Trump's Immigration Arrests Are Seeing A Wave Of Resistance

Yahoo

a day ago

Recent weeks have seen the Trump administration's 'mass deportation' program kick into overdrive.
Militarized federal agents are working hard to meet the White House's sky-high arrestquotas, and the number of people in immigration detention is surging past record highs. That means focusing even more on otherwise law-abiding people who happen to have irregular immigration statuses ― people who pay taxes, show up to court dates and check-ins, work hard to provide for their families, and followed previous administrations' rules to apply for humanitarian protections. It also means interrogating people at swap meets, and undergroundparties, or those who just have brown skin.
The nationdisapproves, polling shows. Massive protests around the country ― in both large urban areas and small towns ― have showcased Americans' fury at having their loved ones and neighbors ripped out of their communities at random.
Across the country, people are also taking action to slow down what they see as the egregious over-enforcement of immigration law, attempting to starve Trump's mass deportation machine of fuel and to throw sand in its gears.
It's a tall order. Donald Trump's deportation apparatus is a bipartisan creation that's been decades in the making. Over time, the legal process has exerted more and more control over immigrants' lives, and Congress has failed to do anything to help out-of-status immigrants in recent years except further criminalize them, and write enormous checks for immigration detention and enforcement. As Stephen Lemons observed in the Phoenix New Times recently, 'Trump didn't create America's deportation machine. He's just revving the engine.'
But activists and community organizers have worked for generations to slow down deportations ― and, as it turns out, Trump's deportation agenda relies upon some crucial choke points. Here they are.One key opportunity for bystanders to intervene in the deportation process comes during the actual moments where immigration agents may be making an arrest.
Take the case of Bishop-elect Michael Pham, Pope Leo XIV's first bishop appointment in the United States. On World Refugee Day last week, Pham and other faith leaders visited an immigration court. The ICE agents who in recent weeks have been arresting immigrants showing up to routine hearings in the building 'scattered' and did not take anyone into custody, Times of San Diego reported.
In Chicago, two National Guard soldiers appeared in uniform with their mother at her immigration appointment, alongside two members of Congress. The soldiers' mother returned home without incident.
Not everyone has the star power to discourage detentions by their mere presence. But at courthouses and ICE check-ins where Trump has taken advantage of a legal maneuver known as 'expeditedremoval' to arrest and deport people without due process, volunteers accompanying immigrants can document arrests and sometimes provide informal legalinformation to people who might not know about ICE'stactics.
There are lots of these kinds of interventions, whether it's taking shifts at a local rapid response network, donating to bail funds, visiting people in immigration detention, helping with translation, contributing child care, delivering food and other supplies to people afraid to go to work, or simply attending a protest.
Spreading information about people's legal rights during interactions with law enforcement, known as 'know your rights' information, has also grown enormously popular. In Los Angeles and around the country, immigration agents have used various pretexts to confront people and ask them about their immigration status. Any knowledgeable family member, coworker, or even a passerby can intervene with friendly advice: You have the right to remain silent and ask to speak to a lawyer. You should not consent to searches, nor should you sign anything. If police don't present an accurate warrant (and specifically, one signed by a judge), you don't have to open the door for law enforcement.
Printable 'redcards' are a convenient way to keep these legal rights handy.
'Every time there have been raids – this happened in Nashville, this happened in Los Angeles – people are figuring out where they're taking people, and then they're going to the detention centers and telling people their rights as they're being brought in on buses. They're shouting at them, 'Don't sign anything!'' said Jessie Hahn, a senior counsel for labor and employment policy at the National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy organization focused on low-income immigrants.
She mentioned people protesting outside of ICE agents' hotels, physically manifesting their disagreement. 'There's lots of different ways to do these bystander interventions. It doesn't require that you be standing there while ICE tries to arrest someone standing next to you.'
Direct action isn't always successful. New York City Comptroller and recent mayoral candidate Brad Lander has himself volunteered to escort immigrants to and from their hearings, and was recently detained for several hours by federal agents for it as he locked arms with one immigration court respondent as agents arrested the man. The man is still in ICE detention, Lander said Monday.
