Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, left, speaks at a press conference hosted by immigrant youth, allies and advocates outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — In the crucial last month before President Joe Biden leaves office, immigrants and allies on Tuesday urged the president to offer protections for immigrant communities before Donald Trump is inaugurated.
The president-elect has promised the largest deportation in U.S. history, stoking fear and uncertainty among undocumented immigrants and immigration advocates over a sweeping platform that marked the core of Trump’s GOP presidential campaign.
Speaking near the U.S. Capitol, the “Home is Here” campaign featured immigrant youth, allies and advocates demanding Biden take executive action.
The national coalition, which fights to protect immigrant communities, also urged Congress not to boost funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection during the lame-duck session in a way that would aid Trump in carrying out mass deportations. Members of Congress are expected to vote this week on a stopgap spending bill that would fund the government through mid-March.
Immigrant youth, allies and advocates traveled to Washington, D.C., from across the country, including states such as Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, New York and Utah, to rally and meet with members of Congress about their demands.
Claudia Quiñonez, organizing director of United We Dream, the nation’s largest immigrant youth-led network, said “before the keys to the White House are handed over to Trump, before a new Congress takes office, this lame-duck period is (a) critical window for our members in Congress and President Biden to leave it all on the field.”
Quiñonez, who is also a co-chair of the Home is Here campaign, said there is “no underestimating the length Trump is willing to go to fulfill his pledges for mass deportation in raiding our schools, our workplaces, our hospitals and our churches.”
U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib also voiced her concerns Tuesday over the president-elect’s immigration plans.
“We cannot underestimate, as you all know, what will unfold the moment Trump takes office in January, and we need as many people as possible working to resist this hateful agenda,” the Michigan Democrat said.
Tlaib noted that Biden “still has power to take immediate executive action to protect our immigrant communities.”
She also said “we must continue to work incredibly hard, not only to outwork the hate, but to really promote love and justice within our communities.”
Among its priorities, the Home is Here campaign aims to protect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program recipients. A federal court will determine the program’s legal fate.
The Obama-era program was created in 2012 and designed to protect children who were brought into the country illegally from deportation.
Trump tried ending DACA during his first term.
During an NBC News interview earlier this month, Trump did not give specifics on what he intends to do about the program but said that he “will work with the Democrats on a plan.”
Immigration groups on Tuesday also expressed worry over the uncertainty of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which allows migrants in countries with unsafe conditions to legally reside and work in the United States.
Trump sought to end TPS for multiple countries throughout his first administration.
Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto urges the Biden administration to extend protections for Dreamers and immigrants with Temporary Protected Status during a Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024, press conference. From left to right are Andrea Flores of the immigration advocacy group FWD.us and Sens. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Alex Padilla of California. (Photo by Ariana Figueroa/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — Jose Cabrera took off work from his landscaping job to join three Latino Democratic senators for a Wednesday press conference urging the Biden administration to renew protected statuses, like his, before the return of President-elect Donald Trump to the White House.
Cabrera, of Montgomery County, Maryland, has lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years, and is protected from deportation and allowed work permits. His home country of El Salvador is deemed too dangerous to return, giving him a designation of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.
He and other immigrants living legally in the United States fear if they lose their protected status, they will be swept up as Trump implements his campaign promise of mass deportations.
Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Alex Padilla of California and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico are pressing the Biden administration to redesignate TPS for nationals from Nicaragua and El Salvador and to also designate TPS for people from Ecuador.
TPS for El Salvador ends in March and TPS for Nicaragua ends in July, after Trump takes office on Jan. 20.
“We know the incoming administration is going to try to implement chaotic immigration policies that tear our families apart,” Cortez Masto said.
The members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus also stressed that the White House should direct the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s immigration agency to speed up renewal applications for those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.
“It’s time for this administration to ensure that we can renew their DACA status now, before they come under threat from the Trump administration,” Cortez Masto said.
The White House could not be immediately reached for comment.
Mass deportations threat
The senators stressed that the Biden administration should take action, given Trump’s vow to enact mass deportations, targeting the millions of immigrants without legal status. Deportations could easily include those with TPS if their status is not renewed.
TPS designations can last six, 12 or 18 months before they are renewed and cover more than 1 million immigrants. The status does not offer a pathway to citizenship.
So far, 17 countries have TPS designation and it’s been used in instances like Ukrainians fleeing from Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Andrea Flores, the vice president on immigration policy and campaigns at the immigration advocacy group FWD.us, said that Biden should use TPS to protect those holding the status from the incoming Trump administration.
During the first Trump administration, the former president tried to end TPS for Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Sudan, but the courts blocked those attempts in 2018.
“Those people will now lose legal status in the next administration. Those people will be subject to mass deportations, and they’ll be returned to a country where they will be guaranteed to be persecuted,” Flores said.
Padilla and Luján stressed that mass deportations would not only harm communities but the U.S. economy. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing Tuesday on the ramifications of mass deportations at which Republicans indicated they will be moving ahead quickly once Trump takes office.
“Mass deportations will jeopardize the safety and security of millions of mixed-status families, sowing deep (mis)trust and fear in the communities we represent, and without a doubt, destabilize the United States economy,” Luján said.
There are roughly 4 million mixed-status families, meaning family members with different immigration statuses.
Padilla said that those who have TPS and DACA all work in crucial U.S. industries.
“By taking work authorization for hundreds of thousands of workers away, we’re gutting our own workforce,” he said.
DACA fate
Trump, who tried to end DACA during his first administration, said during a sit-down interview with NBC on Sunday that he would “work with the Democrats on a plan” to keep those recipients in the U.S., but he did not elaborate on any details.
Thomas A. Saenz, the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which along with the state of New Jersey is defending DACA in the courts, said Dreamers should still continue to apply for renewals “and not fear renewing.”
“They should continue to seek renewal even perhaps earlier than they otherwise might to try to extend the period under which they are protected,” he said in an interview with States Newsroom.
Cortez Masto said she is always willing to work to protect Dreamers, but is skeptical about Trump’s comments.
“The last time he said that, and we brought him a bipartisan bill to do something to protect our Dreamers, he killed it,” she said.
Cortez Masto was referring to a 2018 bipartisan deal that Sens. Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, and Angus King, independent of Maine, struck that would have granted DACA recipients a pathway to citizenship, along with funding for a border wall.
‘The government has all of our information’
Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, deputy director of federal advocacy at the immigrant advocacy group United We Dream, said in an interview with States Newsroom that she’s concerned about Immigration and Customs Enforcement having access to information on DACA applicants through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes legal immigration paperwork.
“We’re really worried that will just give ICE a list of people that they can go then (and) knock on their doors,” she said.
Macedo do Nascimento, who is a DACA recipient herself, said her organization is asking the Biden administration to create a firewall between USCIS databases and DHS agencies like ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“The government has all of our information,” she said. “They could potentially come get us at any point. That’s the worst case scenario.”
If President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his pledge to deport millions of immigrants, it could upend the economies of states where farming and other food-related industries are crucial — and where labor shortages abound.
Immigrants make up about two-thirds of the nation’s crop farmworkers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, and roughly 2 in 5 of them are not legally authorized to work in the United States.
Agricultural industries such as meatpacking, dairy farms and poultry and livestock farms also rely heavily on immigrants.
“We have five to six employees that do the work that nobody else will do. We wouldn’t survive without them,” said Bruce Lampman, who owns Lampman Dairy Farm, in Bruneau, Idaho. His farm, which has been in the family three decades, has 350 cows producing some 26,000 pounds of milk a day.
“My business and every agriculture business in the U.S. will be crippled if they want to get rid of everybody who does the work,” said Lampman, adding that his workers are worried about what’s to come.
Anita Alves Pena, a Colorado State University professor of economics who studies immigration, noted that many agricultural employers already can’t find enough laborers. Without farm subsidies or other protections to make up for the loss of immigrant workers, she said, the harm to state economies could be significant.
“Farmers across the country, producers in a lot of different parts, are often talking about labor shortages — and that’s even with the current status quo of having a fairly high percentage of unauthorized individuals in the workforce,” Pena said. “A policy like this, if it was not coupled with something else, would exacerbate that.”
Employers have a hard time hiring enough farm laborers because such workers generally are paid low wages for arduous work.
In addition to hiring immigrant laborers who are in the country illegally, agricultural employers rely on the federal H-2A visa program. H-2A visas usually are for seasonal work, often for about six to 10 months. However, they can be extended for up to three years before a worker must return to their home country.
