If Trump wins, I’m in danger: the fear of undocumented people in the U.S. over the threat of mass deportations

Nora has nightmares since she thinks she can be deported. Their daughters Christell and Leah are willing to leave the U.S. to keep the family together

At night Nora dreams of a dark and unknown house. It is not the place where he lives in Miami, nor is the home he left in Nicaragua 24 years ago. This house is at the end of its deepest fear: deportation.

What am I doing here? Why did I come here?, he wonders inside that house where he discovers that nothing belongs to him, a nightmare that repeats itself every night since the final straight of the presidential campaign in the United States began.

Although her two daughters are U.S. citizens, Nora is undocumented. And if Republican candidate Donald Trump wins the election, he could be forced to return to Nicaragua.

My daughters can’t ask me before Migration, because I went in irregularly across the southern border, he says after agreeing that their true identity will remain anonymous. How hard it is to think about coming home without knowing if I can get back here.

The definition of home as the space where family memoirs are built is the daily topic of conversation between Nora, 47, her husband and daughters Christell and Leah, 30 and 19. They discuss what they will do if Trump is elected and fulfills the election promise to undertake mass deportation of undocumented people.

We sat down to talk, because there’s a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear, Nora says.

My daughters have told me that if I make the decision to leave the United States, they would go with me.

One million to start

JD Vance, Trump’s running mate as a Republican vice
presidential aspirant, said in an interview with the ABC channel that
the mass deportation of migrants could begin with a million undocumented
people.Although immigration law experts question the cost and feasibility of
this proposal, the Republican campaign insists on a motto that
summarizes the starting point of a possible Trump administration in the
face of migration: Mass deportations now.About 11 million undocumented migrants lived in the U.S. through 2022, according to the latest information released by the Department of Homeland Security.

Almost half of this population comes from Mexico, followed by Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

Undocumented migrants make up 3.3 percent of U.S. residents and at least 8.3 million are workers, according to the Pew Research Center.

Most undocumented migrants are concentrated in six states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

However, the Pew Research Center warns that this scenario may have changed over the past two years due to three factors that are not yet reflected in official statistics:

The arrival of 500,000 migrants benefiting from humanitarian (parole) permits from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua.
The record number of more than 2 million arrests on the border with Mexico.The increase of more than 1 million asylum applications.

They want to take my mom away from me.

In 2000, when Nora was left unemployed after Hurricane Mitch devastated her people in Nicaragua, the hardest decision was not to emigrate to the United States along with her husband.

The most painful thing was leaving his daughter Christell, who was 6 at the time, with her grandmother.

It took the couple four years to raise the money needed to get Christell out of Nicaragua and take her to the U.S. A year later, her second daughter, Leah, was born in Miami.

During his first administration (2017-2021), Trump responded to the upsurge in the irregular entry of migrants across the southern border with a controversial order: to separate parents from their children to deter families from emigrating to the U.S. without following what was signed by the law.

That situation sowed so much fear in Nora’s house that her daughter Leah offered to publicly defend her from the threat of being deported, even if she was only 12.

Leah Cayasso became social networks in Leah, the activist, and identified herself as an “orguding daughter of migrants.”

“They want to take my mom away from me,” Leah said from a platform during an act against Trump’s immigration policy in 2018, near the White House in Washington DC.

I don’t like living with this fear. I can’t sleep. I can’t study. “I’m stressed,” he said in tears to an audience that he found crowding.

“I’m afraid they’ll take my mom while she’s at work, driving or at home,” he said at the time.

Six years after that experience, Leah no longer does activism, although she supports her mother’s struggle to find an alternative to obtaining citizenship.

“I had the hopes of a very young girl who didn’t understand very well what was going on,” Leah says in a phone call.

Was it hard not to see results and to some extent I lost hope a little.

Now that I understand the situation, I think the best option for my mom is to have a TPS approved for Nicaraguans.

The option of a TPS

Temporary protection status, known as TPS, provides protection for citizens who cannot return safely to their countries, such as Cuba, Haiti or Venezuela.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security offers TPS to citizens of countries facing three temporary conditions: armed conflicts, natural or health disasters (such as epidemics) or other extraordinary circumstances.

Since Nora’s profile does not meet the conditions required by the United States to opt for humanitarian permission for Nicaraguans, he considers that the most expeditious option to achieve its legalization is a TPS.

In these 24 years I’ve been in the United States, where I’ve worked and paid taxes, there’s been no other mechanism for me to change status.

However, the scenario of obtaining that benefit under a Republican government seems impossible to him. If Trump wins, I’m in danger.

New voters

Christell and Leah voted for the first time in this election.

Christell is hopeful that Democratic candidate Kamala Harris will do something in favor of migrants if she wins the election.

In a meeting with voters broadcast on Univision two weeks ago, Harris was questioned by the daughter of an undocumented Latino woman who died without finding a legal path to citizenship.

Do you have any plans to support that subgroup of migrants who have been here all their lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?,” he asked Harris as he cried.

The Democratic aspirant lamented her pain and recalled that Biden filed a bill with Congress at the beginning of her government to offer legal exits to undocumented people, but did not get the support of Republicans for approval.

“We have a broken immigration system,” he stressed several times.

During the campaign, Harris has promised that he will seek to speed up the asylum process and open legal avenues for undocumented people to process citizenship.

However, it has also indicated that it will tighten restrictions on the southern border to prevent the arrival of new irregular migrants.

While Nora keeps awake after her nightmares and Christell warns that leaving the United States is a difficult decision to make, Leah clings to a certainty: We’ll do anything for my mom.

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