‘Terrifying’: Kansas City-area immigrants brace for Trump’s ‘mass deportation’

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The woman on the telephone, Sylvia — too frightened to want her last name revealed — entered the United States illegally 20 years ago when she was 13, brought across the southern border by her mother, fleeing domestic abuse.

Her memories of Guatemala are faint.

Now, 33, with two teenage sons of her own, born as American citizens, she cannot sleep for the nightmares she’s had since Donald Trump was reelected president, having campaigned on the promise of the largest mass deportation in United States history of immigrants who lack the necessary documents.

The president-elect said on his social media platform, Truth Social, that he’s prepared to declare a national emergency over illegal immigration, potentially freeing up military resources to carry out his plan.

“I have nightmares they pick me up in a truck and send me to my country. It makes me very sad,” Sylvia said in Spanish, interpreted by her Kansas City immigration attorney, Andrea Martinez. “I actually had to be hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital because of my mental health.”

Her panic and depression since the Nov. 5 presidential election has caused her to lose her factory job where she worked five, sometimes six evenings, a week — 2:50 p.m. to 10:30 p.m — making $22 an hour pulling bones from chicken carcasses. She’s worked since she entered the U.S.

“The last Trump administration, I was afraid every time I left the house,” she said. “I feared that they would pick me up and that I would never see my kids again. As soon as he becomes president, I will fear that again.”

‘Communities are scared’

Across the Kansas City region, immigration attorneys are being inundated with calls from anxious immigrants who, as the second Trump administration approaches, fear that whatever unfolds will go beyond Trump’s first-term moves to build a border wall, enact a “Muslim travel ban” or curb illegal crossings by separating children from their families at the southern border.

Martinez said she and her colleagues “are already drowning in work because people are calling us terrified.”

“I mean, communities are scared,” said Kansas City immigration attorney Rekha Sharma-Crawford. “We’ve all lived through Trump 1.0. It was worse than we expected. Like we never expected, ever, that they would separate children from their parents. This time, they’ve had four years to plan. So what awaits us is terrifying for communities, for sure.”

With some 13.3 million immigrants living in the United States without the necessary documents, Trump’s view on illegal immigration has been unwavering, with him consistently claiming such immigrants contribute to problems ranging from joblessness to violent crime. Studies have proven those allegations to be false.

In September, in fact, a National Institute of Justice study using Texas crime data from 2012 to 2018 showed that the rate of crimes committed by immigrants who don’t have proper documentation was lower than for U.S.-born citizens.

Last month, the Pew Research Center released a survey showing that 75% of voters said they felt immigrants who lack the necessary documents were filling jobs that U.S. citizens do not want. In February, the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute asserted flatly, “the idea that immigrants are making things worse for U.S-born workers is wrong. The reality is that the labor market is absorbing immigrants at a rapid pace, while simultaneously maintaining record-low unemployment for U.S.-born workers.”

Tom Homan — Trump’s pick to be “border czar” and who, as the first-term acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, carried out the administration’s policy to separate children from their parents at the southern border — has nonetheless said the American public should expect “shock and awe” on Day 1 of the new administration. The law is the law, Homan has asserted, and entering or staying in the U.S. without permission is illegal.

Kansas City immigration attorney Chris McKinney said two words describe the conversations he’s been having with clients: “Anxiety. Worry.”

Concern has extended beyond those who don’t have the proper documentation, he said.

“I’ve gotten calls from U.S. citizens of Mexican descent worried about being profiled,” McKinney said. “I had someone ask me about revoking or reinterpreting the 14th Amendment, the guarantee of birthright citizenship.

“Then they ask what happens if they work at a place where there’s other undocumented people around. Could they be arrested if they don’t have papers on them? Do I think that will happen? No.

“But I’ve said, ‘At the very least, I hate to tell you to do this, but maybe keep a copy of your passport in your phone to give you peace of mind.’ Yes, I’m actually giving out that advice. Keep a copy of your birth certificate or your passport in your phone.”

Arrests and backlogs

Homan, in an interview that aired in October on the CBS news program “60 Minutes” before he was chosen for the border role, defined what he said “mass deportation” would not look like.

“It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods,” he said. “It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous.”

He added, “There will be targeted arrests.”

Martinez and other immigration attorneys have already begun passing out specially made Red Cards to all their clients spelling out their rights should Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents approach them. The cards, distributed by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, are available in Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Hmong, Punjabi, Russian, Ukrainian, Tagalog, Tigrinya, Vietnamese, and Korean.

They are clear in their advice not to open doors to immigration agents, and not to answer questions or sign anything without first consulting an attorney.

The attorneys, however, said that some hope for their clients may rest in the nature of the immigration system itself, which is massive, full of delays, undermanned and overburdened.

