Nebraska advocacy groups brace for Donald Trump's deportation promise

President-elect Donald Trump has long promised a crackdown on illegal immigration, including the largest mass deportation operation in the country's history.

On Sunday, he said he would name longtime immigration official Tom Homan as his "border czar" and put him "in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin."

If Trump succeeds in his plans to return undocumented immigrants to their previous countries, critics say, the plan could send shock waves through the state — from South Omaha to western Nebraska.

Though advocates are hopeful that legal and economic challenges to Trump's proposed plans could diminish the effects, legal aid and advocacy organizations are preparing for the "worst case scenario," Anna Deal, the legal director at Nebraska's Center for Immigrant and Refugee Advancement, said.

"We began planning immediately," Deal said of the organization's reaction to Trump's victory in the presidential election. "[Trump's plans] are quite widespread, and he does seem to be better organized and more aggressive in terms of getting started right away than last term."

Approximately 40,000 undocumented immigrants are living in Nebraska — though that number is likely an undercount due to the difficulty of surveying people living in the country illegally, and could range anywhere from 25,000 to 75,000, according to a 2023 report from Pew Research. The same survey estimated about 35,000 undocumented immigrants are part of the state's labor force, largely in manufacturing, construction and agriculture sectors.

A mass deportation of undocumented workers — who make up between 3% and 4% of the state's labor force, according to Pew Research, and more than 4.5% of the nationwide labor force — could have economic implications. The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan think tank, found that Trump's deportation plans would cause higher unemployment and inflation rates and lower the country's GDP.

That's in addition to the humanitarian consequences associated with mass deportations, Deal said.

"I think family separation through detention and deportation would really damage the social fabric in — I mean, across the country — but especially in small towns, where a lot of people in the town could potentially be impacted," Deal said. "A lot of families could be separated, and a lot of children could be without their parents in a single small town."

Trump and his surrogates have vowed to expand workplace raids and public sweeps — shifting away from the recent approach by Immigration and Customs Enforcement of targeting individual people instead of high-profile, public roundups.

Nebraska got a taste of the impacts of such large-scale operations during a series of 2018 raids in O'Neill, Nebraska, in which Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided a local tomato greenhouse complex, a potato processing facility and a cattle feedlot, resulting in 133 undocumented workers detained in makeshift camps. The raids left employers with a significant workforce shortage, and multiple children were left behind after their parents were arrested.

Deal and the legal team from the immigrant and refugee center were on the ground in O'Neill and are preparing to deploy again if raids happen in Nebraska communities in the coming months and years.

Temporary Protected Status holders wary

Though deportations of undocumented immigrants are a key policy of the Trump administration, advocates are also preparing for the administration to strip protections from people with temporary or conditional legal status.

One group that advocates worry will be targeted by the new administration is recipients of Temporary Protected Status, which grants protection from deportation for people hailing from a select group of countries with unsafe conditions, like ongoing armed conflict or environmental disasters. The vast majority of those with protected status come from Latin America — particularly El Salvador, Haiti and Venezuela.

The Temporary Protected Status program was a target in Trump's last administration. He terminated the designations for six countries in 2018, a move that was ultimately halted by a court order and never went into effect. But it put the estimated 1,500 people with protected status in Nebraska in a state of limbo as the court battle dragged on until President Joe Biden's administration in 2023 rescinded the Trump-era terminations.

Ariel Magaña Linares, an Omaha-based, Fremont-raised immigration attorney, came to the U.S. from El Salvador when he was 2 years old. Since then, Magaña Linares has resided legally in the country with Temporary Protected Status, which he renews every 18 months. He's a "fully licensed Omahan," the graduate of the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the Creighton University School of Law said.

The uncertainty and fear that Trump's reelection brings to Magaña Linares' life and legal status is a familiar feeling. In 2018, when Trump ended protected status for Salvadorans, he remembers sitting alone in a van at a speech competition, unable to explain to his classmates why he had gone quiet. He remembers having his first panic attack a week later.

"I had never felt like that," Magaña Linares said. "That's the kind of pressure that I felt at the time, just the uncertainty. What's going to happen with my life, everything I've built? I've gone to school here, I've been a part of extracurricular activities. I've done everything I can to make myself a successful person. And now to be at risk of (deportation)?"

Now, as an attorney, Magaña Linares has a few clients who are in the country with Temporary Protected Status. The individual situations vary widely: Some have been in the U.S. for decades and now have children who are old enough to petition for their parents to get legal status. Others have "accepted fate," he said, while some are willing to fight the inevitable court battles.

In all cases, Magaña Linares wants to remind people who fear that they may be affected by Trump's immigration policies that they still have rights to due process.

"It's almost never as simple as, you know, we're going to issue an executive order to just arrest people and deport them," Magaña Linares said. "It doesn't work that way in this country. The courts are still there, and although we're not very optimistic about where those courts will ultimately fall in line with, at the very least, this country guarantees you a process."

Local police could be tapped in deportation operations

During his campaign, Trump often said he planned to utilize local law enforcement to assist in mass deportation efforts.

"We will be using local law enforcement," Trump said when pressed on his plans during an interview with Time Magazine in April. "We'll be obviously starting with the criminal element. And we're going to be using local police because local police know (immigrants) by name, by first name, second name, and third name. I mean, they know them very well."

When ICE taps local law enforcement to play a role in deportations, it is typically through what is known as a 287(g) agreement. The most common type is the "jail enforcement" model, which allows officers to interrogate suspected noncitizens who have been arrested on state or local charges regarding their immigration status, and place immigration detainers on people they determine to be subject to removal. Only one agency in Nebraska, the Dakota County Sheriff's Office, currently has such an agreement with ICE.

"I think (the administration) absolutely intends to try to leverage state and local law enforcement to engage in immigration enforcement, and part of that would be through the expansion or initiation of new 287(g) agreements," Deal said.

When Trump first took office in 2017, Omaha Police Department Chief Todd Schmaderer and Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert issued a statement saying Omaha police officers "do not and will not seek out individuals to check their legal status."

Earlier this year, after two undocumented immigrants were shot and killed by police, Schmaderer said that OPD does not "typically get involved in the ICE process," though he said that Omaha is not a "sanctuary city," a term used to describe municipalities that limit or prohibit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. On Tuesday, an Omaha police spokeperson said the department's policy has not changed.

Douglas County Sheriff Aaron Hanson said the Sheriff's Office has "no plans, nor would it be appropriate, to be involved in standard immigration enforcement efforts," though Hanson said he plans to review internal department policies on communicating with ICE about the immigration status of people arrested for serious crimes.