When she was 7 Greisa Martinez moved illegally from Hidalgo, in Mexico, to Dallas with her parents. Now 28, Martinez works for United We Dream, an immigration-advocacy group. Following the election of Donald Trump as president, she has been busy. In case of an immigration raid, she instructs her charges, don’t open their doors to immigration officials unless they have a court-ordered warrant, and remain silent until speaking with a lawyer.
Martinez is one of around 740,000 beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy that President Barack Obama implemented in 2012 by executive action. In his 100-day plan published in October, however, Trump vowed to reverse every one of Obama’s executive actions. He could kill DACA on his first day in the Oval Office.
He also could opt to let it die a slower, gentler death by refusing to renew DACA permits, which expire every two years. Either way DACA’s beneficiaries would lose their right to work legally. DACA grants undocumented immigrants who arrived in America before the age of 16, and who meet several other requirements, eligibility to work and temporary amnesty from deportation.
In his earlier stump speeches, Trump repeatedly pledged to rid the country of all 11 million unauthorized, undocumented migrants living within its borders, the bulk of whom arrived before 2004. He has picked the Senate’s most enthusiastic deporter, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R.-Ala.), as his attorney-general. All of this has alarmed DACA recipients.
“When we applied for DACA, we identified ourselves as undocumented,” said Perla Salgado of Arizona, who arrived to America at 6 and has not once returned to Mexico. “We gave our addresses. The government now has this information and can come after us or our families.”
Since winning the election, Trump has said that he will focus on illegal immigrants with criminal records—not unlike Obama, whose administration has deported more people than any other president’s. He also has made some sympathetic noises about those who arrived in the country as children. In an interview on 60 Minutes, Trump estimated the number of criminal immigrants to be between 2 million and 3 million. The Migration Policy Institute, a think tank, says that it is closer to 820,000.
Even if Trump’s administration aims for the top end of the range, it will be hard for him to keep all his campaign promises related to immigration. To gather funding for his proposed wall along America’s border with Mexico, for example, Trump would need congressional approval.
The president requires no such authorization to change the Department of Homeland Security’s deportation priorities, though. From his first day in the White House, Trump will have discretion as to what groups should be targeted for removal.
“He could easily expand the definition for what constitutes criminality to meet the 2 million to 3 million goal he set,” Martinez said.
Two factors will limit the size of the deportation dragnet. The first is capacity. The federal government already spends more on enforcing immigration laws than on the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the United States Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms combined.
Finding people to deport also is getting harder. That is partly because the number of border apprehensions has declined markedly in recent years, as the flow of Mexicans into the United States has also ebbed.
The second variable is cooperation from cities and states. More than 3 million undocumented immigrants reside in California, twice the number in Texas, the second-most-popular home for undocumented foreigners. A 2014 study by the University of Southern California estimated that workers who are in the state illegally make up 10% of the work force and contribute $130 billion of California’s $2.5-trillion gross domestic product.
On December 5 California lawmakers introduced a package of bills to obstruct mass deportation. These measures include a state program to fund legal representation for immigrants in deportation hearings and a ban on immigration enforcement in public schools, hospitals and on courthouse premises.
“California will be your wall of justice,” the president of the state senate declared in a statement. “We will not stand by and let the federal government use our state and local agencies to separate mothers from their children.”
According to a 2015 study by the University of Pennsylvania, only 37% of immigrants and 14% of detained immigrants in deportation proceedings secured lawyers to defend them in court.
The policies of so-called “sanctuary cities” such as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco will further hinder any plans Trump might have for a huge increase in the rate of deportation. The Immigrant Legal Resource Center counted four states, 39 cities and 364 counties that qualify as sanctuary jurisdictions. Some prohibit local police from asking people they arrest about their immigration status. Others refuse to obey immigration officers unless they have a warrant. Supporters of these approaches say that they help guarantee that fear of deportation does not dissuade undocumented immigrants from reporting crimes, visiting hospitals or enrolling in schools.
© 2016 Economist Newspaper Ltd., London (December 10). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Image credits: Todd Heisler/The New York Times, Doug Mills/The New York Times
1 comment
President Trump promised to rescind DACA on his first day in office. We need to deport all 12 million illegal aliens and build a wall. NO AMNESTY.