Employers must pay H-2A workers a state-specific minimum wage and provide no-cost transportation and housing. Still, employers’ applications for H-2A visas have soared in the past 18 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a trend reflecting the shortage of U.S.-born laborers willing to do the work. The number of H-2A positions has surged from just over 48,000 in 2005 to more than 378,000 in 2023.
But agricultural employers that operate year-round, such as poultry, dairy and livestock producers, can’t use the seasonal visa to fill gaps, according to the USDA.
My business and every agriculture business in the U.S. will be crippled if they want to get rid of everybody who does the work
– Bruce Lampman, owner of Lampman Dairy Farm in Bruneau, Idaho
Farmers also employ foreign nationals who have “temporary protected status” under a 1990 law that allows immigrants to remain if the U.S. has determined their home countries are unsafe because of violence or other reasons. There are about 1.2 million people in the U.S. under the program or eligible for it, from countries including El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Lebanon and Ukraine. Many have been here for decades, and Trump has threatened to end the program.
Support for the program
Immigration advocates want a pathway for H-2A workers to gain permanent legal status, and agricultural trade organizations are pushing for an expansion of the H-2A program to include year-round operations.
The National Milk Producers Federation says it’s too early to say how it would cope with mass deportations under the Trump administration. But the group states it “strongly supports efforts to pass agriculture labor reform that provides permanent legal status to current workers and their families and gives dairy farmers access to a workable guestworker program.”
Immigrants make up 51% of labor at dairy farms across states, and farms that employ immigrants produce nearly 80% of the nation’s milk supply, according to the organization.
“Foreign workers are important to the success of U.S. dairy, and we will work closely with members of Congress and federal officials to show the importance of foreign workers to the dairy industry and farm communities,” Jaime Castaneda, the group’s executive vice president for policy development and strategy, wrote in an email.
Adam Croissant, the former vice president of research and development at yogurt company Chobani, which has manufacturing plants in Idaho and New York, said he’s seen a lot of misinformation around immigrants’ workforce contributions.
“The dairy industry as a whole understands that without immigrant labor, the dairy industry doesn’t exist. It’s as simple as that,” said Croissant.
Tom Super, a spokesperson for the National Chicken Council, lambasted U.S. immigration policy and said the poultry industry “wants a stable, legal, and permanent workforce.”
“The chicken industry is heavily affected by our nation’s immigration policy or, more pointedly, lack thereof. … The system is broken, and Washington has done nothing to fix it,” Super wrote in an email.
Changes ahead?
But major changes to the H-2A visa program are unlikely to happen before deportations begin. In an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” over the weekend, Trump repeated his promise to start deporting some immigrants almost immediately.
He said he plans to begin with convicted criminals, but would then move to other immigrants. “We’re starting with the criminals, and we’ve got to do it. And then we’re starting with the others, and we’re going to see how it goes.”
Some farmers still hope that Trump’s actions won’t match his rhetoric. But “hoping isn’t a great business plan,” said Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association. “Our ability to feed ourselves as a country is completely jeopardized if you do see the mass deportations.”
If the deportations do happen, agricultural workers will disappear faster than they can be replaced, experts say.
“The H-2A program will not expand instantly to fill the gap. So, that’s going to be a problem,” said Jeffrey Dorfman, a professor of agricultural economics at North Carolina State University who was Georgia’s state economist from 2019 to 2023.
In Georgia, agriculture is an $83.6 billion industry that supports more than 323,000 jobs. It is one of the five states most reliant on the federal H-2A visa program, depending on those workers to fill about 60% of agricultural jobs.
Dorfman argued that even the fear of deportation will have an impact on the workforce.
“When farmworkers hear about ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids on a nearby farm, lots of them disappear. Even the legal ones often disappear for a few days. So, if everybody just gets scared and self-deports, just goes back home, I think that would be the worst disruption,” said Dorfman, adding that even more jobs would need to be filled if the administration revokes temporary protected status.
Antonio De Loera-Brust, communications director for the farmworker labor union United Farm Workers, said the nation’s focus should be on protecting workers, no matter their legal status.
“They deserve a lot better than just not getting deported,” he said. “They deserve better wages, they deserve labor rights, they deserve citizenship.”
And though economists and the agriculture industry have said that mass deportations could raise grocery store prices, De Loera-Brust called that particular argument a sign of “moral weakness.”
“As if the worst thing about hundreds of thousands of people getting separated from their families was going to be that consumers would have to pay more for a bag of strawberries or a bag of baby carrots,” De Loera-Brust said. “There’s a moral gap there.”
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
President-elect Donald Trump was interviewed for the edition of NBC News’ “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker” that aired on Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024. (Photo courtesy of NBC News)
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump vowed to sign an executive order on his first day in office to end the constitutional right to U.S. citizenship for anyone born in the country, during an extensive Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker.”
But Trump also admitted there would be legal hurdles to carrying out his policy goal of amending the 14th Amendment. Many constitutional legal scholars have argued that Trump could not halt what is known as birthright citizenship through an executive order.
“We have to end it,” Trump told Welker. “We’re going to end that because it’s ridiculous.”
On other immigration topics, he said he is willing to make a deal with Democrats on keeping so-called Dreamers in the U.S., and he supports deporting entire families in his mass deportation plans, even if the children themselves are U.S. citizens.
But some of his most extensive comments were on birthright citizenship. “We’re gonna have to get it changed,” Trump said of the 14th Amendment.
“All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” according to the 14th Amendment.
Trump said that he will try to end birthright citizenship through an executive order, “if we can.”
Experts take issue. “There is today no serious scholarly debate about whether a president can, through executive action, contradict the Supreme Court’s long-standing and consistent interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment,” Gerald Neuman, director of the human rights program at Harvard Law School, said in a statement in 2018 along with a group of constitutional law scholars.
Two-thirds of both the U.S. House and Senate would be required to vote to approve an amendment changing the Constitution, and three-fourths of state legislatures would have to ratify such an amendment for it to take effect. A convention could also be called by two-thirds of state legislatures.
While Republicans are set to control both chambers by January, it’s not by a margin of two-thirds.
During the interview, Trump also inaccurately claimed that the United States is the only country in the world that has birthright citizenship. More than a dozen countries bestow birthright citizenship, from Canada to Brazil.
Some countries have birthright citizenship, but with restrictions, such as France, which requires at least one parent be a citizen in order for the child to obtain citizenship.
A branch extended to Dreamers
Welker asked Trump what his plans are for the Dreamers, the more than 500,000 people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that he tried to end during his first administration. The DACA program is currently waiting for a federal court to decide its legal fate.
“These are people that have been brought here at a very young age and many of these are middle-aged people now, they don’t even speak the language of their country,” he said.
Trump said that he would “work with the Democrats on a plan,” but did not elaborate on any details.
Welker asked Trump about his mass deportation plans, a campaign pledge to deport millions of undocumented people, and how that would affect the more than 4 million mixed-status families, meaning families with different immigration statuses.
“I don’t want to be breaking up families,” Trump said. “So the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”
Welker asked if that included, “even kids who are here legally?”
“Whatcha gonna do if they want to stay with the father?” Trump said. “We have to have rules and regulations.”
Trump did not answer repeated questions as to whether he would bring back one of his harshest immigration policies, known as family separation, that separated parents from their children at the border. While most have been reunited, there are still about a quarter of children who are not with their parents.
“We don’t have to separate families,” Trump said. “We’ll send the whole family very humanely, back to the country where they came.”
Hundreds of immigrant rights advocates and others participate in rally and demonstration at the Federal Building in lower Manhattan on June 1, 2018 in New York. In coordinated marches across the country people gathered outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field offices, U.S. attorney's offices, and the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Spencer Platt | Getty Images).
The week before Thanksgiving, I spoke with an immigration attorney in Madison, Grant Sovern, who helped found the Community Immigration Law Center (CILC) — part of a flurry of new services created in the wake of the 2018 ICE raids that terrorized Dane County during President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration. No one knows what the immigration crackdown Trump has promised for his second term will look like. But advocates are once again meeting to try to prepare.
Sovern told me about desperate calls from friends of his college-age daughter — students who are worried about losing their protected status under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). While he has been offering them hope that the new administration won’t start by targeting Dreamers, who grew up in this country and just want to continue to study and work here, he added that the easiest targets for mass deportation are other people who’ve followed the rules. Asylum-seekers and those with temporary protected status and work visas — like the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, that Trump and incoming Vice President J.D. Vance falsely accused of eating their neighbors’ pets — will be the easiest to find.
