Mercedes Falk, executive director of the nonprofit Puentes/Bridges, which takes Midwestern dairy farmers to Mexico to meet their workers' families, talks with Teresa Juarez Tepole in her home | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

VERACRUZ, MEXICO — John Rosenow climbed into a pickup truck in Zongolica, a small city in rural southern Mexico, squeezing into the front with several friends and relatives from Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the back of the truck, six more people crowded onto benches, holding onto each other as the truck bounced over rutted dirt roads, climbing into the clouds as it traveled among little mountain villages in the state of Veracruz. The truck slowed down for a girl herding goats across the road and passed tiny wooden houses perched on the steep mountainside, with chickens in the yard and a few cows tied up by their horns.

“This never gets old,” said Rosenow, a 75-year-old dairy farmer from Waumandee, Wisconsin, who has made the same trip every winter since 2001, often joined by other dairy farmers who come to visit the families of their Mexican workers. He warned the group he might cry when he met up with some of his former employees. One current employee he’s particularly close to, Roberto, was contemplating moving home in December, but decided against it. “Man, that was the best Christmas present,” he said.

Along the way, the group saw wooden shacks with no indoor plumbing, dirt floors and tin roofs sitting next to big brick houses with shiny tile floors — the bigger houses built with money sent home by Mexican workers laboring in the U.S.

Economic interdependence and decades-long relationships have long bound dairy farmers in Wisconsin and nearby Minnesota to Mexican workers and their families. 

Of Rosenow’s 18 employees, 13 are from Mexico. That’s not unusual. Latin American workers, most of them from Mexico, perform an estimated 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms. The money they send home has lifted many of their families out of poverty. And without them, dairies like Rosenow’s would go belly-up. Yet almost all of the immigrant workers who milk cows in the U.S. lack legal status. That’s because, while the U.S. government provides visas for migrant workers who pick seasonal crops and for immigrants with specialized technical skills, there is no U.S. visa program for low-skilled labor in year-round industries like dairy.

In San Juan Texhuacán, about an hour up the mountain from Zongolica, Rosenow and the group visited Fatima Tepole, 42, who milked cows on a farm in Minnesota for four years, from 2012 to 2016, saving enough money to build a house next door to her parents and siblings and to start her business, a little school supply store. 

“Here the average worker can make 300 pesos a day,” (about $15) she said. “There you can make that much in an hour.” (Her estimate is close to what Mexican government data shows: Mexico’s average monthly salary is the equivalent of $297 U.S. dollars, or about $15 per day for a five-day workweek. Subsistence farmers in rural Veracruz generally make less and work longer hours.)

The visitors from the U.S. gathered in Tepole’s parents’ kitchen to learn how to make tortillas on a wood-burning stove. Then Tepole and her family served them a feast – meat stewed in green chili sauce with fresh tortillas and cheese and bean tostadas. Tepole had hosted many other Bridges groups over the years, including the farmer she worked for in Minnesota. “You’re the first Americans deported by Donald Trump!” she joked. 

Building a house — ‘our biggest dream’

Tepole’s sister-in-law, Celeste Tzanahua Hernández, 31, stood near the stove while the group ate. “We thank you for visiting us,” she said. “It’s good that other people know that we’re not all bad people — that people know and can value the work and sacrifices we are making.”

Tzanahua Hernández’s husband, who previously milked cows and now works at a sawmill, has been away from his two children, ages 5 and 12, for the last three and a half years while working in the U.S., she said. They expect him to return in a few months.

Waiting for him has been “a heavy emotional burden,” she said. But with the money he sends home, supplemented with her earnings as a preschool teacher, they’ve been able to build a home — a spacious, open-plan living area and modern kitchen attached to the compound where the extended family lives — buy a used car and afford school tuition, music lessons, tae kwon do, dental work and doctor’s appointments for the children.

When he comes home, her husband is planning to buy some equipment and set himself up in business as a builder.

Lately the family has been worried about Trump’s deportation threats.

