Few Donald Trump campaign promises have caused as much anxiety as his draconian plan for a mass deportation of all undocumented or removable immigrants — as many as 13 million people — which could affect a million people living and working in Florida.
Now that former President Trump is, again, President-elect Trump, that prospect has undocumented migrants like Maria of Miami in a high state of dread.
“Right now everybody is at risk, everybody is in danger,” said Maria. “What will happen to thousands like me that have been here for decades?”
Maria, who asked WLRN not to use her last name, came to the U.S. as a computer student after Hurricane Mitch destroyed her native Nicaragua in 1998. She arrived too late to apply for Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which shields migrants from disaster- or conflict-torn countries from deportation.
Since then, Maria has worked, paid taxes — and hoped the federal government would extend lawful TPS designation to tens of thousands of Nicaraguan migrants like her, especially now that Nicaragua is ruled by a brutal dictatorship.
“If I have to go back to Nicaragua, it’s going to be horrible,” Maria said. “I’m not even sure if [the dictatorship there] is going to let me in” since it has stripped many expats of their Nicaraguan citizenship in recent years — leaving those like Maria essentially without a country.
That’s why Maria is imploring President Biden to grant that additional TPS protection to Nicaraguans before he leaves office — and Trump occupies the White House — in January.
“People are scared,” Maria said, in tears. “People are calling me and telling me, ‘What can we do?’ And I have no answers.”
READ MORE: After Trump’s Springfield lies, has electing Haitians taken on new urgency?
But even receiving TPS may not be the answer to that angst, as migrants like Daniela know all too well.
“I’m very, very nervous that TPS will be taken from me as soon as Trump is President,” said Daniela, who is from Venezuela — itself under a brutal dictatorship and the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history.
Daniela, who also asked us not to use her last name, received TPS three years ago when Biden extended it to Venezuelans, and she now works in a medical clinic here.
But, like many TPS recipients WLRN spoke with, she fears Trump will eliminate that protected status — as he tried to do during his first presidency before a federal court blocked him — and leave her undocumented again.
“I hope everything I’m hearing, everything they’re saying is not true,” Daniela said.
“But I think he doesn’t care under which circumstances you are, he just wants to take everyone out of the country,” she said.
Immigration advocates agree that the migrants most people think of as undocumented — farm, restaurant and construction workers, for example — may not be the most vulnerable under Trump’s deportation plan.
That’s because those migrants tend to dwell deeper underground and are harder for immigration authorities to find. As a result, it’s the migrants who are here lawfully — but could easily have that lawful status taken away by, say, executive order — who may be in Trump’s crosshairs instead.
“The people they know about are those who have had some relationship with the immigration system. That makes them more visible — and vulnerable.”
Oscar Chacon
“You do not begin by going blind — you begin with what you know,” said Oscar Chacon, co-founder and senior strategy advisor for the nonprofit Alianza Americas in Chicago, a coalition of immigrant advocacy organizations that several Florida groups have partnered with to prepare for Trump’s deportation plan.
“The people they know about, the people whose addresses, phone numbers, email accounts they can identify,” Chacon noted, “are people who technically are not here unlawfully, who have had some sort of relationship with the immigration system.”
Executive discretion
Chacon points out that along with TPS holders, that includes DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival) recipients, aka Dreamers, those who were brought to the U.S. as undocumented migrants when they were young children.
It also means migrants whose asylum cases are pending — or those here on the two-year humanitarian parole Biden created in 2022 for Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants, which was meant to reduce the number of migrants crossing the overwhelmed U.S southern border.
On the campaign trail in September, Trump pledged to shut that program down and deport the hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries who’ve come here under its aegis so far. His Vice president-elect, JD Vance, made the incoming administration’s plans very clear at a campaign rally in Arizona in late October.
“What Donald Trump has proposed doing is we’re going to stop doing mass parole,” said Vance. “We’re going to stop doing mass grants of Temporary Protected Status.”
“All those programs emanate essentially from executive branch discretion,” Chacon said.
“Keep in mind that Trump [in 2018 during his first presidency] did try to terminate DACA, did try to end TPS, but they did not follow proper [legal] procedure.
“I am sure they’ve learned their lessons since then.”
Trump’s newly named “border czar,” Tom Homan, told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday that he will “prioritize [deporting] public safety threats and national security threats first, and that’s where the focus will be.”
Homan, however, added that any immigrant in the U.S. illegally could be deported: “If you’re in the country illegally, you shouldn’t feel comfortable, absolutely not. I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I’m in the country illegally. You shouldn’t be comfortable either because when you enter this country illegally, you have committed a crime. You are a criminal, and you’re not off the table.”
Guadalupe de la Cruz, Florida program director for the nonprofit immigrant advocate group American Friends Service Committee, agrees that while legal protection is certainly important for fruit and vegetable pickers — through efforts like “family-preparedness plans” organizations like hers have in place for them — they may not, ironically, be the ones most at risk of being rounded up under Trump.
“There are so many young professionals, like Dreamers, who are likely going to be put in some kind of immigration status limbo under the new Trump Administration,” De la Cruz said.
All of which is why immigrant advocate leaders in South Florida are bracing for serious legal battles with Trump.
“The largest communities with TPS status are Venezuelans and Haitians — and we happen to have the largest number of Venezuelans and Haitians right here in Florida,” said Tessa Petit, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition in Miami.
“If he eliminates TPS for them — and then remember we also have [in Florida] the bulk of folks who came in on [Biden’s] parole, whom he may attack as well — then we’re going to face the harshest part of it.”
Many analysts, however, say the tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars such a massive deportation would cost to carry out makes it less likely to happen. They add it could also do massive damage to the U.S. economy, since so many sectors depend on migrant labor.
The nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington D.C. estimates that in Florida alone, undocumented migrants pay almost $2 billion in taxes.
But the politics are in Trump’s favor: recent polls show most Americans favor the plan as a way to bring order to the U.S.’s broken immigration system.
Petit says that’s not surprising since Congress has done so little in this century itself to fix that system — leaving Americans with little left to turn to aside from immigration demagoguery.
“You start hearing something like ‘mass deportation is the solution’ often enough, when no one else is telling you otherwise, you start to believe it,” Petit said.
“There was no one — as there was back in 1986 when we actually had immigration reform — to tell them that this sort of thing is not necessary, that it is just an act of cruelty, and that the problem can actually be dealt with by another approach.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Want more stories about the Americas? Sign up for WLRN’s Americas Report newsletter and we’ll send a round up of the most important news and stories from the hemisphere, every Thursday morning. Sign up here.