What an ominous holiday season. We need the warmth of gatherings with friends and family more than ever. But it’s a weird time to be celebrating the arrival of our nation’s first immigrants and the mythical meal where they bonded with Native Americans before swiping their land and wiping them out. Talking about colonialism, genocide and how our society is built on historic injustice is quickly dismissed as “woke” and out of fashion these days. But it’s unavoidable if you’re trying to understand the rise of right-wing authoritarianism here and around the globe.
The same week I spoke with Sovern about preparations in Dane County to counter Trump’s mass deportations, Israeli peace activist Rotem Levin came to Madison with his Palestinian peace movement colleague Osama Iliwat to speak out against the war in Gaza and to discuss their vision for “a path to shared safety, justice and liberation,” according to the promotional materials from Jewish Voice for Peace, Vets for Peace and a handful of local religious groups that brought them to the Presbyterian church near my house.
I met Levin at the home of a neighbor who hosted the pair (Iliwat was resting, feeling unwell after their trip). Levin said their goal was to get people to stop being “sleepy” about the occupation and the hopelessness of the seemingly endless war on Palestinians by his country, supported by the U.S.
“We’re not like you – you genocided all the Native Americans and now they have to accept you,” Levin said with startling Israeli frankness. “We’re in the Middle East. There are Muslims all around us. The only way to guarantee safety and security is by building trust.”
Of the recent U.S. election, he said, “I want to encourage you. We have been living with dictatorship for 20 years. You will be OK.”
People who have been living comfortably with the thought that they are part of a democracy, protected by the rule of law, are not the ones who need to be afraid, he added. In the U.S., “people without papers” are the most vulnerable, like the Palestinians in Israel, he said. His parents, among other Israelis, have been shocked by his country’s rapid slide into fascism under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu and his right-wing cabinet. For his mother, who suddenly doesn’t recognize her country, and for his father, who was beaten at a protest march, the shift to militarism and the crushing of free speech was unthinkable until recently. For his Palestinian friends, however, repression is a familiar fact of life. His message is that security depends on justice for everyone.
Levin was not keen to talk about the daunting project of finding a political solution to the conflict. He didn’t want to get bogged down in arguments about the details, he said. Focusing on the small things, building personal, humanizing connections between Israelis and Palestinians, is critically important, even if there is no big-picture solution on the horizon yet.
The same approach applies here, on the cusp on the next Trump administration.
Community leaders and immigration attorneys have been meeting in Madison to try to figure out what to do. Local funding has dried up since the first Trump term. CILC lacks adequate resources and doesn’t have enough volunteer lawyers to respond to the crisis advocates see coming. And they don’t even know what shape that crisis will take. The prospect that the Trump administration will likely do away with its own practice, in the first administration, of not conducting raids in churches and schools “sends shivers down everybody’s spine,” Sovern said.
Mass raids like the 2018 ICE operations that shut down local restaurants could be scaled up, and could cause huge economic harm, especially for Wisconsin dairy farms where an estimated 70% of the workforce is comprised of undocumented immigrants.
But raiding isolated farms in rural areas of the state wouldn’t make the kind of news splash Trump is probably seeking. To achieve that effect, Democratic cities like Madison could be in the crosshairs. Instead of dropping busloads of migrants off in liberal northern cities, the publicity stunt gleefully executed by Republican Govs. Greg Abbot of Texas and Ron Desantis of Florida, the Trump administration could send in buses to round people up, crashing local economies by emptying out restaurants and other businesses that depend on an immigrant workforce.
According to The Hill, Texas has offered the incoming Trump administration 1,400 acres to build a mass deportation detention camp.
In Madison, immigrant rights groups and local officials have begun trying to calm people down.
After the 2018 ICE raids, advocates hosted an information session to offer legal advice and “the only thing anyone wanted to ask was, ‘Who will pick up my kids from school if I’m deported?’” Sovern recalled.
There is a lot to worry about, including the bill that recently passed the U.S. House allowing the federal government to designate U.S. nonprofits “terrorist supporting” organizations and strip them of their tax-exempt status.
But it’s also important to remember that, under current law, “they can’t do all the bad things they want to do all at once,” Sovern said.
He pointed to an evaluation of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, the nation’s first public defender system for immigrants facing deportation. (CILC, in Madison, was the second such effort.) The project provided lawyers to all low-income immigrants facing deportation proceedings in New York City. Before the project, only 4% of those challenging deportation were successful. Once they were provided with attorneys, the rate of success rose to 48%.
And despite polls showing increasing public support for mass deportations, even in the current amped-up anti-immigrant climate, most Americans (about 64%)say undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country if they meet certain conditions including applying for citizenship, working, paying taxes and not committing crimes.
People are more sympathetic if they hear the stories of real people who are affected by deportation threats, not just the lies about violent criminals who are eating pets.
It’s also important to spread the word that there are good people trying to hold up a light in the darkness. As Sovern puts it, “What we can do are little bits of tons of hard work.”
Even if it’s impossible to solve the big problem all at once, brave people are doing their best to lead us to a better future.
People demonstrate and call out words of encouragement to detainees held inside the Metropolitan Detention Center after marching to decry Trump administration immigration and refugee policies on June 30, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — A federal judge late Thursday struck down a White House policy that created a pathway to citizenship for people in the country lacking permanent status who were married to a U.S. citizen.
Eastern District of Texas Judge J. Campbell Barker ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its authority and the program “stretches legal interpretation past its breaking point” of U.S. immigration law. The suit was brought by Texas and other Republican-led states.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s program, called “Keeping Families Together,” would have shielded at least 550,000 immigrant spouses and their children from deportation.
With less than three months before President-elect Donald Trump is sworn into office, it’s unlikely the incoming administration will defend the program, and Trump has vowed to carry out mass deportations.
In a Thursday interview with NBC News, Trump said “there is no price tag” when it comes to mass deportations and that his administration will have “no choice” but to carry them out.
“We obviously have to make the border strong and powerful and, and we have to — at the same time, we want people to come into our country,” he said to NBC. “And you know, I’m not somebody that says, ‘No, you can’t come in.’ We want people to come in.”
As the former president is set to enter a second term in January, he has vowed to immediately begin carrying out mass deportations and ending programs that have granted temporary protections for immigrants such as humanitarian parole.
Trump has criticized the Biden policy that was struck down Thursday as a “mass amnesty” program.
“Mass amnesty” is a legal term that is considered an official pardon, but the program had certain requirements. The individuals considered for citizenship had to have been married to a U.S. citizen for at least a decade and undergo an extreme vetting procedure by DHS.
“This is unsustainable and can’t be allowed to continue!” Trump wrote of the program when it was announced in June. “On day one, we will SHUT DOWN THE BORDER and start deporting millions of Biden’s Illegal Criminals.”
The Texas judge, Barker, was appointed during Trump’s first term. The program was already put on hold in August when Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton led a suit against it.
The states that joined the suit are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming.
Those states argued that the Biden administration overreached its authority in creating the program and that it would financially harm states if the people qualifying for citizenship were allowed to remain in the country.
The states were represented by America First Legal, an organization established by Trump adviser Stephen Miller — the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration policies during his first term.
Ashley DeAzevedo, the President of American Families United, which represents U.S. citizens married to people without permanent status, in a statement urged the Biden administration to appeal the case.
“District Court Judge J. Campbell Barker did not just dismantle the Keeping Families Together program, he shattered the hopes of hundreds of thousands of American families,” she said. “Families like ours deserve better than this blatant attempt to stop a legal program, and we will not stop until the courts rectify this injustice.”
It’s estimated that roughly 500,000 spouses without legal status and their children would have been eligible to apply for a lawful permanent residence — a green card — under certain requirements. About 50,000 children who do not have legal status and have an immigrant parent married to a U.S. citizen would have also been included in that benefit.
The Department of Justice did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.
A woman holds a sign calling for “Mass deportation now!” at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to conduct mass deportations of millions of immigrants in the country without authorization. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom.)
WASHINGTON — Immigration advocates and civil rights groups are preparing to take on President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises to crack down on immigration, from reviving controversial policies of his first term to enacting mass deportations.
Trump has pledged to end, immediately after retaking office, parole programs that have allowed immigrants to work and live in the country legally. In those humanitarian parole programs, as of 2021, there were more than 1 million immigrants with temporary protections.
What is likely to immediately follow is the re-implementation of his previous immigration policies, such as bans on allowing people from predominantly Muslim countries into the United States and reinstating the “Remain in Mexico” policy that requires asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while they await their cases.
Immigration groups are preparing for those policies and the ones to follow ahead of Inauguration Day.
Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project, laid out a sobering reality.
