Grijalva said.

“It’s mostly trauma services, the same sort of services you would provide if a parent was in a car accident,” she said.

TUSD did not respond to the Star’s request for details on those protocols, but spokeswoman Karla Escamilla in an email, “Federal law prohibits public schools from requiring documentation on immigration status for enrollment.”

“There have to be safe spaces for our kids,” Grijalva said. “That’s a protection every public school should provide. ... Both Pima County and the City of Tucson have taken strong positions on this (under SB1070) and I anticipate we’ll renew our efforts this upcoming year.”

DACA recipients also worried

This year’s election night was painful for Jimena, 28, and her husband José, 36, whose parents brought him to the U.S. from Veracruz, Mexico, when he was 14. The couple asked that the Star only use their first names because they worry José, like many others, is vulnerable to losing his protected status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

The Obama-era program protects from deportation 535,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. DACA recipients can get work permits, and must renew their status every two years.

The Supreme Court blocked Trump’s first-term efforts to rescind DACA in 2020. The program’s future is now up to an appeals court, after the Biden Administration challenged a 2023 Texas federal judge’s decision ruling the program illegal.

Congress hasn’t acted to provide a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients despite polls showing strong support for it.

Jimena and José said they stayed up late on election night, planning for if they have to leave the home they own in Casa Grande.

At 13 weeks pregnant, Jimena says it’s been hard to get excited about becoming parents. Trump’s election feels like a personal attack, said Jimena, a naturalized U.S. citizen from El Salvador.

“It feels like half of the country hates us. You can’t feel safe,” she said. “Sometimes I just feel numb. It’s not that we forget we’re expecting a baby, but it just feels like this time where we should be focusing on our family, we have to focus on all the negativity around us.”

When Jimena looks at her husband, who runs an auto-glass tinting business, “I see the definition of an American dreamer,” she said. “I see him as coming to this country and making something of himself. He has a business, he employs people, he pays his taxes, and he gets nothing in return but uncertainty. That’s the thing that breaks my heart.”

Deportation causes trauma and grief, said Silva of Scholarships A-Z, whose family moved from Peru when she and her brother were children.

When she was 19, Silva’s brother was detained at a traffic stop and later deported. It was 2011, and then-President Barack Obama, a Democrat, was ramping up the deportation program that would give him the moniker “deporter-in-chief” among critics.

It was also one year before Obama created DACA, which Silva’s brother would have qualified for.

“I wouldn’t wish deportation on anyone,” she said. “I don’t know that anyone is safer because my brother isn’t in this country anymore.”

Now, once again, “it feels like our community is literally being hunted,” Silva said. “That is not okay. That is not what a first-world country should do.”

Seek community

DACA recipient Luna Lara, 29, is a housing advocate in Tucson. She recalls “constantly looking over my shoulder” while growing up undocumented in Texas after her family moved from Nuevo Leon, Mexico. She and her brother “grew up on home remedies” because their parents were too scared to take them to the hospital if they were sick, she said.

“It was drilled into us that we had to be good, we had to have good grades, we had to make sure we never got in trouble or in a fight, anything that would arouse suspicions or get anybody’s attention,” she said.

The hyper-vigilance has never gone away, Lara said.

“Even to this day, once a year my mom will have a conversation with me, ‘Hey, if something happens, here’s where all the paperwork is, here’s your next step,’” she said.

For those feeling isolated and anxious, seeking support in faith groups or advocacy groups is key, Silva said.

“I want our community to know they’re not alone, to know they have rights, they are worthy and everything they’re feeling is valid,” she said. “They don’t have to go through the next four years feeling isolated.”

Dora Rodriguez, migrant-rights activist and founder of Salvavision in Tucson, noted that Democrats and Republicans alike have targeted immigrants.

Obama deported more people in each of his two terms than Republican Trump did, and currently under the Biden Administration’s June asylum restrictions, 1,200 newly arrived migrants each week are being quickly deported back to Nogales, Sonora, she said.

At 19, Rodriguez nearly died crossing the Sonoran Desert after she fled war-torn El Salvador in 1980.

Rodriguez doesn’t believe Trump can follow through on his deportation threats — “Mexico didn’t build the wall like he told us,” she said — but she’s concerned about how local law enforcement will react to Proposition 314 if it goes into effect.

As activists, “We’re not scared. We’re more outraged,” she said. “I don’t have space to be afraid. I don’t have space to give up. ... When I talk to people who are already saying, ‘I’m going to take my husband to California because I am terrified of that new law in Arizona,’ how can you answer that? You just have to be there for that person and say, ‘No, you’re not alone. We’re gonna fight for you.’”

Lara said the prospect of mass deportations makes her feel angry, but she doesn’t want to say she’s afraid.

“I hate to use the word fear, because I’ve lived in fear all my life,” she said.

She’s still holding on to hope that what she was taught to love about the U.S., as a place of equality and freedom, might still be true.

“I’m blessed every day to be waking up in a great country that I still believe in,” Lara said. “I just need it to love me back.”