In October, the American Immigration Council released a special report, “Mass Deportation: Devastating Costs to America, Its Budget and Economy,” which estimated the cost of a one-time mass deportation — should such an event even be possible — at $315 billion. If done over 11 years, the cost would be about $88 billion per year for a total of nearly $1 trillion.

“There would be no way to accomplish this mission without mass detention as an interim step,” the report said.

There currently is no room. Taken together, about 2 million people now reside in all of America’s already crowded local and county jails and in state and federal prisons. Building detention centers for millions more people would take years.

“The costs involved, they would be massive,” McKinney, the attorney, said. “The resources needed would be massive. The government is just not set up to do something like that without an amazing overhaul.”

Then there is the process. Individuals who are caught entering the U.S. illegally can be detained in an ICE detention facility. If it is determined that they do not have a criminal record or pose other security threats, they generally are released. They then receive an NTA or a “notice to appear” in court before an immigration judge for what is known as a master calendar hearing regarding their potential deportation. It is a civil hearing, not a criminal hearing.

Getting to the initial step of a master calendar hearing can take up to a year.

If the individual, known in court as the “respondent,” says they intend to apply for asylum, they are then given another court date for what’s known as an individual calendar hearing, or “merits hearing” in which they plead the merits of their case.

That adds significantly more time.

The immigration court in Kansas City, which has only three judges at 2345 Grand Blvd. and serves both Kansas and Missouri, has a backlog of around 45,000 cases. The number is so great that respondents who are now appearing before a judge are having their individual calendar hearings scheduled for 2028 and 2029.

Nationally, the backlog of pending cases stands at approximately 3.5 million.

As respondents await individual hearings, many are like Sylvia, who applied for and was granted a permit that legally allows her to work. While supporters of mass deportation say that removing millions of workers would increase wages, opponents insist that removing 7.5 million people from the work rolls would deliver a hobbling blow to industries including construction, agriculture and hospitality.

Day 1

Trump has promised he would make changes beginning on Day 1.

While Day 1 is unlikely to bring the kind of sweeping deportations that many might envision, attorneys said there is still a lot that Trump can do early. Changes are already underway.

On Nov. 7, two days after the election, a federal judge in Texas struck down a President Joe Biden administration initiative known as Keeping Families Together. The program’s intent was to allow about 500,000 immigrants without legal status — those living in the country for at least a decade and married to U.S. citizens — a path to legal status, obtaining their green cards without first having to leave the country as the law previously required.

The program had only just begun in August. But Judge J. Campbell Parker ruled that the Biden administration did not have the legal authority to enact it.

President-elect Trump has already said he would take aim at a program known as Temporary Protected Status. Affecting some 900,000 immigrants from 16 countries — including Ukraine, Venezuela, Haiti, El Salvador and Afghanistan — the program gives temporary legal status to people from countries deemed unsafe because of wars, epidemics and environmental cataclysms like earthquakes and floods.

There are concerns, attorneys said, that on Day 1 the administration will instruct the Department of Homeland Security to set new prosecutorial priorities — switching from the current focus on people who are threats to national security, public safety and border security to detaining any and all people in the U.S. illegally.

They anticipate that DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, may also come under attack.

“Trump tried to rescind the DACA program the last time,” Martinez said.

The program, which went into effect in 2012 during President Barack Obama’s administration, was put in place to prevent the deportation of children who were brought illegally to the U.S. with their parents or other adults. Many, who are now anywhere from 16 to 39 years old, arrived at such young ages they know no other country as home.

The program protects some 530,000 people. It allows them to stay, access higher education and receive work permits that can be renewed every two years.

“These kids, who were brought here as kids,” Martinez said, “are terrified that they’re not going to be able to live and work in the U.S. because Trump is going to try to rescind the program again.”

Jennifer, 28, also afraid to use her last name, is one of them. She arrived from Mexico with her grandparents at age 1. Her father was already in the U.S. Her mother was still in Mexico, but would arrive later. Her two younger brothers are citizens, both born in the U.S.

Married to a U.S. citizen, Jennifer works full time in a laboratory and has her own son, age 2.

Should her DACA status come under threat, she said, she’s not sure what she will do. The U.S. is the only home she remembers.

She said her husband is “telling me more to relax. We’ll play it by ear.” They, nonetheless, are making sure their son and whole family have valid passports.

Her mother, who has no legal status and is more vulnerable, has tried to calm her fears.

“She keeps telling me that everything is going to be OK,” Jennifer said. “She says, ‘If they take us all out of here, there won’t be many hardworking people here.’”

The uncertainty keeps Jennifer on edge.

“I’ve been here all my life. My first language is English,” she said. “I mean, thinking of the worst-case scenario, what could I do? What should I do? I worry about what will happen with my son. …

“I’m not sure how all this will work. That scares me.”