“We recognize that many are feeling terrified about what the next four years will bring,” she said in a statement. “While we cannot stop all the harms from coming to pass, we say to everyone facing harm: we are here to do everything in our power to support and protect each other.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which was at the forefront of challenging some of Trump’s harshest immigration policies during his first term, said on social media it is prepared for legal challenges beginning on Trump’s first day in office.
Greisa Martínez Rosas, executive director of the largest immigrant youth organization, United We Dream, said in a statement that with Trump promising to plan mass deportations, they are “clear eyed about the fight ahead.”
“We will use and grow our power to new heights, building the largest pro-immigrant movement this country has ever seen, to fight back against white nationalism, and to enact a vision for the future that honors our values of a pluralistic democracy where everyone can live and thrive without fear,” Martínez Rosas said.
Deportations
Some immediate deportations could include those already in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, which was 37,395 as of September.
It could also include expanding expedited removals, which means if a person lacking permanent legal status is in the country for two years without a court hearing or any type of authorization, they can be deported without a hearing before a judge.
That type of removal is limited to 100 miles from a border. However, during the first Trump administration, that zone was expanded to the rest of the country. A second Trump administration could do that again.
The Migration Policy Institute, an immigration think tank, has estimated that “the expansion of expedited removal to the U.S. interior could apply to as many as 288,000 people.”
Tom Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2017 to 2018, told CBS News recently that mass deportation would be targeted.
“It’s not gonna be a mass sweep of neighborhoods,” he said. “They’ll be targeted arrests. We’ll know who we’re going to arrest, where we’re most likely to find ‘em based on numerous, you know, investigative processes.”
Funding
At issue would also be the cost of mass deportations.
Trump’s core campaign promise to enact mass deportations would be a costly undertaking that needs congressional approval — something that might be easier if the incoming president is granted control of both chambers.
The American Immigration Council, in a conservative estimate, found that it would cost $968 billion to remove the roughly 13 million immigrants in the country without authorization over the next ten years.
It would cost the government $89.3 billion in arrests, $167.8 billion to detain massive amounts of people, $34 billion on legal processing and $24 billion on removals, according to the analysis.
That funding would need to be appropriated through Congress.
As of Thursday morning, it was unclear if Trump would deal with a divided Congress or united GOP control. Republicans have flipped the Senate, and though there are still too many House races left to project control of the chamber, the GOP was inching toward a thin majority.
Economic impact
Economic experts have warned of the consequences of removing millions of workers.
Jeremy Robbins, the executive director of the American Immigration Council, tried to break down the economic effects of mass deportations.
“Should any president choose to pursue mass deportation, it would come at an extraordinary cost to the government while also devastating the economy,” Robbins said in a Wednesday statement.
“It’s critical that policymakers and the American public understand what this would involve: tens of billions of tax-payer dollars, already-strained industries devastated, millions of people locked up in detention, and thousands of families torn apart causing widespread terror and chaos in communities across the country.”
In 2022, households led by undocumented immigrants paid $75.6 billion in total taxes, according to the American Immigration Council. It’s estimated that about 4.8% of the U.S. workforce consists of unauthorized immigrants, according to the Pew Research Center.
Fernanda Jimenez, a 24-year-old Racine resident, came to the United States from Mexico with her mother and siblings when she was just 5 years old. It’s the only home she can remember.
For almost a decade, Jimenez has been protected from deportation by the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, launched under the Obama administration. The program allows people who came to the country illegally as children to get work permits and continue living in America.
Earlier this year, Jimenez graduated from Alverno College in Milwaukee. She currently works as a grant writer, helping nonprofits apply for funding. But she’s also in the process of applying to law school.
“I like helping nonprofits get funding to do the work that we need in our country and especially our communities, but I’m more passionate about community organizing,” she said. “I’d like to eventually use legal skills after law school for community organizing.”
Jimenez has big dreams, but she says she’s been feeling a looming anxiety since former President Donald Trump won his bid to return to the White House in this year’s presidential race.
She was still in high school when Trump was first elected in 2016, but she says she still remembers feeling “terrified” about what his election would mean for her parents who don’t have permanent legal status and what it would mean for DACA’s future.
Those fears have come roaring back in recent weeks.
“Our community is terrified. They’re uncertain of their futures, they’re concerned for their family members who are undocumented and not protected under DACA,” Jimenez said. “A lot of naturalized citizens are concerned as well. The mass deportation threat is being taken seriously.”
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to lead the largest deportation effort in U.S. history. Shortly after the election, he announced that Tom Homan, former acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would serve as his administration’s “border czar.”
In interviews with Fox News last week, Homan said he would prioritize deporting people who threaten public safety or pose risks to national security. But he also told the network that anyone in the country illegally is “not off the table,” and the administration would perform workplace immigration raids.
Immigrant rights group plans organizing efforts
Following Trump’s reelection, Voces de La Frontera, a Milwaukee-based immigrant rights group, has been holding community meetings in Green Bay, Milwaukee and Dane County to plan next steps, according to Christine Neumann-Ortiz, the organization’s founding executive director.
She said many of the immigrants in Wisconsin without permanent legal status are fearful of the prospect of mass deportations, but she doesn’t believe they will leave the country preemptively. Rather, she said they may leave Wisconsin for states that provide more protections to immigrants.
Neumann-Ortiz said Voces is using the regional meetings to brainstorm ways it can organize around protecting immigrants without permanent legal status. She said the group plans to raise awareness through mass strikes, protests and civil disobedience.
“We really are going to have to very strongly be a movement that stands for human decency, solidarity, and we’re going to have to do that in the streets,” she said.
Neumann-Ortiz also said she believes most Trump voters cast ballots for him because of economic concerns, not because they wanted to see people forcibly removed from their communities.
“I do think as things unfold, there’s going to be shock waves that are going to happen that are going to have many people open their eyes, regret their decisions and see what they can do to help,” she said.
David Najera, Hispanic outreach coordinator for the Republican Party of Wisconsin, does not share the concerns about mass deportations.
“My parents came from Mexico and Texas. They came the right way, and that’s the way I’d like to see people come,” he said.
Najera said he supports Trump’s immigration policies, citing concerns about crime, infectious disease and government resources.
“The immigrants are just overwhelming the hospitals, schools and everything else, and taking our tax money,” Najera said. “I’m not saying they’re all bad, but there’s a majority of them that are just getting out of their jails over there in different countries, and coming here with bad intentions.”
How are Wisconsin immigration attorneys advising clients?
Marc Christopher, an immigration attorney based in Milwaukee, represents clients in federal immigration court who are facing deportation or seeking asylum. Christopher said he doesn’t expect the Trump administration’s deportation effort to be limited to people with serious criminal convictions or those who pose security concerns.
He said he expects increased targeting of individuals who haven’t committed crimes or have been charged with minor offenses, like driving without a license. Immigrants living in Wisconsin without proof of citizenship or legal residency can’t get driver’s licenses.
“What I’m telling my clients to do is make sure that you follow the law to a tee,” Christopher said. “If you do not have a driver’s license, do not drive. If you can have someone else drive you to work or drive your children to school, make sure and do that because that’s the most common way that they get thrown into the immigration court process.”
Aissa Olivarez, managing attorney for the Community Immigration Law Center in Madison, said she expects the incoming administration to expand the use of “expedited removal.” It’s a process that allows the government to deport people without presenting their case to an immigration judge if the person has been in the country for less than two years.
“I’m also advising people to start gathering proof that they’ve been here for more than two years — phone bills, light bills, leases, school information — to be able to show in case they are stopped and questioned by immigration authorities,” Olivarez said.
Attorney Aissa Olivarez of the Community Immigration Law Center leads a seminar on March 11, 2024, in Madison, Wis. The presentation included basic information about the rights of immigrants in the U.S. and how people can apply for asylum. (Angela Major / WPR)
Second Trump term reignites fears over DACA’s future, impact on mixed-status families
Christopher and Olivarez both said the DACA program, and other federal programs giving immigrants temporary protected statuses, could end in the coming years.
Trump previously tried to end the DACA program, but it was upheld in a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with four liberal justices. The current court has a 6-3 conservative majority, meaning Roberts would no longer be the deciding vote.
“It’s (DACA) all but assuredly going to be found unconstitutional by the current Supreme Court,” Christopher said of the DACA program.
Jimenez, the DACA recipient from Racine, said she’s afraid being a participant in the program will make her a target for deportation by the federal government.
“We have to provide, every two years, an updated information application of where we live, our biometrics, our pictures, and they have to be recent pictures,” she said. “They have our entire information. And that’s really where our fear is at. They know who we are. They know we’re undocumented.”
