Arizona’s immigrant communities are preparing for worst-case scenarios after election

Arizona’s immigrant community is on edge following an election that brought Trump back into office  — and threats of mass deportations with him.

At the national level, Trump has promised to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history,” use militarization for a “border crackdown,” and end birthright citizenship.

While Trump’s promises will be difficult to carry out and implement, there is a general awareness of the danger that another Trump presidency holds for immigrants and communities of color. Rebecca Denis, a family justice organizer with the nonprofit Poder in Action, said he has made it clear how he feels about immigrants and communities of color with his racially charged rhetoric.

The reality of another Trump presidency is setting in, and now the community is starting to plan and prepare, Denis said.

“We’re not going to allow ourselves to be dehumanized,” she said.

Bracing for the worst

There are an estimated 250,000 undocumented immigrants who live in Arizona, about 3.5% of the population. Another 700,000 Arizonans are immigrants living in the state with permanent residency status, refugees, or are working towards US citizenship. Many live in mixed-status households, and all are potentially at risk of deportation, regardless of legal status.

Nina Franco is a Phoenix-based social worker who works with many mixed-status families and undocumented youth in a mentorship program for teens. She believes that it will be difficult for the Trump administration to carry out mass deportations, but the more the community is prepared for the worst, the better.

Trump’s promise to end birthright citizenship will likely face a Supreme Court battle and extensive opposition to the constitutional right.

Trump’s cabinet picks are where a lot of the fear is coming from, Franco said.

Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for the Head of the Department of Homeland Security, believes mass deportations are the solution to the “mass illegal immigration crisis on the border.” While his outlook may seem as bleak as it is unachievable, Homan’s got the resume to back it up: former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who was behind the “zero tolerance” policy that separated families at the southern border.

Those in Franco’s circle are taking Trump and Homan at their word. Her coworker is the only adult in her family who is US-born, and she is preparing for a situation where nearly her whole family could be deported, leaving her to step up to care for at least six children on her own, at 23 years old.

The prejudice against immigrants coming from the Trump administration has created fear and misinformation, Franco said. With this kind of rhetoric, she’s found it hard to believe that “only the criminals” will be deported.

‘Are my parents going to get deported?’

Goodyear resident Lexsiri Coronado’s father recently became a permanent resident, and her mother is still in the process – but for the two of them, fear of being deported has always hovered over their heads, from the SB1070 days until now, she said.

“It’s always just kind of waiting for, you know, the moment to happen or waiting for it to pass,” Coronado said.

After the spike in deportations during the Obama administration, Coronado said she and her family realized that it didn’t matter who was president or what kind of laws were in place – the threat is always there.

Alexia Isais is a sixth-grade teacher in South Phoenix, where she teaches with a number of Latino and immigrant students.

She says her students have been asking questions like, “am I going to get deported because of how I look? Are my parents going to get deported?”

“[There was] genuine fear within their faces,” Isais said. “They’re sixth graders, they like to joke around, but they were definitely not joking around. Even some of the goofiest students were straight faced the entire day, just because of how much it impacted them.”

Isais’ grandparents are Mexican immigrants, and said her grandfather fears Prop 314 will give law enforcement the authority to pull him over and detain him just because of the way he looks — the same thing he feared in 2010, when police used racial profiling to enforce SB1070, she said.

November’s election brought former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s right-hand man, Jerry Sheridan, back to lead the department.

Arpaio was known for his sweeps of Latino neighborhoods, where sheriff’s deputies would pull over Latino drivers for minor traffic violations just to scrutinize their immigration status.

Sheridan was found by a federal judge to be in civil contempt of court for disobeying a 2011 preliminary order to stop holding people based solely on suspected immigration violations – landing him a spot on the Brady List, a database of peace officers with sustained findings of credibility and truthfulness issues.