“My husband saw ICE at a restaurant. It scared him a lot. That would not be the best way to have to come home,” Tzanahua Hernández said. “He has a car there. He wants to sell it. My dad is worried about what will happen if he goes to jail, or if he has to leave with no money — and how they treat immigrants on the border.”

The family has urged him to send home his valuables: “If he has some good shoes, good things, start sending them home so he doesn’t lose them,” Tzanahua Hernández said.

“He comforts us by saying that the situation is not so dangerous,” she added. “But we see the news reports — the young men who had recently arrived and now have been deported. … He says he feels better knowing that now our house is built, which was our biggest dream.”

Tepole and other Mexican workers estimated that it costs $25,000 to $35,000 to build a small house — the goal of many who are sending home money from jobs in the U.S. The strength of the dollar means the money people earn in the U.S. goes much farther in Mexico.

“For the first year you work there, you pay off your debt to cross the border,” Tepole said. Border crossings can cost between  $11,000 and $15,000, workers told the Examiner. “If you work really hard you can do that in seven or eight months,” Tepole said. “After another year, you have enough to start building. But you are also covering expenses for your family. So it depends on those expenses how far you get. After that, in two or three more years you can finish your house if you give it your all.”

“Young people can do it faster,” she added. “It takes more time if you are paying expenses for your kids.”

Money sent home to Mexico by workers in the U.S. is the country’s largest single source of foreign income — more than Mexico brings in from tourism, exports of manufactured products or petroleum sales. In 2023 Mexico received $63.3 billion in remittances from its citizens who labor in the U.S. — about 4.5% of total GDP — according to a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Mexico ranks second only to India for the size of the contribution made by people working abroad to their home country’s economy. And the amount of money sent home by Mexican workers in the U.S. has increased dramatically in recent years, by roughly 32% between 2019 and 2023, according to the same report. Beyond covering families’ basic expenses, remittances drive economic development, “providing households with the means to save money and make investments in education, upskilling, and community improvement,” the report found.

On the U.S. side, undocumented workers pay about $97 billion in total taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. About $26 billion of that goes to fund Social Security and $6 billion for Medicare — programs from which those workers are excluded. “We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking immigrants are taking money out of the pot,” says David Kallick, director of the Immigration Research Initiative in New York. His group has done a lot of research over the years “to show how immigration is a big contributor to the overall economic success of this country,” Kallick adds. “But the economic damage done by tearing people away from their jobs is even bigger.” 

“You’re talking about 19% of the labor force and $4.6 trillion in economic output,” Kallick says of immigrant workers’ overall contribution to the U.S. economy. Deporting the estimated 11 million workers in the U.S. without legal status would have devastating ripple effects from the loss of farms, restaurants, construction projects, home health care and child care, he says. “We have a broken immigration system that has made it possible for people to become very much part of the economy across the board, and yet to be trapped in the lowest wage jobs in every sector.” 

“The reality,” he adds, “is there are not enough U.S.-born people to take the place of millions of people doing these jobs who are undocumented.”

One unintended consequence of the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border is that workers without authorization who would otherwise go home to Mexico have stayed in the U.S. for longer stints in recent years, knowing that once they go home they might never be able to cross the border again to come back.

‘When they go, it’s sad’

Up the hill from Fatima Tepole’s house, her friend Teresa Juarez Tepole, age 48, has four adult children between the ages of 26 and 33 who are working in the U.S, while she takes care of their children. Mercedes Falk, a translator on about 20 dairy farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the director of the nonprofit group Puentes/Bridges, which organized the trip to Mexico, told Teresa that the farmer one of her sons works for in Minnesota is “an incredible person,” who wants to give her son special training so he can advance in his job. Teresa was glad to hear it. “He has confidence in my son,” she said, smiling.

When her children were very small their father died, Teresa said, and she barely scratched out a living by taking in washing and making tortillas. Sometimes the family was hungry.