Immigrant rights advocates are also concerned that a mass deportation effort could devastate the estimated 28,000 families in Wisconsin with mixed-immigration status. Those families include households where one spouse may be a U.S. citizen married to someone who doesn’t have permanent legal status, or where the parents of U.S. citizen children lack legal status.
Jimenez said her brother is part of a mixed-status family. She says he is a DACA recipient, his girlfriend is a legal resident, and his children are U.S. citizens.
“If he is to be deported, his kids would suffer the most not having their father with them, and my parents, who I fear (for) the most, have no protection,” she said. “They have to work. They have to drive to work. They have to drive without a license.”
What could a second Trump term mean for asylum seekers in Wisconsin?
Christopher, the immigration attorney from Milwaukee, said individuals seeking asylum in Wisconsin are in the country legally as they wait to make their case to the government that they should be granted asylum in the United States.
Under the last Trump administration, Christopher said the federal government narrowed the qualifications to be granted asylum. He said the previous Trump administration made it so those fleeing cartel or gang violence in their home country did not qualify and rolled back protections for those fleeing gender-based violence.
If Trump tightens restrictions on the qualifications on asylum again, Christopher said those new restrictions would apply to people already in Wisconsin waiting to make their case to immigration officials.
“You’re not protected by the rules at the time that you apply,” he said. “It’s going to be a major shift.”
Byron Chavez, a 28-year-old asylum seeker from Nicaragua, has been living in Whitewater since 2022. He applied for asylum and is waiting to make his case to the government.
“The community is very friendly. … You got everything you need and everything is close,” he said. “The diversity you have here, it’s what makes Whitewater a really nice place.”
If he gets an asylum hearing after Trump takes office, Chavez says he’s hopeful the government will hear him out and grant him asylum.
“I’m a little bit more concerned because I think the immigration law will be stricter,” he said. “But other than that, I like to go by the book. I’m doing things the way they should, and hopefully that talks about my desire of being here. I want to do things the right way.”
People demonstrate and call out words of encouragement to detainees held inside the Metropolitan Detention Center after marching to decry Trump administration immigration and refugee policies on June 30, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON —Top advisers to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign held a Wednesday press conference including children who were separated from their parents under the highly criticized Trump administration immigration policy, as a warning of what a second term under the former president could bring for the Latino community.
The press conference in Doral, Florida, came ahead of a late Wednesday Univision town hall at which GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump will talk with undecided Latino voters.
Four children at the press conference recounted stories of being separated from a parent by immigration officials during the Trump administration and the lasting trauma it caused. Their full names and ages were not provided by the campaign.
With 20 days until Nov. 5 and early voting underway in many states, both campaigns have tried to court Latino voters, as they are the second-largest group of eligible voters.
“The Latino vote will decide this election,” Democratic Texas U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, who serves as co-chair for the Harris campaign, said at the press conference.
Harris campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz said that for the next 20 days, Democrats will continue to reach out to Latinos and stress “the threat that Donald Trump is to Latino communities everywhere.”
Harris looks for Latino support
The 2024 presidential election is essentially a dead heat between Harris and Trump. Latino voter preferences largely resemble the 2020 presidential election, when President Joe Biden defeated Trump 61% to 36% in earning the Latino vote, according to the Pew Research Center.
Harris, the Democratic nominee, currently has a smaller lead over Trump with Latinos, 57% to 39%, according to the Pew Research Center.
Escobar warned what a second Trump administration could bring to the Latino community.
“I hear a lot of Latinos who say that they want to vote for Donald Trump, that they appreciate some of his policies,” she said.
Escobar said that Trump has not only promised to carry out mass deportations, but go after pathways to legal immigration. She argued that architects of some of the former president’s harshest immigration policies are top level advisers, like Stephen Miller, who has proposed eliminating legal immigration like humanitarian parole programs and Temporary Protected Status.
Miller has also proposed a program to strip naturalized citizens of their U.S. citizenship — an initiative that Miller said would be “turbocharged” under a second Trump administration.
“For Latinos who think that when Donald Trump insults immigrants, or when he talks about mass deportation that you’re thinking he’s talking about somebody else, oh no, no, he’s talking about you,” Escobar, who represents the border town of El Paso, said.
Escobar said there would be no guardrails for a second Trump administration and programs like family separation could be implemented. The separation occurred at the border as asylum-seeking parents were put into criminal detention and sometimes deported.
“These kids who have lived through horrific trauma, through the pain of being separated from their parents, what you heard from them moments ago will be far worse if Trump gets a second term,” she said. “In Donald Trump’s first term, he had people around him who actually tried to stop him. In a second term, not only will those guardrails not exist, but those people who were there to stop him in the first place are long gone.”
Trump has declined to say whether he would resume family separations if given a second term, also known as the zero-tolerance policy.
“Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come. If a family hears that they’re going to be separated, they love their family. They don’t come. So I know it sounds harsh,” Trump said during a CNN town hall in May 2023.
Escobar said that she is hoping that at Wednesday night’s town hall, Trump will be pressed on whether he would reimplement his family separation policy.
The Biden administration established a task force to reunite the 3,881 children who were separated from their families from 2017 to 2021.
Anti-immigrant messaging featured prominently at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this summer.
Convention goers waved “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” signs. The party’s 2024 platform declared that with a second term former President Donald Trump would “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”
But even as immigration remains a top issue for the Trump campaign and voters — it was tied for the second most important issue for voters in a recent Marquette Law School Poll — new survey results suggest a majority of Wisconsin Republicans might not be sold on one of Trump’s top campaign pledges.
The poll, conducted by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which has been conducting in-depth surveys on key issues in six battleground states, found that 63% of Wisconsin residents would prefer finding a pathway to citizenship for “undocumented immigrants who have been living in the US for some years and have not committed a serious crime. They would pay a penalty and any taxes they owe. After several years, they would be allowed to apply for citizenship.”
Only 25% in Wisconsin support mass deportation, described as an effort “with the goal of finding, detaining and deporting most or all of the 11 million people who have been living in the US without legal status. States would be asked to use their local law enforcement or National Guard, and the Federal government may use the military.”
More than three in four Democrats and 51% of Republicans in Wisconsin prefer a path to citizenship over a mass deportation program. Thirty-six percent of Republicans in this crucial battleground state preferred mass deportation. Nationally, 58% prefer a path to citizenship while just 26% favor mass deportation.
So why, then, is there a disconnect between what voters favor and what Trump is campaigning on?
First, it “is not uncommon that majorities find the pro arguments and the con arguments convincing, so the same person can find both sides convincing,” said Steven Kull, the Program for Public Consultation’s director.
That’s why, in a rally or group setting, a message of “this is going to be dealt with” resonates with voters, he said. But, when voters “actually reason through” the pluses and minuses of each option, they are able to shift their views on something they initially like when hearing surface-level details, Kull said.
Trump’s signature proposal to build a wall along the southern border was supported by 59% of Wisconsin respondents, including 76% of Wisconsin Republicans. Meanwhile, 54% of Democrats in the state opposed the idea. Nationally, 55% are in favor of building the wall, according to the poll.
There was bipartisan consensus on a few immigration-related policies. For example, 74% of Wisconsin residents supported a proposal that would increase the number of border patrol agents from 20,000 to 22,000.
There was also support for increasing “the number of migrant workers who enter the US legally by increasing the number of work visas available, provided there is a demand for such workers.”
Respondents were informed that the “work visas are only granted if the employer has tried and failed to fill the position with an American worker; that employers must pay migrant workers the same wages they would to American workers; and that currently offering more visas would substantially increase the number of legal migrant workers.”
It was backed by 71% of respondents, including 58% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats.
Trump’s threats of mass deportation have rattled Wisconsin’s dairy industry, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. Given that some estimates say upwards of 80% of workers at large dairy farms are immigrants, many of them in the country illegally, their removal could threaten the day-to-day operations of dairies across the state.
A proposal to hire hundreds of additional immigration judges to speed up the processing of asylum cases is favored by 61% of Wisconsin residents, though with 76% support from Democrats. Among Republicans, 54% oppose adding judges.
If you’re interested in going through the policymaking simulation, you can do so here.
Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.
In this photo from July 2021, a person stands next to the U.S.-Mexico border barrier in Tijuana, Mexico, painted with a mural depicting people who arrived in the U.S. illegally as children and were deported as adults. (Mario Tama | Getty Images)
Swing state voters, including in Wisconsin, favor a number of immigration policy changes, according to a new survey. “Mass deportation” — promised by the Republican candidate for president, former President Donald Trump — isn’t one of them.
The survey isn’t aimed at simply taking the public’s immediate temperature on issues at the top of the political agenda, however.
