Maria Dorie has navigated immigration enforcement threats all her life.
Her parents brought her to the U.S. from Mexico when she was 3 years old. She’s undocumented and grew up in Tucson in the midst of SB 1070 — the now-defunct Arizona law that gave local police the authority to do immigration-related enforcement.
“I feel like everything in the past — it does not compare to what’s going on now,” Dorie said. “At least back then, it felt like, ‘OK, they took my mom and dad, but we were able to see them the next week.’ Now it’s like, ‘they took my mom and dad, and I don’t know where they’re at.’”
Dorie first spoke with KJZZ just over a year ago — right before President Donald Trump’s second term began, as immigrant communities were preparing for a lot of different possibilities. She’s in her 20s, has no criminal record and, over the years, she’s applied for protection from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, and a short-lived Biden-era program for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens.
Nothing’s worked out so far. That makes Dorie feel especially vulnerable now.
“Because now, it feels more like kidnapping. Like people are getting taken away just doing everyday activities,” she said.
New threats
It’s been a year this week since Trump reentered office and issued a slew of Day 1 executive orders on immigration, bringing into question everything from asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, to whether people born in the U.S. are guaranteed citizenship.
Carolina Silva is the executive director of the Tucson-based community advocacy group Scholarships A-Z. She says this year is changing the calculus for immigrant families across the board.
“Even if you have DACA, or you’re on a visa, or you have [Temporary Protected Status], you unfortunately are not going to be safe … Now, even as a citizen, you might not be safe,” she said. “Now, when people are detained, it’s a lot harder to find them, it is a lot harder to get them out of detention, and a lot of times, it’s even impossible to get bond.”
Those concerns bear out in the data.
Federal figures analyzed by the American Immigration Council show the number of discretionary releases from ICE detention fell by 87%.
And a record high of nearly 69,000 people are being held in ICE detention facilities, according to federal figures, up from the roughly 40,000 in detention when Trump took office.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, policy analyst with the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, or MPI, says past immigration enforcement has focused on migrants at the border and people further inside the U.S. with a criminal record.
More than 70% of those detained now have no criminal convictions.
“The biggest change that we’ve seen under this administration is the in-community arrests,” Bush-Joseph said. “This is very visible, really public effort, because it’s happening in daylight, in the suburbs, where people live, at their workplaces.”
As a report she co-authored this month notes, there’s also far fewer people at the border now.
Biden-era bans on asylum, and ramped up enforcement in Mexico and the U.S., meant the number of border arrests — and the number of people able to enter the U.S. and pursue asylum cases — was down even before Trump took office in January.
A slew of new Trump-era restrictions enacted this past year has plummeted those numbers even further. Border arrests averaged just over 7,000 a month between February and November of last year, the lowest rate since the 1970s.
“Despite the quiet, the administration entered uncharted territory by deploying the military for border enforcement, potentially redefining its traditional role,” the MPI report says. “Approximately 7,000 troops were deployed to the Southwest border as of December 10, as part of a mission that has cost about $1.3 billion.”
Meanwhile, Bush-Joseph says, the Trump administration has asserted that all immigrants — even those with temporary legal status — could be deported. And Congress has approved a supersized budget of $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement.
“They’ve taken away that prioritization of people with a criminal record, and essentially everyone is fair game now,” she said.
In December, the Trump administration said it deported some 622,000 people last year, and claims 1.9 million have self-deported.
Without detailed data to support those figures, Bush-Joseph says it’s hard to identify definitive patterns. But one thing is certain — more and more people are being detained far beyond the border.
Community changes
Tucson Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz says that’s a visible change in her community, where city leaders are hearing from community members everyday with questions and fears about ramped up immigration enforcement.
“We’re continuously having to pivot, dealing with this immigration enforcement to create a theatre, right? This political theatre,” Santa Cruz said.
City leaders are looking for ways to limit or prohibit ICE’s use of city property for immigration enforcement, and Tucson Police are already not authorized to act as immigration officers alongside ICE. Still, Santa Cruz says the onslaught of immigration enforcement — carried out by masked, unidentified officers — is eroding trust.
“That’s really unfortunate, because this is a moment where we should be leaning into each other,” Santa Cruz said.
This month, city leaders laid out a response plan in the event of federally-deployed National Guard troops coming to Tucson, like the Trump administration has done in cities like Los Angeles.
The city has also created a landing page to connect local families with links to legal aid, instructions for planning in the event of someone getting detained, and other resources.
That’s a discussion Maria Dorie, the undocumented Tucsonan, has been trying to figure out how to have with her family.
Before Trump took office for a second time, her parents were deciding who would care for her three younger siblings, who are US citizens, if they were arrested. Seeing the reality now, she says, those conversations have become harder to face.
“It feels like the conversation of death, like if my mom dies, who will be in charge,” she said. “I’m like, ‘OK so, plan B, what if this, this and this happens?’ My mom immediately tries to shut it down, she’s like, ‘let’s not talk about that right now.’”
Dorie says she and her siblings have also made changes. These days, she doesn’t go to her sisters’ basketball games as much anymore because she’s worried about getting detained. And she’s noticing that her youngest sister is worrying more about her and her parents.
"Some people say, ‘oh, they don’t know, the younger kids don’t understand. They do understand,” she said. "She’s going to leave elementary school and go into middle school, you know? She should be living that pre-teen life, not wondering if my parents are going to come home.”
But Dorie says being deported isn’t what scares her the most. It’s the worry that if she’s detained, she won’t be found.
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