She couldn’t afford to send the children to school beyond the early grades. From the time they were little, they helped with the washing and making tortillas. Her oldest son started working in a bakery as a teenager. “They’d give him four or five loaves of bread and he would bring them home, because I couldn’t afford to buy bread,” she said.

Now they’ve all gone to the U.S. “to see their kids grow up, to give them an education, too, because here there’s no money.”

Her granddaughter is in secondary school. “I can’t read or write well, but I tell my granddaughter she has to study hard because her mother is suffering so she can study,” she said. 

Teresa’s 30-year-old daughter has been in the U.S. for the last three and a half years. She picked fruit for the first year and a half and for the last two years has been milking cows on a dairy farm in Minnesota.

“When they go, it’s sad,” Teresa said. “You don’t know how long it will take them, when they’ll arrive, how they’ll be treated … I cried a lot.”

Even though she is proud of her children, she misses them, she said. “When they were growing up, at dinner time we always sat down together.”

And now, on top of the loneliness, there is more worry, she said. “With the president there, I start thinking of my kids and, my God, there they are and what if he throws them out? What if they’re mistreated? … There’s nothing to do but put ourselves in God’s hands, may he protect us.”

Hoping there aren’t mass deportations

At each stop on the Puentes/Bridges trip, people asked about Trump’s planned deportations.

Rosenow told several families that Brooke Rollins, Trump’s agriculture secretary, has said that deportations won’t hurt dairy farms. Rollins testified during her confirmation hearings that she supported Trump’s plan for mass deportations but that she would work with the administration to “make sure none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business.”

“I’m counting on that,” Rosenow said. During the trip, his wife called with another worry: Trump’s tariffs were reportedly about to wreak havoc with exports of butter to Canada and drive up the price of the peat moss they import to make the compost they sell on their farm.

At a stop outside the little town of Astacinga, the conversation again turned to deportation. Rosenow stopped to visit the family of his favorite employee, Roberto, 45, and Kevin, Roberto’s 21-year-old son, who came North a few years ago to work with his dad on the farm. 

In the kitchen, Rosenow told Roberto’s mother, Concepciona Acahua Macoixtle, 62, , with Falk translating, “Roberto is my best friend. He gets along with anybody. And he has become a better golfer than me.” The two men golf together every week during the season, and Roberto has become something of a local celebrity on the golf course in Buffalo County.

Rosenow got out his phone to show a picture of Roberto playing golf.

Roberto’s wife, Veronica, asked how her son Kevin was behaving. Assured by Rosenow that he was “a delight,” she then turned to her other worry. “Is there a lot of immigration enforcement up there?” she asked.

“There are a lot of rumors, but I have a lot of confidence in the secretary of agriculture,” Rosenow said, once again explaining that he’s relying on Rollins’ assurance that farms won’t go out of business because of immigration enforcement. 

“If not, tell my husband to come home,” Veronica said. “Or his boss should get him a visa.”

“I’d do it in a moment,” Rosenow said, as Falk translated.

Falk explained that six-month visas are for seasonal work and dairy farmers can’t apply for them for their workers. Roberto’s mother nodded. “You have to work every day.”

“Some people are getting grabbed by immigration,” she said. Restaurant workers from nearby Astacinga were deported to tent cities in the north of Mexico, she said, adding, “that’s why we’re worried about our children.”

Veronica’s son Aaron, 15, wanted to go up North, too, but Kevin calls and lectures him about staying in school, his mother told the group. Now he’s going to high school in Astacinga and will graduate in a couple of years, Veronica said. 

Concepciona’s grandchildren have vastly different lives from her own life growing up, or that of her children. Her mother died when she was 4 and she never went to school. Instead she tended the family’s sheep when she was young and met her husband at 18, when both were working in the fields cutting sugar cane.

When they were raising their children, Concepciona said, “We all lived together in one kitchen room. Sometimes there wasn’t enough food. They didn’t have shoes sometimes. They didn’t always have tortillas.”