Produced by theProgram for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland, it’s part of a project that asks people how they want to see various social and civic problems solved after they are informed about the details and pros and cons of various options.
Program for Public Consultation Director Steven Kull. (Photo courtesy Kull)
The goal “is to give the public a greater voice, bring the public to the table, give them a meaningful understanding of the issues [and] widen the range of issues that they can engage with and articulate their views on,” program director Steven Kull said in an interview.
The process helps counteract public misinformation about subjects, at least among poll participants, Kull said. It also aims to open people’s minds to opposing arguments for policies. “People often can go inside silos and not hear arguments on both sides,” he said.
Kull believes surveys that simply ask a person’s opinion on a policy proposal fall short unless they make room for people to fully consider context: the nature of the problem itself and the potential consequences of various options. Those surveys also don’t adequately engage the public in thinking about and helping to shape effective policy, he contends.
Simply asking the public’s opinion of “mass deportation” of immigrants who are in the U.S. without legal status is an example.
“What it exactly means is not very clear,” Kull said. “It’s just kind of a feeling statement.”
Letting the public assess options
Addressing the impending shortfall in the Social Security system offers another illustration.
Asked about raising the retirement age or raising the payroll tax that funds the program, most people are likely to give a thumbs-down to both options, Kull said — while at the same time affirming that they want Social Security to remain viable.
“And you put those together and you go, ‘Oh, the public’s a big baby. They don’t really understand these things. And it’s third rail, better stay away from it,’” Kull said.
By contrast, the Program for Public Consultation’s survey began with a presentation of alternatives for dealing withSocial Security’s threatened insolvency. Survey participants were then asked about those alternatives — including combining several as part of an overall solution.
“We presented all the options and told them what the effects would be of each one, and evaluated arguments pro and con,” Kull said. “There were majorities that did address the Social Security shortfall effectively and made hard decisions.”
Going against stereotype, “Democrats cut benefits, Republicans raised taxes,” he added. “And there was actually a remarkable amount of convergence.”
The proposed benefit cuts in the survey were for the highest 20% of earners, and the tax increase consisted of gradually raising the payroll tax from 6.2% to 6.5% of income, as well as subjecting income over $400,000 to the payroll tax, currently capped at $169,000.
The Program for Public Consultation has been conducting surveys over the last several months on subjects that have been at the forefront of the 2024 election campaigns. The surveys have included national samples as well as samples from six battleground states in the presidential race.
Kull said the policy simulations at the heart of the program present issues in language comprehensible to someone with a high school education. Alternatives are also reviewed by proponents and opponents of each proposal.
A survey reported in early September examined public response onabortion rights. It showed majorities opposed criminalizing abortion, although Democrats and Republicans differed in the percentage taking that position.
Focusing on immigration
The immigration survey released Thursday asks participants to consider how to address the presence of 11 million immigrants in the U.S. without any legal status. Trump and other Republican candidates have sought to center undocumented immigrants, often with misleading or false claims about crime, and Trump has emphasized his intention to conduct a mass deportation of immigrants if he’s elected.
The survey reviewed various policy alternatives. Among them were provisions from the2013 immigration reform legislation that passed the U.S. Senate on a bipartisan 68-32 vote but died in the House of Representatives.
“All the main elements are here, and they all get pretty robust majority support, and most of it bipartisan,” Kull said.
The survey’s proposed “path to legal citizenship” describes the creation of a new visa for undocumented immigrants already in the U.S. who meet certain conditions. The visa would allow them to apply for citizenship after several years.
The survey projects that removing 11 million immigrants without legal status from the U.S. would cost $100 billion or more.
Given those descriptions, 63% of Wisconsinites in the survey preferred the path to citizenship over deportation. That included 77% of Democrats and 41% of Republicans.
Overall 25% of Wisconsinites in the survey favored mass deportation, including 14% of Democrats and 36% of Republicans. The remaining 11% of Wisconsin participants (12% of Republicans and 9% of Democrats) favored neither alternative.
The survey’s Wisconsin sample consisted of 605 people.
Bipartisan agreement — sometimes
While the strength of support or opposition to those and other policy options varied from state to state, survey participants in five other swing states and the national survey sample all favored the path to citizenship over mass deportation, although support from Democrats was higher.
Similar bipartisan majorities favor hiring more Border Patrol agents, requiring employers to use E-Verify to confirm all hires are legally allowed to work in the U.S. and increasing the number of work visas that would allow migrant workers to enter the U.S. legally.
Some policies show a partisan division, at least in some states. A majority of Wisconsin Republicans — 54% — oppose hiring more immigration judges to reduce the backlog of applicants seeking asylum, while 76% of Democrats support that option. Overall, 61% of Wisconsinites in the survey were in favor.
Building more walls on the border — which survey participants are told would cost about $25 billion — was favored by 55% of Wisconsinites overall, and by 76% of Wisconsin Republicans. It was opposed by 54% of Democrats
Members of the public can visit the program website and go through thepolicymaking simulation themselves. It is available in English and Spanish.
The program’s swing state survey findings might not be able to predict how people will vote on the issues in the coming election, but Kull said he doesn’t believe simpler surveys are able to do that reliably, either.
“The response to the question, ‘Do you favor or oppose mass deportation?’ doesn’t really give us anything,” he said. “It can just be people kind of reacting randomly.”
For Kull, the survey findings suggest a common theme in the concerns that participants have about immigration.
“The public is frustrated that the process is in this kind of chaos,” he said. In the survey, “there’s basically support for every step that assimilates the process into a legal framework.”
Aerial view of the Bridge of the Americas Land Port of Entry. One of four crossings in El Paso, the Bridge of the Americas is located on the international border separating El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and connects with the Mexican port of “Cordova” in Juarez, Chihuahua. (Jerry Glaser | U.S. Customs and Border Protection)
This is one in a series of States Newsroom reports on the major policy issues in the presidential race.
WASHINGTON — Immigration remains at the forefront of the 2024 presidential election, with both candidates taking a tougher stance than in the past on the flow of migrants into the United States.
GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has made immigration a core campaign issue, as he did in his two previous bids for the White House, and has expanded his attacks this time around to include false claims about migrants with legal status in specific locations like Springfield, Ohio.
He’s often demonized immigrants in speeches and at rallies, and has vowed to enact the mass deportation of millions of people living in the United States without authorization.
Vice President Harris in her remarks on immigration has mainly stuck to her promise to sign into law a bipartisan border security deal that three senators struck earlier this year. That legislation, if enacted, would have been the most drastic change in U.S. immigration law in decades.
The deal never made it out of the Senate. Once Trump expressed his displeasure with the bill, House Republicans pulled their support, and the GOP in the upper chamber followed suit.
Harris has not detailed her positions on immigration beyond her support of the border security bill.
Regardless of who wins the White House, the incoming administration will be tasked with the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects a little over half a million undocumented people brought into the United States as children without authorization. A Texas legal challenge threatens the legality of the program, and the case could make its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Additionally, work visas, massive backlogs in U.S. immigration courts and renewing those individuals in Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, will fall to the next administration. Neither candidate has laid out how they would handle those issues.
The Trump campaign did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.
The Harris campaign pointed to the vice president’s remarks from an Arizona campaign rally where she acknowledged the U.S. has a broken immigration system and put her support behind border security and legal pathways to citizenship.
Harris has made the bipartisan border deal a centerpiece of her campaign. She’s often promised to sign it into law and has used the proposal to criticize Trump.
“We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border,” Harris said during the Democratic National Convention in August.
The bill negotiated by senators would need to reach the 60-vote threshold to advance through the chamber. But after Trump came out against it and it was brought to the floor, the Republican who handled negotiations with Democrats and the White House, Oklahoma’s James Lankford, voted against his own bill.
Additionally, House Democrats in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and immigration groups were not supportive of the bill.
“I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law,” Harris said at the DNC.
The measure raises the bar for asylum, and would require asylum seekers to provide greater proof of their fear of persecution.
The bill would have also provided $20 billion for the hiring of more than 4,000 asylum officers, legal counsel for unaccompanied minors and the purchase of drug screening technology at ports of entry. It would also have provided $8 billion for detention facilities to add 50,000 detention beds.
The plan did include some legal pathways to citizenship for Afghans who aided the U.S. and fled in 2021 after the U.S. withdrew from the country. It also provided up to 10,000 special visas for family members of those Afghan allies.
It also would have added 250,000 green-card employee and family-based visas over the next five years.
Promise: mass deportations
“Send them back,” is chanted at Trump’s rallies, where he often promises to carry out mass deportations.
There are roughly 11 million people in the U.S. without legal authorization.
