Yale Daily News
Former President Donald Trump spoke at an Oct. 12 rally in Aurora, Colorado, with messages of “Deport all illegal aliens now” and “End immigration crime” at the U.S.-Mexico border. He condemned illegal border crossing.
“[Vice President] Kamala [Harris] President Trump said at the rally that he has imported armies of illegal alien gang members and immigrant criminals from Third World dungeons…prisons, jails, mental hospitals and psychiatric hospitals. “She successfully resettled them in your communities and preyed on innocent American citizens.”
For six New Haven immigration lawyers and activists, President Trump’s aggressive anti-immigrant rhetoric brings back memories of his first term, which was marked by procedural chaos and widespread fear in immigrant communities.
In conversations with News about the possibility of a second Trump term, all six painted a picture of a continuation of, and an intensification of, Trump’s first term’s restrictive immigration policies.
But nearly a decade after Trump’s election, lawyers and activists are aiming to be better prepared.
Trump and Harris pledged during the presidential campaign to strengthen border security, as Americans consider immigration the nation’s second-most urgent issue.
Trump, in particular, has raised the bar for anti-immigration statements. He has vowed to carry out mass deportations of millions of illegal immigrants, reinstate a 2017 travel ban on Muslim-majority countries and build camps to detain migrants. There is.
“As we look to the future, I think there will be more disruption and certainly more stringent immigration policy changes,” said Sister Mary Ellen Burns LAW ’89, executive director of Apostle Immigration Services in Fairhaven. told the news. “And of course that means we spent a lot of time trying to maintain the status quo.”
The Trump and Harris campaigns did not respond to requests for comment from the newspaper.
Unrest and fear of immigration intensified during President Trump’s first term
President Trump’s first term was a period of “total turmoil” for Burns. Rapidly evolving immigration policy has meant that Burns has had to constantly relearn the details of his clients’ eligibility and applications.
Burns’ opinion was echoed by other New Haven immigration attorneys and community activists. One major shift in immigration policy, they say, was President Trump’s reduction in the number of asylum seekers admitted into the United States.
In 2020, President Trump capped the number of refugees at 15,000, a historic low since a 1980 law that capped annual refugee admissions. Former President Barack Obama set the cap at 85,000 in 2016, and President Joe Biden set it at 62,500 in 2021.
The Trump administration also required refugee resettlement agencies to resettle at least 100 refugees each year to continue receiving federal funding. More than 100 refugee resettlement agencies across the country closed during his first term.
Maggie Mitchell Salem, executive director of Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services in New Haven, told the News that IRIS has managed to stay afloat thanks to steady donations. Other Connecticut refugee resettlement agencies, including Catholic Charities and the Archdiocese of Hartford’s Resettlement Program, have also closed due to lack of funding.
Trump campaigned on a promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants, but immigration enforcement has lagged behind his predecessor. During Trump’s presidency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 549,000 people and deported 935,000 people, a 17% and 24% decrease, respectively, from Obama’s second term.
Still, Burns and Tabatha Sukdeo ENV ’26, executive director of the undocumented youth advocacy group Connecticut Students for a Dream, emphasized the negative impact of President Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
“People were afraid. Even people who had no reason to be afraid were afraid,” Burns said.
Burns added that under the Trump administration, immigrants faced an increased risk of deportation simply by applying for citizenship. If immigrants are refused, they may be sent to removal proceedings.
For example, the U.S. Violence Against Women Act provides a special path to legal immigration status for victims of unlawful domestic violence who were abused by U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.
“The old policy was always, ‘If you come to our attention with one of these applications, we’re not going to deport you because we don’t want to scare people,'” said Immigrants. Maureen Abel of the bureau’s New Haven Legal Aid Society told The News.
However, during President Trump’s first term, illegal aliens whose applications for VAWA special visas were denied were often subject to deportation proceedings.
The Trump administration also tightened the definition of public charge, a factor that determines whether illegal aliens can obtain legal permanent resident status, based primarily on the likelihood that they will rely on government assistance. did. Sukhdeo said some undocumented locals avoid food pantries even though they are not food secure because they are worried about their utility bills.
Burns said Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is reflected in his individual interactions with immigration officials.