As a teenager, Roberto went to work and took care of his little siblings, sending home money from jobs in Mexico City and later Kentucky, so they would have enough to eat. He first went to the U.S. when he was 16, but returned several times — the last time was when Meagan, 10, was born. He hasn’t been home since she was 3 months old.

“I told him to come home, but he doesn’t,” Concepciona said. “It’s not that he doesn’t want to. The problem is here there’s no money. There, he can earn money to help with his kids’ education. Ten years he’s been there.” She began to cry. 

“My mother- in-law has lost all five of her sons. They’re all up there,” said Veronica. 

During the years Roberto has spent in the U.S., he has built a home for his parents, and Veronica has overseen the excavation and building of their own two-story home with a carport, which looks like it was transplanted to the mountainside from a U.S. suburb. Brick pillars frame a heavy metal gate, behind which a manicured grass lawn is surrounded by a low rock wall and a garden full of fruit trees, palms and rose bushes. 

Veronica and Roberto also purchased more land nearby, where they keep a flock of sheep. With some of his earnings Roberto has helped his nieces go to college. One is finishing up studying to be a teacher and lives with Veronica, she said.

Meagan, a fifth grader, has always gotten good grades, Veronica said proudly. Meagan gave the U.S. visitors an impromptu performance of the Mexican national anthem in Nahuatl — she’d been practicing for a competition at her bilingual Spanish/Nahuatl school.

As the Puentes group got ready to leave, Concepciona said, “Tell my boys to take care. Ask when they are coming. They always say August, December. Then the next December comes and they don’t arrive.”

“The problem is the risk if they don’t have papers,” said Veronica, “so they can’t come back.”

This article is Part One in a series. In Part Two, the U.S.-born son of a deceased Mexican dairy worker meets his extended family in Mexico for the first time. 

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrest a man from Venezuela in Miami in February after a wire fraud conviction. As the Trump administration attacks local sanctuary policies, some states and local governments continue to do what little they can to protect some immigrants from deportation. (Courtesy of Miami ICE Enforcement & Removal Operations office)

Even as the Trump administration criticizes state and local sanctuary policies as an impediment to its deportation aims, officials touting the policies are finding there isn’t much they can do to prevent immigration arrests.

Some states and counties are nonetheless defending their sanctuary policies as a way to slow arrests, especially for purely immigration-related offenses, and to assure residents that local leaders are not taking part in the Trump administration’s deportation plans.

Localities in Connecticut, Oregon and Washington joined a February lawsuit led by the city and county of San Francisco and Santa Clara County in California against a Trump administration executive order calling for defunding cities with sanctuary policies, calling the order “illegal and authoritarian.” California is also preparing to defend its state policies limiting cooperation with immigration authorities, based on a 2017 law that withstood a court challenge under the first Trump administration.

The laws under scrutiny generally limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The policies either prevent local officials from holding prisoners for immigration arrests or, alternatively, from notifying immigration authorities what time prisoners will be released, so federal agents can arrest them on immigration charges that could lead to deportation. There are generally exceptions for some serious crimes.

Chicago, Philadelphia and Seattle — all high-profile sanctuary locations — are among the cities that have seen Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests.

ICE can always find other ways to arrest a person, but it’s harder without local cooperation.

“You’re adding to the time and expense and resources ICE needs,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank devoted to immigration policy.

She noted a 2018 report from the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggesting that deportations fell in California after a 2013 law limited cooperation with ICE for minor and immigration crimes, though they later rose again.

“There is suggestive evidence that sanctuary policies reduce deportations but many reasons to also be skeptical of big effects,” the report concluded.

Most deportation arrests happen when ICE agents get fingerprint records from jails, whether run by city governments or independently elected sheriffs as they are in many counties, and identify people subject to court deportation orders. All jails regardless of sanctuary policy send the fingerprints for federal background checks during the booking process.

