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At Donald Trump’s final rally in Pittsburgh in November, he said recent immigrants were so nasty that only professional fighters had a chance against them.
“The day I take office, the migrant invasion ends and the restoration of our country begins,” Trump said, to applause.
That day arrives Monday with Trump’s inauguration. But what exactly Trump’s immigration crackdown will look like isn’t yet clear. His attention has shifted from keeping immigrants out with a border wall to removing immigrants already here, but he’s contradicted himself at times, and hasn’t clarified how he’d overcome legal and logistical obstacles.
That leaves many immigration advocates relying on memories of Trump’s first term to prepare for what is to come.
Monica Ruiz, the executive director of Casa San Jose, said that during the first Trump administration, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would follow cars full of Latinos but not stop them until they arrived at work — so they could pick up as many Latino-looking people as they could. She said it wasn’t uncommon for her to have to rummage through an abandoned vehicle to figure out who had been picked up.
“You would drive down Broadway Avenue and just see abandoned work trucks because ICE came and took everybody at 6 a.m.” she said. “Kids were not able to be picked up from school because their parents were picked up and detained.”
Casa San Jose developed a response system to calls about such disappearances: Drive the missing person’s route to work to see if their car broke down. Then, call the hospitals. Contact ICE to see if a detention record had appeared. Hire a lawyer, hope an immigration judge grants a bond, and raise thousands of dollars to cover it. Drive four hours to pick the person up from a detention center in York County.
“Many times it's the men that are detained, and they're the main breadwinners,” Ruiz said. “They're in detention for three or four months. The women have small children. And how do they work? How do they pay the rent? And how do they eat?”
After Trump’s reelection, Ruiz said, Casa San Jose began re-teaching some of the basics to new immigrants: Don’t open the door when ICE comes knocking. Ask for papers showing the detention authorization.
They’re also helping families get passports for their American children and encouraging them to sign papers that allow schools to release their children to another caregiver in case they are detained.
Joseph Patrick Murphy, a Republican immigration lawyer in Pittsburgh, said policies changed abruptly during Trump’s first term. For example, he said, previously if someone applying for a work permit or status change had only one or two siblings, it was fine to leave other spaces blank. But doing so suddenly began to result in rejections.
“The clients, they're yelling at you, they're panicking,” he said. “It’s chaos.”
Murphy expects the Trump administration to stop granting discretion for immigration judges to put certain cases aside when the immigrants are on a clear path to citizenship, such as after marrying an American citizen.
That, he said, “raises holy hell with the courts because now you have no way of managing the docket. And it causes a lot of expense and a lot of fear. You're being [dragged] in front of a judge who has the power to deport you over and over and over again.”
One of the Pittsburgh neighborhoods that stands to be impacted the most is Beechview, which has seen an influx of immigrants. But residents there who voted for Trump did it for other reasons, according to City Councilor Anthony Coghill.
After immigration spiked a decade ago, Coghill said he used to hear racist comments about immigrants. That doesn’t happen anymore, he said.
The immigrants “brought in businesses, they brought commerce,” he said. “They're the good, hard-working people who brought life back to a neighborhood that desperately needed it.”
Coghill runs a roofing business and said Latino immigrants form the backbone of the industry. Deporting them en masse, he predicts, will increase the cost of roofing when homes are already expensive.
“If you take away even a third of those people who are working on those roofs, I have a feeling people will have a hard time getting their jobs done,” he said.
When Sister Janice Vanderneck began working in Beechview more than two decades ago, she said, there was only a single Catholic mass held in Spanish. About 30 people showed up, mostly professors and their children. Now, she said, there are five Spanish-language masses across the diocese, and during a recent holiday event in Beechview, 700 parishioners came.
Vanderneck began helping in Beechview when there were only a few immigrants and almost all were Mexican. They wanted to get their kids into school, get a job and find a place to live.
“They would come to the church with their big questions and they were not afraid to reveal — ‘I don't have any immigration status,’” she said.
Vanderneck said a second wave of immigrants came from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. In the past few years they’re more often from Venezuela, Colombia or Ecuador.
What will happen to them now?
Dana Gold, the chief operating officer at Jewish Family and Community Services of Pittsburgh, said groups like hers that support immigrants have been sharing notes about what they believe the most likely scenarios will be.
“We have been told that we should expect deportations. We have been told that we should expect family separation,” she said. “We have been told to expect a climate that is going to create fear.”
Whatever Trump does, Gold’s staff is afraid of the dehumanizing rhetoric that proliferated during his campaign, when immigrants were depicted as criminals. The last time he was in the White House, people seemed shocked to see white nationalists with tiki torches yelling slurs, Gold said. She’s not sure that will happen this time.
“There is a fear that people will just have freedom to be hateful,” she said.