During President Trump’s first term, Burns accompanied many clients to interviews at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in Hartford to prevent miscommunication between applicants and immigration officials. . In an interview where she represented a U.S. citizen applying for naturalization for her father, Burns remembers an immigration official saying, “My job is to find a reason to deny this.”
Burns said officers also took issue with the petitioner’s son, questioning his naturalization permit and prior green card approval.
“This man took Trump’s rhetoric to heart and ran with it,” she said.
A spokesperson for the USCIS Hartford office did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
Abel said applications were frequently changed under the Trump administration, and there were cases in which applications were rejected because lawyers mistakenly used older versions of the application.
She recalled a “ridiculous policy” regarding applications that counterproductively lengthened and complicated them. For example, applicants were required to fill in all blank spaces, including fields that the form states that applicants should skip if not applicable, such as information about a spouse.
“The longer the working time required in any case, the more [attorneys] Having to charge a fee sets the price for more people to leave the agency, and it also reduces the amount of work they can do in a day and therefore the number of clients the agency can have.”Abel he said. “It only took a few dozen stupid little things like that to prevent more people from accessing legal services.”
Preparing for the possibility of Trump’s second term as president
Sukdeo said she was “caught off guard” by President Trump’s victory in 2016, a sentiment echoed by other local immigration activists and lawyers. In preparation for the 2024 election, she has joined a group of more than 60 organizations in Connecticut preparing for the start of a potential second Trump administration.
President Trump and his strategists have vowed to go beyond the restrictive immigration policies of his first term, including launching massive raids and forcing cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. I am doing it.
“This time, we’re just trying to adjust because we owe it to the community,” Sukhdeo said.
Lawyers and immigrant advocates said the move is aimed at increasing communication between organizations, raising awareness of immigrant rights and making undocumented immigrants feel safer.
Addison Dickens, an immigration attorney with IRIS, said she has been meeting with other groups since January to prepare for the incoming administration. One of their identified objectives is to combat misinformation often spread among immigrants via WhatsApp and Facebook about ICE’s powers and immigrants’ eligibility for benefits under the next president.
John Jairo Lugo, community organizing director for the New Haven immigrant advocacy group Unidad Latina en Acción, told the News that his top priority is to give fellow immigrants their rights, especially if Trump is re-elected. He said the goal is to educate the public.
“If you knock on the door of immigrants, they will open the door for you,” he said in Spanish. “When the police stopped them, they started talking. People don’t understand that they have basic rights: the right to remain silent, the right not to open the door, the right to a lawyer, the right to Such as the right not to be restricted solely by one’s color.
Immigration lawyers and activists have expressed concern about President Trump’s mass deportation plans and increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Lugo acknowledged that President Trump did not follow through on his promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants during his first term, but he said he has not made good on his promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants during his first term. He said he had a four-year grace period.
Salem recalled a recent conversation with an immigrant rights activist who began advising undocumented immigrants to choose interim guardians in case their children were deported. “These are unimaginable conversations that have to be thought about,” Salem said.
Lugo and Abel both noted that during President Trump’s first term, ICE increased court arrests of illegal aliens, which discouraged immigrant communities from reporting crimes. Abel has been researching whether courts could accommodate remote court appearances to protect the safety of illegal immigrants in preparation for a possible second term in office for Trump.
Burns also predicts a second Trump administration will reimpose red tape, such as excessive background checks, to slow the process of granting immigration routes.
Sukdeo and Lugo are concerned about Trump’s growing vitriol toward immigrant communities amid a possible second term.
“It has empowered many racists who have remained silent until now because it is politically incorrect to speak out against immigrants, against black people, against minorities,” Lugo said in Spanish. Ta. “But with Trump, everyone talks to you openly and publicly insults you.”
But regardless of the election outcome, activists and lawyers plan to continue pushing for immigration reform — just as many of them have done for decades across multiple presidential administrations.
Lugo emphasized that New Haven’s immigrant community is not going anywhere and pointed to the important role immigrant workers play in New Haven’s, and America’s overall, economy.
“This country cannot survive without immigrants,” he said in Spanish.
In the 2016 presidential election, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 received 86.4% of New Haven’s vote.
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Maia Nehme
Maia Nehme covers police, courts, and the Latino community in the news. She previously covered housing and homelessness. A native of Washington, D.C., she is a sophomore majoring in history at Benjamin Franklin College.