Still, federal officials complain that sanctuary policies can force them to arrest people on the street where it’s more dangerous and time-consuming than a transfer of custody inside a jail.

That happened recently in heavily Democratic Tompkins County in upstate New York, where the county and the city of Ithaca reaffirmed their sanctuary policies after criticism by the Trump administration.

A man who had been held in the county’s jail since 2023 was released on a judge’s order in late January, before ICE agents could arrive to arrest him for deportation. Several agencies, including state police, later arrested him in a parking lot in a show of force, according to local press accounts.

The 27-year-old man, a citizen of Mexico, had been identified for deportation in early January because he had returned to the United States after being deported seven times in 2016. He pleaded guilty to charges of assaulting a police officer and a jail guard and was sentenced to time served.

After the ICE arrest, acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove criticized the county, writing in a Jan. 30 statement: “We will use every tool at our disposal to prevent sanctuary city policies from impeding and obstructing lawful federal operations designed to make America safe again.”

Tompkins County Attorney Maury Josephson, in a statement to Stateline, called Bove’s statement “false and offensive.” Josephson wrote that the sheriff, Derek Osborne, had notified ICE about the prisoner’s release and that federal agents “had every opportunity to come to the jail to obtain the individual in question without any need for a pursuit or other incident.”

Many sanctuary policies are mostly symbolic, meant to assure residents that the city isn’t taking part in federal immigration enforcement. Many policies say city employees will not ask about immigration status when people seek services.

Some sanctuary policies can help indirectly fight deportations by providing legal help and advice for immigrants on how to respond to questions from federal agents, said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, a supervisory policy and practice counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“There have been some steps forward in creating an immigration public defender system, but it’s not available at the federal level yet,” Ibañez Whitlock said. That can make it tricky when an immigration prisoner is moved to another state for detention, and they could lose their legal representation, she said.

Sanctuary policies also aim to improve public safety by assuring immigrants it’s safe for them to report and help investigate crimes. Often the policies forbid asking questions about immigration status for people seeking services.

“For us it’s simple. We are striving to create a culture of trust and security within our communities so that our residents know that they can come to the county when they are in need or when they can be of help,” said Tony LoPresti, county counsel for Santa Clara County, California, during a news conference announcing the San Francisco lawsuit this month.

“That includes feeling safe coming to local law enforcement to report crimes or to participate in investigations without fearing that they or their loved ones face deportation,” LoPresti added.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

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.

Protestors March near Washington Ave in Downtown Green Bay, on Feb 8, 2025. (Photo by Jason Kerzinski/Wisconsin Examiner)

Early Saturday afternoon, a crowd of demonstrators marched through the streets of downtown Green Bay, holding signs and chanting to protest U.S. President Donald Trump and federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“If being an American is defined as hard-working, pro-family values, and being a good neighbor, then we are Americans,” protest organizer Verenice Lopez told the crowd before the march. 

Trump took action on immigration with a flurry of executive orders, including pausing the resettlement of tens of thousands of refugees who had been approved for relocation into the U.S. Reports of deportation raids around the country have caused panic, even after The Guardian reported that ICE press releases had been doctored so they appeared on Google searches to make it seem as though years-old raids had happened recently.  

Trump’s promised mass deportation of immigrants throughout the U.S. has not happened yet, Politico reported last week. The president is reportedly angry that deportation numbers are not higher. 

Trump’s threats have caused fear among immigrant communities in Wisconsin. Lopez addressed Trump directly in her speech. 

“Mr. President,” Lopez said. “My name is Verenice Lopez, and I am a Dreamer. I have chosen to use my voice today for everyone here and for others across this nation that seek a path to citizenship and the American Dream. My story is like so many others. I was brought to this country by my family when I was 2 years old. I have lived, worked and been educated in America my entire life.”

As demonstrators gathered near a promenade that runs alongside the Fox River, Winter Storm Brenda was hitting northeast Wisconsin, dumping up to 10 inches of snow across the region Saturday. Passing cars honked at the marchers. 

