For immigrant advocates, legal services, and rights groups, the threat of anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislation is not new. Earlier this year, the Biden Administration was sued by several groups, including the National Immigrant Justice Center and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) over an executive order which severely restricted asylum claims at the U.S.-Mexico border. President-elect Donald Trump’s first term was defined by harsh immigration tactics, including family separation and a travel ban that barred people from some predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S.
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“It’s been a long four years. It’s been a really long eight years,” says Keren Zwick, litigation director at the National Immigrant Justice Center.
But 2025 will bring a marked escalation for these groups and the people they serve. With Trump’s return to office looms the promise of a sweeping overhaul of the country’s immigration policies, which could include mass deportation, workplace raids, expanding the border wall, bringing back the “Remain in Mexico” policy (which requires migrants who crossed into the U.S. through the southern border to remain in Mexico while their asylum cases were heard), and ending birthright citizenship, or the longstanding principle that children born in the U.S. are granted citizenship.
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“What we’re expecting are drastic changes announced immediately,” says Jennifer Babaie, director of advocacy and legal services at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which provides free and low-cost legal services to migrants and refugees.
Here are some ways that Babaie, Zwick, and immigrant advocates across the country are preparing for Trump’s return to power.
‘Know Your Rights’
Both in the U.S. and in shelters in Tijuana, immigration advocates have been already providing groups “Know Your Rights’” presentations that help migrants understand what is expected of them by border officials, including what will happen in credible fear interviews.
When asylum-seekers enter the United States, they are referred to U.S. border officials who conduct a credible fear interview (CFI), in which the official determines whether the migrant seeking asylum has a “credible fear” of returning to their home country.
Babaie says Las Americas is working to expand these presentations to broader groups, and to include more information to not just those on the border looking to enter the country, but those already in the interior who are at risk of deportation.
“What we’re incorporating into these presentations is safety planning,” she said. “Your family should know their status. Everyone should know where their documents are. You need to know if a person gets picked up, who is your emergency contact, and how do your kids know who to update.”
For Melissa Shepard, directing attorney at Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), her team has similar priorities. Sheperd oversees ImmDef’s Welcoming Project in San Diego, and says that one thing her team is doing is transferring their rights presentations to their website, and translating them into multiple languages—including more indigenous languages—in order to reach wider immigrant communities.
Community organization
Babaie says this is the time communities need to come together, not in spite of the fear of a second Trump Administration but because of it.
“[Community] is our only way to survive,” she says. “Or else, we’re writing a million reports. If no one’s reading them, no one cares. And then, that’s how we get used to losing our rights.”
According to Norma Chávez-Peterson, the executive director of ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties, this means going beyond just informing immigrants and their families of their rights.
“It’s going to really require everyone, immigrant rights organizations, local government, state government, anybody, everybody and their mother that cares and values and wants to protect immigrants,” Chávez-Peterson said. She and her ACLU affiliate have been meeting with different local and state officials, including California’s attorney general and governor’s offices. California Governor Gavin Newsom has already announced a special session on Nov. 7, which in part will be to bolster resources for immigrant families. Chávez-Peterson sees San Diego as a model for other cities on the border to look towards for that kind of multilevel cooperation.
Chávez-Peterson also emphasized that, as an immigrant herself, she sees how immigrants in the country feel that they “have a huge target on their back” and are operating with fear. If threatened, immigrants might not immediately go to the ACLU for help, but rather to their trusted places, including their faith community, their social workers, their teachers, their schools. So, Chávez-Peterson says it’s up to groups like hers to bring information there.“If ICE goes to look for somebody at a school, how do we make sure that those schools have a policy that they can’t share parent information?” she says.
That also means groups across the country have already begun sharing information with one another. Both Babaie and Chávez-Peterson have attended panels, trainings and conferences recently with other advocacy and legal groups, and say these are important for communication on what policies are actually being implemented so they can be utilized immediately.
“[During the first Trump Administration], policies were being implemented without any announcement whatsoever,” Babaie said. “And so then the only way attorneys were figuring out what exactly was happening was through word of mouth, not through FOIAs or announcements from the administration.”
Streamline services
Though Trump has made some of his potential policy initiatives clear, immigrant advocates are also preparing to expect the unexpected.
Part of that preparation for Chávez-Peterson includes revitalizing the San Diego Rapid Response Network, which includes a hotline, free legal deportation defense, and other nonprofits, all pulled together in collaboration to help families that are caught up in deportation crises.
“When the family’s in crisis, the last thing that you want to do is give them a list with numbers to call yes and get bounced around from organization to organization,” she says.
Babaie also emphasizes that this means preparing teams—teams already exhausted from the legal battles of the past eight years—for the battles ahead.
“We’re all going to have to move to a more procedural and detail-oriented way of working, because in the last time we had the Trump presidency, we were getting denials because of something like a space was left blank on a form,” she said.
The most important message though, she says, is to let both immigrant communities and the government know that groups like Las Americas are there, and they are ready: “Part of our obligation is to maintain that we’re going to keep doing what we do. And no matter what you throw at us, we’re just going to turn around and find a way to still use our legal practice to defend these people.”
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