Immigrants have been the target of hateful rhetoric and actions since President-elect Donald Trump launched his campaign over a year ago. Galvanizing his base with promises to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and to ban Muslim immigration, Trump has dramatically shifted the tone of the national conversation on immigration and raised fears that he’ll follow through on his harshest campaign promises.
What a President Trump will actually do around federal immigration policy remains unclear. In a recent interview with Time magazine, he scaled back his rhetoric, expressing some openness to “work something out” with beneficiaries of President Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which gives certain undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children temporary work permits and reprieves from deportation.
At the same time, Trump has been adamant that he will deport what he says are at least 2 million undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions — even though the Migration Policy Institute estimates there are only about 820,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal records.
Some of Trump’s appointments also suggest he’ll hew to a hardline approach. Among his transition advisers is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who helped write legislation cracking down on immigrants in Arizona and elsewhere. And Trump’s pick for attorney general is U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican who has opposed proposals to give undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship.
What does all this mean for immigration issues in the South — a region that’s now home to some of the fastest-growing immigrant communities in the country, and where Trump won every state but Virginia?
In some ways, not much will change. The South has been dominated by anti-immigrant lawmakers who, as the numbers of immigrants in the region have grown, have introduced and passed legislation at the local and state level to target their communities. These have ranged from English-only decrees and bans on Islamic Sharia law to laws modeled after Arizona’s infamous SB 1070 ordering immigrants to carry registration papers at all times and requiring state law enforcement officers to determine the immigration status of people they stop.
Local communities in the South have also participated in federal programs like 287(g) and Secure Communities, which involve local police in federal immigration enforcement. While many of the nation’s largest cities and entire states like California have adopted so-called sanctuary policies to limit local involvement in federal immigration enforcement to avoid creating rifts between police officers and the communities they protect, only a handful of Southern localities have adopted such measures, among them New Orleans and Miami.
Trump has pledged to withhold federal funding from places with such sanctuary policies, leaving many national advocates scrambling to protect their local wins. But in the South, several states have already passed such measures penalizing sanctuary communities.
Building on Existing Networks
“In many ways, our community has been under attack for a long time,” said Adelina Nicholls of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights.
GLAHR, like many other grassroots immigrant advocacy groups across the South, has already organized in response to anti-immigrant hostility and has been fighting to protect communities from both the federal-local deportation apparatus as well as local and state anti-immigrant policies. GLAHR works with a network of comités populares — people’s committees — across Georgia to organize families and communities around these efforts. Nicholls hopes to expand and mobilize this network in the face of what’s expected to be stepped-up enforcement under a Trump administration.
“Nobody knows exactly what’s coming next,” Nicholls said. “But it’s time for everybody to gather, to reflect, to organize.”
In Arkansas, immigrant advocates are leveraging networks and immigrant resource centers they have built across the state in recent years in response to immigration raids and programs like 287(g), and to support those pursuing DACA and citizenship status. In a post-election environment where anti-immigrant bullying has escalated, the group is activating its community watch network to report incidents in neighborhoods and schools.
“We immediately transitioned from election to rapid response in response to the extreme panic we were feeling at all levels from our immigrant communities and allies,” said Mireya Reith of the Arkansas United Community Coalition, an immigrant advocacy and support organization working in the state since 2010.
Reith is also reaching out to allies in local communities such as school leaders, elected officials, business owners and others with whom her organization has built relationships to stand with immigrant communities. There are signs that the work is paying off: Mayors of nine Arkansas communities who publicly took welcoming stances on immigration were all re-elected in 2016.
Organizing locally and building on the resistance efforts of recent years will be critical. While anti-immigrant rhetoric is nothing new for Southern immigrant advocates, losing a level of defense nationally still has implications for vulnerable communities and adds urgency to efforts to protect immigrant rights in areas where local anti-immigrant leaders may be emboldened by the national rhetoric.
“We need to be there for each other,” said Stephanie Cho of Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Atlanta who organizes and advocates for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the state.
“We need to be a place where we can actually make some real changes,” she said. “It’s not easy, but we have to keep going.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.