Lopez said that “in a moment of, I guess, fear and anxiety,” she “just had a calling to do something about it.” She used Facebook and reached out to organizations she hoped would support the protest. 

Two organizations joined the effort, though neither group specifically works on immigration issues. The Green Bay Anti-war Committee is “dedicated to fighting against U.S. wars” and has opposed the war in Gaza. Hate Free Outagamie’s aims include improving inclusivity for LGBTQ+ people. 

“Whenever you’re trying to create or do anything big, getting momentum going is always the biggest issue, or the hardest part,” said Daniel Castillo, co-chair for Green Bay Anti-war Committee. “…Something that people can go to and realize that they’re the only ones that can really fight for their own rights, is something that we would like to get started.”  

Lopez said she felt the turnout — estimates varied from 50 to 100 or more people — was good. 

She said that “we do plan on creating more [protests or marches] within the next few weeks or month.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

The U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2025. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House Wednesday passed legislation that greatly expands mandatory detention requirements of immigrants charged and arrested on petty crimes, among other crimes.

In a 263-156 vote, 46 House Democrats voted with Republicans to send the bill, S. 5, to President Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law. The passage of the measure gave Trump — who campaigned on an immigration crackdown and promised mass deportations — an early victory for a president not even a full week into his second term.

The GOP-led bill is named after 22-year-old Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. The man convicted in her murder was said by immigration officials to have entered the country without proper authorization and was later charged in the United States with shoplifting.

“I am proud the Laken Riley Act will be the very first landmark bill President Trump signs into law, and it is proof that President Trump and the Republican Senate Majority stand ready to come turn promises made into promises kept,” Alabama GOP Sen. Katie Britt, who led the bill, said in a statement.

Many immigration attorneys and advocates have argued the passage of the bill will help fuel Trump’s promise of mass deportations, because it would require mandatory detention of immigrants without the ability for an immigration judge to grant bond.

Additionally, there is no carve-out for immigrant children in the bill, meaning if they are accused or charged with shoplifting, the bill would require them to be detained.

And while the bill aims to target immigrants who are in the country without proper legal authorization, immigration attorneys have argued that some immigrants with legal status could be ensnared as well.  

Another concerning provision pointed to by some Democrats and immigration attorneys is the broad legal standing the bill gives state attorneys general to challenge federal immigration policy and the bond decisions from immigration judges.

That same authority could also force the secretary of state to halt the issuing of visas on the international stage.

There’s also the issue of resources. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement estimated the cost of enforcing the law would be at least $26.9 billion in its first year, according to NPR. The budget for ICE for fiscal year 2024 is about $9 billion.

Twelve Senate Democrats joined with Republicans to pass the bill out of the upper chamber on Monday. The House already passed the bill earlier this month, but because amendments were added to the measure in the Senate, it went back to the House for final passage.

Those Senate Democrats included Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly of Arizona, Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Mark Warner of Virginia.

A majority of those Senate Democrats are up for reelection in 2026 or hail from a battleground state that Trump won in November.

Senators also agreed to attach two amendments to the bill that expand the mandatory detention requirements even further.

One amendment by Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn requires mandatory detention for assault of a law enforcement officer. Another from Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa includes mandatory detention requirements to apply to the serious harm or death of a person. 

Immigrant farm workers harvest broccoli on March 16, 2006, near the border town of San Luis, south of Yuma, Arizona. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON —  A top Republican on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday that when President-elect Donald Trump takes office and the GOP takes control of the Senate, lawmakers’ first priority will be to pass a border security package through a complex process known as budget reconciliation.

Trump has promised his base his administration will enact mass deportations of people living in the country illegally. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said at a Judiciary hearing that Senate Republicans will focus on increasing beds at detention centers, hiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and purchasing technology for enforcement at the southern border.

“It is our belief that the only way you’ll get control of the border is for deportations to start early,” he said. “If we do not have outflow, the inflow will continue.”