But it's a numbers game. Lander has said that on previous volunteer shifts, he was able to escort other immigration court respondents to and from their hearings without incident. And with his detention, he likely catalyzed new opposition to courthouse ICE arrests, and trained New York media's magnifying glass on Trump's mass deportation agenda.
Importantly, because America's militarized deportation machine has been decades in the making, activists have also mobilized against it for decades. As a result, communities around the United States ― and not just big cities ― are filled with an extensive network of immigrants' rights organizations, from grassroots community groups to mutual aid networks to national organizations, largely led by immigrants and their loved ones. These groups are deeply sensitive to the needs of people facing arrest and deportation, and they've done the work even when the national media hasn't taken notice. Now, they're serving as key nodes of resistance against Trump's stepped-up enforcement actions.
The data is clear. Legal representation is associated withbetteroutcomes in immigration court.
That's because the deck is stacked against people in the immigration legal system. Unlike in criminal court, people in the immigration process are not guaranteed free legal representation if they can't afford it, even if they're detained behind bars.
Also, immigration courts in the United States fall under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department. They're not independent. America's hundreds of immigration judges have a union, but it was decertified by conservatives on the Federal Labor Relations Authority in 2020, and is currently fighting in court for its members' rights to speak publicly about their work. Like other federal workers, they've also been undermined by Trump administration appointees, and they're subject to immense pressure from the administration to speed up the pace of deportations.
Trump has also worked hard to create more undocumented people, moving to end deportation protections for over 1 million people who applied through humanitarian channels, including Temporary Protected Status, the CBP One app, and the CHNV (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela) parole program. And we've seen immigration hearings and regular ICE check-ins leveraged to increase arrest numbers.
In such an intrusive, byzantine, dehumanizing system, immigration lawyers are crucial. They can pursue legal pathways that can slow or prevent deportation, such as the asylum process, while also advocating for release from immigration detention as cases proceed.
'Having a lawyer represent someone in deportation proceedings makes an enormous difference,' the New York Immigration Coalition explains. 'Sixty percent of not detained immigrants with lawyers win their cases, versus 17% who don't have legal help. Detained immigrants with legal representation are 10 times more likely to win their cases compared to those who lack counsel, and are seven times more likely to be released from custody than those without counsel.'
Across the country, communities are fundraising for legal representation for people facing arrest and deportation, whether through personal campaigns, local nonprofits or national organizations.
Some, including NYIC and Democrats' newly-minted nominee for mayor of New York City, Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, want to increase government funding for immigrant legal representation. Part of the reason is that when legal representation is run by clinics or nonprofits ― or carried out pro bono by large law firms ― there can be institutional pressure to screen for people with 'winnable' cases. This tension is part of theargument for 'universalrepresentation' for respondents in the immigration legal system, just like public defenders are guaranteed regardless of ability to pay in criminal court.
Wherever the funding comes from, the availability of legal representation will be a key variable in the ultimate scope of Trump's deportations.
Even though immigration enforcement is a federal job, local cooperation is a crucial part of the operation.
Jail space that local governments rent out to ICE is the most common type of immigration detention, one 2020 analysis found. Localities also frequently coordinate law enforcement operations with immigration authorities, including, crucially, the hand-off of undocumented people who are being released from local jails. Laws in Texas and Florida (both currently paused by courts) criminalize being undocumented on the state level.
And recently, all kinds of local law enforcement agencies, including university police departments, have been entering into so-called '287(g) agreements' with ICE in record numbers; the agreements essentially deputize local corrections officers, police officers and sheriffs deputies as de facto immigration agents, such that 'in encounters with local law enforcement, they no longer have to wait to call ICE for ICE to show up to make an immigration arrest,' Hahn said.
'The sheriffs in the room, we need your bed space. We need your 287(g) agreements,' Trump's Border Czar Tom Homan told a meeting of the National Sheriffs' Association in February. 'We need that force multiplier.'
Over the past few decades, the so-called 'sanctuary' movement has emerged to minimize this kind of collaboration. There's no single 'sanctuary policy.' Rather, the term refers to a groupofpolicies that can be effectuated at the state and local level, all with the aim of limiting involvement in immigration enforcement. Taken together, sanctuary policies can prevent a routine traffic stop from turning into immigration detention and deportation.
