Tarrant County’s undocumented ‘live in fear’ of Trump’s promised mass deportations
María Gabriela Cena hasn't set foot in Salvatierra, Guanajuato, since she was 4 years old, when her parents brought her with them to the United States without authorization.
But on the day after President-elect Donald Trump won a second term in the White House , she found herself making contingency plans in case she is deported back to her place of birth.
Trump campaigned on a promise to enact mass deportations of millions of immigrants "on day one" of his administration. Now that he is president elect, Cena and millions of others in her situation are coming to grips with that possibility.
Vice President Elect J.D. Vance has justified the operation by saying it would remove criminals from the country and stop undercutting wages for U.S. citizens. Experts have said that the logistics of deporting tens of millions of people render the feat all but impossible in a single presidential term, but they still expect to see increased removal actions in the coming years.
"There are lots of things going through my head right now, and I'm really worried," she said. "I stayed up all night watching the election, and it was very stressful."
A recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, Cena is no stranger to this kind of stress. Under that program, she has faced the possibility of deportation each time her application had to be renewed every two years. But now that threat has become much more real.
"I live in fear," she said.
Cena works for Methodist Justice Ministries, an award-winning Fort Worth nonprofit organization that works with victims of domestic violence .
"We are contributing to this country," she said. "I pay taxes, I do everything according to the law, and I couldn't vote. I had no say in this."
Her 10-year-old son is a U.S. citizen, but she would take him with her if she were forced to leave the country. Her home state of Guanajuato is one of Mexico's most violent.
While Cena will try to keep her family together as much as possible, deportation would tear apart Susana Nieto's. She and her husband have lived undocumented in Fort Worth for over 20 years, but her two sons — aged 20 and 8 — were born here, and they would have to stay.
"My oldest son is very independent, and he could provide for his little brother, but we'd be leaving half of ourselves behind," she said.
If Trump follows through on his promise of mass deportations, "it's going to affect a lot of people, primarily families," she said. "We're all at risk."
Nieto sells cakes and other desserts out of her home, and her husband works construction. They have been waiting for her son to turn 21 next year so he can sponsor them for residency. Now she's not so sure they'll make it in time.
"It's a lot of mixed feelings," she said. "Hoping something good will happen, but getting something else."
Are mass deportations even feasible?
The logistics of deporting 13 million people are such that the feat would be nearly impossible to achieve in one term as president, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council.
"And even an operation spread out over the course of a decade would cost somewhere near a trillion dollars," he said.
Researchers at the American Immigration Council published a report in October that found that a conservative estimate for the cost of the operation would be around $315 billion.
"There are some basic, fundamental realities about the removal system that will remain the same absent a radical overhaul of our immigration enforcement laws," Reichlin-Melnick said.
These realities include the fact that the majority of undocumented immigrants are not in detainment centers, but living in communities, and the government would have to develop a system to find them. This would take an enormous amount of time and resources.
Also, the country does not have the physical infrastructure to detain so many people. It would have to build facilities — either permanent or temporary — and staff them, adding to the costs of the operation.
The most salient precedent for such an operation in U.S. history is the internment of people of Japanese origin during World War II , but immigration detainees today have more rights than they did, Reichlin-Melnick said.
These rights would create issues in what Reichlin-Melnick called the "biggest bottleneck" in the operation: the immigration court system.
There are 3.7 million cases pending in the system, and the average wait time is anywhere from two to six years.
If an undocumented person were to be arrested on the new administration's first day, "it's very unlikely that that person's case would be finished by the time Trump left office," Reichlin-Melnick said.
Some undocumented immigrants — Venezuelans, for example — cannot be deported, since the United States does not have diplomatic relations with their countries of origin.
"So even if Trump were to round up Venezuelans and throw them in camps and produce removal orders for them somehow, they would have to stay in the country, and probably would end up released on orders of supervision," he said.
Logistic hurdles aside, pulling off the deportations of 13 million undocumented immigrants would be an "economic disaster," Reichlin-Melnick said.
Removing them from the labor force would result in losses of tens of billions of dollars in federal and state taxes and social security, over $256 billion in spending power and as much as 6.8% in GDP, the council's report found.
Here in Tarrant County, more than a quarter of construction workers are undocumented. That industry, as well as the hospitality, cleaning, manufacturing and general services industries, would be hurt by mass deportations , according to American Immigration Council researchers. A Workers Defense Project survey recently reported by Texas Monthly found that half of construction workers in major Texas cities are undocumented.
It is precisely their necessity to the U.S. economy that gives some undocumented immigrants the reassurance that Trump's rhetoric will not materialize into action.
Similar threats in the past
In the decade that Fidencio Torres has lived undocumented in Fort Worth, he has worked processing wood products, cooking, washing dishes and applying car window tint. He knows U.S. citizens largely don't want to do the jobs undocumented workers do, he says, and doesn't believe Trump will follow through with his proposal.
"If they were to throw everyone out of the country, restaurant kitchens — for starters — wouldn't function," he said. "The economy needs immigrant labor."
He has heard similar threats from presidents in the past, Torres said, but they haven't done it so far.
"I really don't think they would want to do it," he said.
While what Torres hears from Trump tells him "he doesn't want Mexicans here" in the United States, Torres said he still aligns with the president-elect ideologically.
"Seems to me like he's the better one for the economy," Torres said. "If he wants to get rid of immigrant labor, I don't know how good that will be for the economy, but everyone knows Trump is all talk."
'People should be scared'
Even if the Trump administration is not able or willing to deport every single person in the country without authorization, we can expect to see large-scale arrests and deportations, Reichlin-Melnick said.
"People should be scared," he said.
Trump has promised to end temporary protected status, which has been granted to around 1 million people, he said, and would likely end DACA protections for the program's more than half a million recipients as well.
"What does it mean for the U.S. economy when in the span of a year, a million and a half people might lose their legal authorization to work?" he said.
That's the reality Cena faces now that Trump won a second term.
"It's probable that I won't be able to renew my DACA, and that would be very difficult for me, I'd lose my job," she said. "I really don't know what I'm going to do."
And Cena is not alone.
The phones at the immigration counseling organization Proyecto Inmigrante were ringing off the hooks on Wednesday, Nov. 5, with people worried about what mass deportations would mean for them, according to CEO and founder Douglas Interiano .
Many of those calls were from people married to U.S. citizens or permanent residents. They wanted to know if they'll be deported, too, he said, but did not have a good answer for them.
"That's a very difficult question to answer," he said, because it is still unclear exactly how the Trump administration would conduct a mass deportation operation.
The immigration system prioritizes deportations of people with criminal records or other more pertinent reasons for expedited removal, Interiano said, but that could change.
"We are yet to see if there's going to be some kind of a process, there's going to be some kind of priorities, such as the ones that we have in place under the current administration, or if this is going to be in general just whoever is identified as an undocumented, they will be deported," he said.
For her part, Nieto has not started making contingency plans, but realizes she needs to do so.
"You have to have a plan B in case they deport you," she said. "But let's hope to God that doesn't happen."
