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Chicago’s Lower West Side felt uneasily quiet this week.
Christina Alejandra, a dancer and local business owner in the city’s artsy, majority Mexican American neighborhood, wondered whether it was because of the freezing temperatures, or the impending threat of immigration raids.
The city has been preparing for weeks for a crackdown, after Donald Trump’s new administration made clear that so-called sanctuary cities – communities like Chicago that refuse to hand over immigrants to federal authorities – would be the first targets of its mass-deportation program.
But the fear didn’t really hit Alejandra, who’s 26 and undocumented, until Monday, inauguration day, as Trump began unleashing a barrage of new immigration restrictions. “I’ve never been scared like this before,” she said. The Guardian is not publishing Alejandra’s full name to protect her and her family from immigration enforcement.
Chicago and surrounding areas have seen raids before, including during the first Trump administration. “But this feels different,” Alejandra said. “The way he and his supporters are riled up. There’s a shift happening.”
Such worries have been stirred up in immigrant communities across the US in recent days, amid a flood of new executive orders setting strict limits on who can enter the US, who can stay here and who can call themselves an American, setting off unprecedented waves of panic within the country and at its borders.
Moments after the president was sworn into office, asylum seekers waiting to enter the country learned that their appointments to meet with Customs and Border Protection had been cancelled – and images of devastated and desperate people at the border made a stark diptych with the inaugural ceremonies.
In the following 72 hours, the Trump administration dispatched additional troops to the border, suspended the US refugee program, directed immigration officers to “fast track” the removal of immigrants and brazenly challenged the American tradition and constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship to the children of many immigrants. His Department of Justice said it would go after local authorities that declined to cooperate with the president’s plans for mass deportations.
Policy experts warned that many of those directives wouldn’t pass legal muster, but that the chaotic tempo of the orders was designed to stoke panic. Pregnant women who are undocumented or on temporary visas suddenly had to grapple with the possibility that their babies would be born on US soil, without US citizenship. A plaintiff in one of the lawsuits challenging Trump’s order – a pregnant woman from Venezuela who is going by the pseudonym Monica – worried that her child “will be a citizen of nothing”. It would be impossible for her to get her child Venezuelan citizenship while her asylum case in the US is pending. “I don’t know what will happen,” she said at a press conference presenting the lawsuit. “What can I do? What can I do for my child?”
In Chicago, Alejandra felt uneasy for the first time earlier this week as she was driving to the gym – she worried about getting pulled over. She had planned to visit her mother and sister, whom she hasn’t seen in a while, in South Carolina, but cancelled her flight this week. She had travelled all across the US for her dance career, but the risk of flying suddenly seemed foolish.
She said she’s been doing her best to protect herself and her family, while also preparing for the possibility of deportation.
She routinely checks community-led forums where advocates are posting updates on the possible movements of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents, and pointing her loved ones to local resources explaining the legal rights of both citizens and non-citizens.
“Every single person in my life I’ve been talking to about this has told me: ‘No way Christina, you’re not getting deported,’” she said. It’s a well-intentioned – or perhaps a self-preserving – notion. The people who love her don’t want to see her taken away. Until recently, she had the same thought – she came to the US as a small child with her family, who were fleeing a wave of femicide in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
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“I don’t have a criminal record. I have a business, where I employ five US citizens,” she said. “I always felt like I’m that example immigrant. Why would they want to go after me?” Now, she’s not so sure. She’s had trouble keeping up with the litany of new restrictions on immigration.
At the production company she runs, she deputized her employees to take over some of her management duties to keep the company running if she isn’t there. She has been in touch with the few family members left in Mexico, to make sure they’ll be there to receive her if she’s sent back.
“It’s a hard thing, because I grew up here my entire life,” she said. “But this is just part of being prepared. And I think that helps ease the nerves.”
One of Alejandra’s closest childhood friends, Luis Enrique, 25, a paralegal for a local legal aid non-profit, said he had been simultaneously fielding questions on various group chats from friends and family members asking what Trump’s executive orders mean for them, and frantically reading up on new and upcoming orders and legislation.
Enrique, who has legal status to remain in the US through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, said he had also been feeling fear and guilt that his loved ones are more vulnerable than he is. The Guardian has not used his family name to protect his parents, who are undocumented.
Last weekend, when he returned from a trip to Mexico City where he spoke about his experience as an immigrant and Daca recipient – he worried about asking his parents to pick him up from the airport. “We had been expecting some of these policies for a while, and we’ve been preparing here,” he said. “So I didn’t think I was going to cry on my return trip to Chicago, but I did. I couldn’t stop that anxiety.”
Still, he said, he along with advocates and community leaders have been telling Chicagoans that there are ways to resist. “We’re trying to also spread that message that a lot of these executive orders do seem to be unconstitutional. They are not actually tangible yet,” he said. “They are just meant to spread fear.”