“We’re going to have the largest deportation,” Trump said at a June campaign rally in Racine, Wisconsin. “We have no choice.”
Under Trump’s vision, mass deportation would be a broad, multipronged effort that includes invoking an 18th-century law; reshuffling law enforcement at federal agencies; transferring funds within programs in the Department of Homeland Security; and forcing greater enforcement of immigration laws.
Promise: an end to birthright citizenship
In a May 2023 campaign video, Trump said if he wins the White House, one of his first moves would be to issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship, which means anyone born in the U.S., regardless of their parents’ status, is an American citizen.
This is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and would likely face legal challenges.
“As part of my plan to secure the border, on Day One of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship,” Trump said.
Promise: deportation of pro-Palestinian students on visas
Across the country, students on college campuses during the past year have set up encampments and protests calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and an end to the Israel-Hamas war.
In the initial attack on Oct. 7, 2023, more than 1,200 people were killed in Israel and hundreds taken hostage. As the war has continued, researchers estimate that as many as 186,000 Palestinians have been killed.
At a private dinner in May, Trump told donors that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country,” according to the Washington Post.
“You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” Trump said. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
Trump also made that vow during a campaign rally in October 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“We’ll terminate the visas of all of Hamas’ sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country, if that’s OK with you,” he said.
With immigration reform stalled in Congress, one way the Biden administration has handled mass migration is the use of humanitarian parole programs. Those humanitarian parole programs have been used for Ukrainians fleeing the war with Russia, Afghans fleeing after the U.S. withdrawal and for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.
More than 1 million people have been paroled into the U.S. under the executive authority extended by the Biden administration.
“I will stop the outrageous abuse of parole authority,” Trump said.
Promise: green cards for foreign students
In a June podcast interview, Trump said that he was supportive of giving green cards to foreign students if they graduate from a U.S. college.
“What I will do is, if you graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” Trump said. “That includes junior colleges, too.”
This would be done through rulemaking from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
On the podcast, Trump also said he would extend H-1B visas for tech workers. Those visas allow employers to hire foreign workers for specialized occupations, usually for a high skill role.
Promise: more screenings of immigrants
On social media, the Trump campaign said it would put in place an “ideological screening” for all immigrants and bar those who have sympathies toward Hamas.
Promise: Trump-era immigration policies
Trump has stated in various campaign speeches that he plans to reinstate his immigration policies from his first term.
That would include the continuation of building a wall along the southern border; reissuing a travel ban on individuals from predominantly Muslim countries; suspending travel of refugees; reinstating a public health policy that barred migrants from claiming asylum amid the coronavirus pandemic; and reinstating the remain in Mexico policy that required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting their cases.
Faith leaders with the Dane Sanctuary Coalition spoke out against anti-immigrant rhetoric at the Midvale Community Lutheran Church Thursday | Wisconsin Examiner photo
Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance traveled to western Wisconsin this week to double down on his spurious attacks on immigrants, promising to “kick these illegal aliens out.”
It was the second time in two weeks that Republicans have campaigned in the rural, western part of the state on their “mass deportation” platform.
The region where Vance and U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden made their recent stands against immigrants is heavily dependent on immigrant labor. Immigrants make up a large majority of the workforce on area dairy farms and they do most of the heavy lifting for other key businesses in the area including Ashley Furniture — the world’s largest furniture manufacturer — and the Pilgrim’s poultry processing plant.
Western Wisconsin has experienced a big recent demographic shift with an influx of Latin American immigrants. And those newcomers have revitalized small towns across the region that were in decline because young people are moving away, leaving an aging white population. Mexican restaurants, grocery stores and other small businesses have given new life to fading Main streets and young families have filled schools that were on the brink of closure from low enrollment.
It’s hard to keep up with all the falsehoods politicians are spreading about immigrants in this campaign season. Among the doozies Vance dropped during his visit to Eau Claire was his baseless assertion that immigrants caused two area hospitals to close recently and that mass deportation will “make the business of rural health care much more affordable.”
The closure of those rural hospitals was agonizing for the communities that struggled to hold on to them. An aging patient population, low Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, trouble finding and keeping staff, and a larger harsh landscape for nonprofit hospitals were among the factors that caused the hospitals to close. But neither the legislators who worked on the issues nor hospital management pointed to immigrants as the problem. There’s good reason for that.
Across the country, immigrants use the U.S. medical system far less than people born in the U.S. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that: “Recent immigrants were responsible for only about 1% of public medical expenditures even though they constituted 5% of the population,” and “immigrants’ medical costs averaged about 14% to 20% less than those who were US born.”
As Alison Pfau, bilingual regional dairy educator for the University of Wisconsin Extension, has seen that phenomenon up close. She explained during a panel I participated in this week that given a choice between seeking medical care and staying on the job, “immigrant workers will choose to keep working every time, unless it’s a dire emergency.”
Meanwhile, national research shows that immigrants — including those without legal status — pay more into government health care programs through tax withholdings than they use in benefits. In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid almost $100 billion in taxes, about a third of which went to Medicare and Social Security — programs they will never be able to use —Wisconsin Watch reports. Without them, U.S. safety net programs would take a big hit.
Other misleading campaign talking points mix up immigrants who are in the U.S. without legal authorization, like most Wisconsin dairy workers, with refugees and asylum seekers like the atrociously slandered Haitian refugees Vance and Trump have been falsely accusing of eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — who are here under U.S. protection and therefore not, contrary to campaign rhetoric, eligible to be deported.
Antonio De Loera-Brust, a United Farm Workers spokesman, told Wisconsin Watch that the point of anti-immigrant rhetoric is not a real policy plan. After all, deporting millions of workers would be logistically impossible, in addition to depriving U.S. agriculture of a huge portion of its labor force. Employers who support Trump despite his threats, De Loera-Brust theorized, aren’t worried about losing their workers — they see the rhetoric as a way to frighten farmworkers so they don’t demand their rights. “I don’t think you need to psychoanalyze it that much further beyond, ‘This is in their economic interest,’” he told Wisconsin Watch.
He has a point. There is nothing coherent or logical about the barrage of hateful rhetoric about immigrants. Fear itself seems to be the point. And a system in which a disempowered workforce lives in fear is a system that is bound to be rife with exploitation.
Still, some farmers do object to the nasty characterization of immigrants. They point out that there is no legal visa for year-round farm work, even though the U.S. has depended on these workers to do jobs Americans don’t want to do for decades now. They want a visa program that recognizes that work and gives the people who’ve been here a long time a path to citizenship.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about all the political flame-throwing over communities supposedly afflicted by immigrants is that many of the people who live in those communities don’t agree that they are afflicted at all.
I found this out when I interviewed local leaders in Whitewater, Wisconsin, which was the focus of a lot of misleading political spin about a supposed sudden “flood” of Nicaraguan asylum seekers causing a crime wave. It turned out that story was false.
Eau Claire, like Whitewater, has been welcoming asylum seekers from other countries for years, and, as in Whitewater, residents there say the experience has enriched their community.
Matt Kendziera, executive director of Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice, lived in Eau Claire for 29 years before moving to Madison last year. He said he never heard divisive talk about the arrival of people from other countries in the community until Vance visited this week to talk about the scourge of immigration. “Eau Claire has been a wonderful and welcoming community to the refugees who are there,” he told me. Many former refugees have become community leaders, he added, running for city council and becoming active in the local schools.
I spoke to Kendziera Thursday during a news conference at the Midvale Lutheran Community Church in Madison, where faith leaders who are part of the Dane Sanctuary Coalition were speaking out against “the growing number of vicious, racist lies, hatred, bomb threats, persecution and death threats against asylum seekers,” according to a coalition press release.
“This church has had the privilege of accompanying asylum seekers,” said Midvale Lutheran’s co-pastor, Rev. Katie Baardseth. Families from Cameroon, Ukraine and Colombia fleeing persecution and violence had found “peace and success in Madison,” she said. The experience of welcoming those families had benefited the congregation, she added.
Rabbi Jon Prosnit of Temple Beth El talked about Jews’ historical experience: “We’ve been targeted, we’ve been scapegoated. … We are always on guard lest our own hearts harden,” he said, adding that welcoming and protecting outsiders is “the most repeated injunction in the entire Torah.”
Ibrahim Saeed, president of the Islamic Center of Madison, described the history of the Muslim people as a history of persecution and exile but also of being welcomed by strangers. God made humanity, he said, “so you can get to know each other, not to despise each other.”
Without a doubt, there’s a demographic shift going on in Wisconsin, especially in rural areas. But community leaders, employers and regular citizens in Wisconsin communities like Whitewater, Eau Claire and Arcadia have embraced the change and the energy and economic and cultural benefits that come with it.
