Arizona immigrant families brace for the threat of Trump's mass deportations

On a quiet evening in Tucson, about a dozen people file into a high school cafeteria for a weekly legal aid clinic put on by the immigrant aid group Keep Tucson Together.

The clinic is a Tucson mainstay. Years ago, this is where local families lined up to learn about the Obama-era DACA program.

Xochitl Mercado, a volunteer coordinator and citizenship program lead with the group, says now, people are coming to the office and calling with questions about how the new Trump administration could affect their everyday lives.

“They come with fear and anguish about what is going to happen if they have a family member that’s sick and goes to the hospital,” she said in Spanish.

She’s heard from mothers scared of risking arrest taking their special needs children to medical appointments. And fathers worried about going to work.

Mercado has a cart full of tools to hand out. They’re holdovers from previous ramped-up deportation eras — little red cards in Spanish and English that outline a person’s rights under the U.S. Constitution. And big yellow signs declaring law enforcement isn’t allowed entry without a warrant.

“Above all, making people understand that they have rights, even if they don’t have an immigration status, they have rights,” she said.

President-elect Trump has vowed to enact mass deportations for the roughly 13 million undocumented people living in the U.S. — a number that includes people who overstayed their visas or those in the country with temporary protection from deportation. But what exactly that will look like is still in flux.

In the weeks since the election, Trump has alternated between asserting he’d target immigrants with criminal histories and protect DACA, to saying U.S. citizen children could even be deported alongside their family members.

Noah Schramm, policy strategist with the ACLU of Arizona, says details are still murky, but they have expectations based off the first Trump administration.

“We’re expecting a ramping up of federal enforcement and potentially a good amount of collaboration at the state level in that mass deportation,” he said. “I think it is fair to take the threats they are making on this issue quite seriously.”

He says that’s true especially because of Proposition 314. The law was passed by a wide margin by Arizona voters this year. But a key portion — giving immigration-related arrest authority to local police — is on hold for now while a similar law in Texas is litigated.

City leaders like Mayor Regina Romero in Tucson have spoken out against the incoming administration's deportation plans.. Schramm says that’s positive for communities, because Trump would likely need the help of local jurisdictions to carry out deportations on a mass scale.

“With that being said, immigration, and immigration enforcement is the province of the federal government, and there’s not a whole lot that local and state officials can do to actually stand in the way,” he said.

The prospect of deportation and family separation is nothing new, especially in Arizona. More than a decade ago, SB1070 also gave local law enforcement immigration-related arrest authority before the Supreme Court ruled it illegal.

A memory of that time is seared into Maria Dorie’s brain. She came home from school to see her Tucson apartment complex surrounded by immigration authorities. Her neighbors were being detained.

“And I just remember looking at my mom and saying, 'why are they taking them?' And she’s like, ‘because they talked about their status,’ and this is the effect of it.' So ever since then, it put it in my head, like, ‘I should never talk about my status, or this will happen,’” she said. “It was a really triggering event, because I was just thinking like, 'I have to survive in Arizona with SB1070.'”

Dorie came to the U.S. from Mexico with her parents when she was 3 years old. Her siblings are U.S. citizens. She’s twice applied for DACA and, more recently, to a short-lived Biden program offering a pathway to citizenship for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens. She’s still undocumented.

“All three times, my two DACAs and then my Biden parole in place, I’ve gotten my fingerprints done. And every time I think I’m so close, it just gets taken right out from under me,” she said.

Her family was making plans for the worst-case scenario during the first Trump administration. Now she’s an adult, and their new family plan has her as caregiver to her siblings.

“If my parents do get detained, what is the plan? We’re going back to planning everything. Where will the kids go? My aunt was like, ‘the little ones can come with me, and the other two can just stay with Maria,’” she said. “I don’t know how I’d do it.”

Alisa Reznick/KJZZ

Planning for the worst is something Cynthia Moran has been doing quietly all her life.

“It’s something when I was really little, I was never really vocal about, it was always just those inside thoughts of, what would happen if the day after tomorrow my mom isn’t here?" she said.

She’s 18 now and a student at the University of Arizona. She’s the oldest of four siblings who were all born in Phoenix. But her parents are undocumented. When she was in fifth grade, her dad got a deportation order.

“I think that was like the moment my little bubble burst and I was able to see many families were going through the same thing,” she said.

She says her mom was just getting comfortable with the idea of making the two-hour drive to see her in Tucson. That’s changing now. But she says, her family still hasn’t had the talk.

“I honestly cannot imagine my life without my mother, she is my rock, in every aspect, through my education, through my personal life,” she said. “I think it’s just our fear to acknowledge that President-elect Donald Trump will actually go through with his promise of a mass deportation. And in that sense, we have avoided talking about what would happen if my mother were to be detained and deported.”

Moran says she knows that talk needs to happen eventually. They just don’t feel ready quite yet.