However, a senior fellow at the pro-immigration think tank the American Immigration Council, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, told the panel the endeavor will be expensive.

Carrying out mass deportations of 1 million people would cost about $88 billion a year for arrests, detainment and removal, he said. About 13 million people are living in the United States illegally.

Fixing a broken system

The committee hearing, led by Democrats who control the Senate now but will be in the minority next year, explored the ramifications of the Trump campaign promise of mass deportations.

“Instead of mass deportations, mass accountability,” said the chair of the committee, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois. “Let’s fix our broken immigration system in a way that protects our country and honors our heritage as a nation of immigrants.”

The budget reconciliation process cited by Graham that would be used to pass border security legislation, if successful, would allow Republicans to get around the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate.

Reconciliation is generally used when one party controls the House, Senate and the White House, because it only requires a majority vote in each chamber.

Graham added that Republicans will also prevent those people who were paroled into the country through executive authority from employing another avenue for legal immigration status. The GOP has been critical of programs that allow certain nationals from Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela to temporarily work and live in the United States.

“So if you’re here illegally, get ready to leave,” Graham said.

DACA program

One of the hearing witnesses, Foday Turay, is in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which is awaiting a federal court ruling on its legality after the Trump administration tried to end it.

Separately, on Monday, a federal court blocked the implementation of a final rule from the Biden administration to allow DACA recipients to have health care access under the Affordable Care Act. 

About 500,000 people are in the program, which is aimed at protecting children brought into the country without authorization from deportation. It also allows them to obtain work permits.

Turay is an assistant district attorney in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, and said if he were deported it would devastate his family, as he is the primary income earner in his household.

He said his wife, a U.S. citizen, is the primary caretaker of her mother, a person with disabilities who is undergoing cancer treatments. Additionally, Turay said he would have to leave his son behind if he is deported.

Another witness, Patty Morin of Aberdeen, Maryland, told how her daughter, Rachel, was killed. The suspect, who was charged with first-degree murder and sexual assault, was in the country illegally and had a prior criminal record.

Durbin said Democrats are not opposed to ICE carrying out its duties to deport those with criminal records and stressed that Trump’s plans for mass deportations extend beyond that group and would include people like Turay.

“This man for a living is prosecuting criminals,” Durbin said of Turay. “This other individual is a clear criminal with a record. When we say ‘mass deportation,’ should we consider them the same because they’re both undocumented?”

Graham said when it comes to DACA, “hopefully we can find a solution to that problem.”

Over the weekend, Trump expressed his support for coming to an agreement with Democrats to allow DACA recipients to remain in the country, despite trying to end the program during his first term.

Use of National Guard

Durbin said he is concerned about Trump’s comments about using the National Guard to carry out mass deportations.

One of the witnesses, Randy Manner, a retired major general in the U.S. Army, said he sees problems with using the military for mass deportations.

It could affect military readiness, he said, and the military is not trained in that capacity.

“Immigration enforcement is the responsibility of federal law enforcement agencies,” Manner said.

He added that having soldiers carry out that directive would have a negative impact on morale and recruiting. Manner also said having the U.S. military involved in that kind of political messaging would erode public trust.

Cost of mass deportations

Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar said not only would mass deportations be harmful to communities, but a financial strain as well.

Reichlin-Melnick said industries that would be hit particularly hard by losing employees would include construction, agriculture and hospitality.

Reichlin-Melnick also argued that ICE already focuses on arresting and conducting deportation proceedings for noncitizens with criminal records.

“The overwhelming majority of people who would be the target of a mass deportation campaign do not have criminal records,” he said. “They are people who have been living otherwise law-abiding lives in this country, living, working and, in many cases, paying taxes.”

Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn suggested that local law enforcement should be empowered to carry out deportations, even though immigration enforcement is a federal issue.

Art Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for sharply limiting immigration, supported that idea.

“They’re going to be the people who are best able to pull those individuals out of the community,” Arthur said of local law enforcement.