It’s inspiring to talk to people who have opened their hearts, welcoming newcomers and feeling their own lives and communities enriched by the experience.
Contrary to all the toxic rhetoric, immigration is a net plus for our country, and especially for the white, rural areas the Trump/Vance campaign is targeting in Wisconsin. Beneath the noise of the political campaign, a lot of people in those communities can tell you about it.
President Joe Biden’s administration announced a 100-day suspension of the removal of certain undocumented immigrants on Jan. 20, 2021, the day Biden was inaugurated.
However, a judge blocked the “pause” days later.
Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance alluded to the suspension Sept. 17, 2024, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, blaming Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Homeland Security Department suspended removals — the mandatory departure of noncitizens out of the United States based on a formal order.
The department said it would review immigration enforcement practices during the pause, which did not apply to certain undocumented immigrants, such as suspected terrorists.
Days later, a Texas federal judge blocked the suspension, which had been challenged by Texas’ attorney general.
The Migration Policy Institute reported in June that deportations — including removals and other types of departures — under Biden are on track to match former President Donald Trump’s 1.5 million total.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s 47th Annual Leadership Conference at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center on September 18, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris warned Wednesday of her GOP rival’s plans to enact mass deportations.
“They have pledged to carry out the largest deportation, a mass deportation, in American history,” Harris said during a speech at an event hosted by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the nonprofit arm of the congressional caucus.
A Scripps News/Ipsos survey published Wednesday found that a majority of Americans support mass deportations, including 58% of independents.
The survey showed 54% of respondents overall supported mass deportations, with 86% of Republicans and 25% of Democrats saying they supported the idea.
Harris asked the crowd at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute 2024 Leadership Conference to imagine how mass deportations would be carried out.
“How’s that gonna happen, massive raids? Massive detention camps?” she said. “What are they talking about?”
Harris said that the U.S. should instead focus on reforming “our broken immigration” system.
“We can do both,” she said. “Create an earned pathway to citizenship and ensure our border is secure.”
Trump also urged House Republicans on Wednesday to cause a government shutdown if a provision to require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections is not included in a stopgap spending bill that would avert a government shutdown by Oct. 1.
Teamsters decline to endorse
The General Executive Board of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters decided Wednesday to not endorse either candidate for president, because it “found no definitive support among members for either party’s nominee.”
“Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien said in a statement.
“We sought commitments from both Trump and Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries—and to honor our members’ right to strike—but were unable to secure those pledges,” he continued.
Harris made a surprise visit this week to the Teamsters office in Washington, D.C.
After the non-endorsement, the Trump campaign released a statement arguing that the “rank-and-file of the Teamsters Union supports Donald Trump for President.”
The union released internal polls Wednesday that showed members favored Trump over Harris 58% to 31%. An earlier poll taken when President Joe Biden was still in the race showed members backed Biden 44.3% compared to Trump’s 36.3%.
The union endorsed Biden in 2020 and has traditionally backed Democrats.
On the trail
The candidates continue to hold events across the country.
Trump is scheduled to hold an evening rally in Uniondale, New York, his second live campaign event since his second apparent assassination attempt at his golf course in Florida over the weekend. He held a town hall in Flint, Michigan, on Tuesday.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, announced late Tuesday that the bipartisan group a bipartisan task force created to investigate the July assassination attempt against Trump would expand to include the apparent assassination attempt at the GOP presidential nominee’s Florida golf club.
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, delivered remarks in Raleigh, North Carolina, late Wednesday afternoon.
Thursday’s campaign schedule shows a packed day of public events for all the major campaign figures.
Harris is expected to make a campaign stop in Detroit. She’s then scheduled to return to Wisconsin.
Trump is scheduled to attend a “Fighting Anti-Semitism in America Event” in Washington, D.C at 6 p.m. Eastern.
Harris is expected to join an 8 p.m. Eastern “Unite for America” livestream hosted by Oprah Winfrey in collaboration with the group Win With Black Women, along with more than 140 grassroots groups.
Inauguration platform
Congressional leaders participated in a longtime tradition Wednesday, hammering the first nail of the stage that will be used to swear in the 47th president Jan. 20.
Members of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies partook in the First Nail Ceremony, where they picked up a hammer and smacked preset nails into wooden planks.
Senators on the committee included Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, Sens. Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and Deb Fischer, Republican of Nebraska.
“At the very least it’ll be therapeutic,” Klobuchar joked about the hammering.
The House lawmakers included Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Republicans of Louisiana, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York.
Scalise was the first lawmaker to finish hammering his nail, followed by Johnson. Klobuchar was the last, and ended her final swing of her hammer with a laugh.
It takes about six months to build the platform for the ceremony, Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin said.
The Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, greets the Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, as they joined other officials at Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2024, honoring the lives of those lost in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. The handshake came the day after a fiery debate between the candidates. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump intensified in the days following their first, and likely only, debate, as both hit swing states with just over 50 days until the election.
The Harris campaign rode a wave of momentum to the week’s end, cutting ads featuring debate clips and kicking off an “aggressive” blitz of battleground states that it dubbed the “New Way Forward” tour.
Trump and Republican Party officials meanwhile filed what they described as “election integrity” lawsuits this week targeting voter registration and absentee ballots in Nevada and Michigan.
While numerouspollsshowed Harris outperformed the former president at Tuesday’s debate, Trump continued to tout his performance at a press conference Friday and chastised a reporter for suggesting some Republicans thought he gave a poor showing.
“We’ve gotten great praise for the debate,” he said, adding “You know, look, you come from Fox (News), you shouldn’t play the same game as everybody else.”
Trump spoke for roughly an hour and took a dozen questions at the Trump National Golf Course in Los Angeles where he promised, if elected, “to start with Springfield and Aurora” when he carries out the “largest deportation in the history of our country.”
Trump has repeated baseless rumors that Venezuelan gangs overtook an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado. In an unforgettable moment during Tuesday’s debate he claimed Haitian migrants are eating domesticated pets in Springfield, Ohio — a lie that circulated among the right on social media, including from his running mate, Ohio’s junior U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance.
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians live in the U.S. legally under temporary protected status after the nearby Caribbean nation was rocked by a violent government collapse this spring.
When asked by a reporter Friday if he felt any concern for the Ohio community that has been thrust into the national spotlight and is now the target of bomb threats, Trump said no.
“The real threat is what’s happening at our borders,” he snapped back.
Trump also lobbed similar attacks at a Thursday night rally in Tucson, Arizona, describing a small western Pennsylvania town of Charleroi as “not so beautiful now” because Haitian migrants moved in.
In reality, Charleroi has suffered population loss and blight for decades following the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s.
Harris campaigns in North Carolina, Pennsylvania
Prior to the debate, a national New York Times/Siena poll showed Trump with a slight edge over Harris.
“We are the underdog, let’s be clear about that,” Harris told a roaring crowd in Greensboro, North Carolina Thursday night. “And so we have hard work ahead of us, but we like hard work.”
Harris held back-to-back campaign rallies Thursday night in North Carolina’s Raleigh and Greensboro that together drew 25,000, according to campaign figures.
The vice president headed to the battleground state of Pennsylvania Friday, where she first visited Classic Elements, a bookshop and cafe in the ruby-red Johnstown area before a nighttime rally in Wilkes-Barre.
The commonwealth’s junior U.S. Sen. John Fetterman and wife Gisele accompanied Harris to the small business, where she told about a dozen patrons, “You’ve created a space that is a safe space, where people are welcome and know that they’re encouraged to be with each other and feel a sense of belonging,” according to reporters traveling with her.
“I will be continuing to travel around the state to make sure that I’m listening as much as we are talking,” Harris said. “And ultimately I feel very strongly that you’ve got to earn every vote and that means spending time with folks in the communities where they live. And so that’s why I’m here and we’re going to be spending a lot more time in Pennsylvania.”
Harris garnered the coveted endorsement from mega pop star and Pennsylvania native Taylor Swift immediately after the debate.
Both Trump and Harris at 9/11 ceremony
By week’s end the vice president added to her list of Republican endorsements, when the Bush-era Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez announced his support. Gonzalez, who served under former president George W. Bush, wrote Thursday in Politico that Trump poses “perhaps the most serious threat to the rule of law in a generation.”
Tuesday’s debate was immediately followed by the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Harris joined President Joe Biden at multiple ceremonies.
Trump also attended events in New York City and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, accompanied by far-right activist and 9/11 conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. He defended her at his press conference Friday, calling her a “free spirit.”
Several Republicans havecriticized Loomer in recent days.
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