And, crucially, decisions around sanctuary status are made at the local and state level, so even if Trump and the Republican party control Washington, D.C., anti-ICE activists are still able to make a big difference.
To put it plainly, the reason Trump and Republicans hatesanctuaryjurisdictions is because they work. During former President Barack 'Deporter-In-Chief' Obama's presidency, we saw that as more and more communities enacted sanctuary policies, ICE's capacity to arrest and deport people plunged. Referring to 'custodial' arrests, where ICE picks someone up after they've been arrested by another law enforcement agency, the libertarian Cato Institute found in 2018 that 'Local and state non-cooperation with ICE works to reduce the number of ICE arrests[,] as between 70 percent and 90 percent of those arrests are custodial [since 2008].' Sanctuary policies 'reduce deportations by one-third,' while having no measurable effect on crime, the legal scholar David K. Hausman found in 2020.
'This is the time to really focus locally, because you have a lot more power at the local level,' Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, a coalition working to abolish U.S. immigration detention, told HuffPost. 'I remind people that sanctuary policies really flourished under the Obama administration because people were just so frustrated by the scale of deportations in the criminal-legal system.'
It can be difficult to track what localities have sanctuary policies, as the Trump administration itself recently discovered. The list of localities participating in 287(g) agreements is fairly well-documented, both by ICE itself and groups like the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. (The latter organization in 2019 also authored an 'Ending 287(g) Toolkit for Local Organizers.') But there's no single resource to check your locality's stance on other sanctuary issues, and localities are constantlyreevaluating their cooperation with the federal government on immigration enforcement. The extent of that cooperation is a prime battleground for people who want to disrupt Trump's mass deportation agenda.
'Go to your county commission hearings, go to your city council,' Shah said, noting that community activism has led to major changes, like a 2022 law in Illinois entirely outlawing immigration detention in the state. 'There's people doing this work across the country at the local level, and there's a lot of possibility to protect immigrants.'
Trump will vastly increase the scale of his mass deportation agenda with the enormous budget increase he wants to give federal law enforcement, particularly at the Department of Homeland Security. DHS houses the primary agencies carrying out arrests and deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, the latter of which includes Border Patrol.
In addition to further militarizing the U.S. border and targeting immigrant families with onerous fees and exclusion from public benefits, the proposed Republican budget bill ― the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill ― massively expands the federal police budget, with a specific eye toward immigration arrests and removals.
The proposal would spend $45 billion to expand immigration detention, including familydetention ― that's over four times more than ICE's entire 2024 budget, and 13 times ICE's 2024 detention budget, according to a National Immigration Law Center analysis. That increase is part of an even larger overall explosion in the size of the immigration enforcement budget, including tens of billions of dollars for hiring thousands more Border Patrol and ICE agents, as well as transportation funding for driving and flying detainees between detention centers and outside the country.
'Detention is the way they can deport people, so they're very, very committed to having more detention capacity, in order to reach their numbers,' said Shah. She noted research from her group and others showing that 'as detention capacity increases, so do ICE apprehensions.'
'There's so much damaging about this budget bill,' she added. 'I think we're in a moment [like the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks] where they're just going to throw so much money at this that they're going to build up a system that's going to be very hard to take down.'
Don't just take critics' word for it. Homan has repeatedly said the scale of Trump's deportations depends directly on resources.
'Everybody always asks me, 'How many people can you remove?' I don't know. What do our resources look like?' he told Fox Newsshortly after Election Day 2024. 'How many beds are we going to have? What's the size of the transportation contract? How many resources do I have? How many officers do I have? Can I bring back retired officers? Can [the Department of Defense] help, with a lot of the stuff that doesn't require arrest, where you don't have to have a badge and a gun and immigration authority? There are a lot of things — whether it's transportation, or logistics, or infrastructure-building — that DOD can do.'
In a Fox Business interview Wednesday, Homan hammered home a similar argument, calling the proposed massive budget increases 'imperative' to procure more agents, detention beds, transportation streams, and resources to 'target' people for arrest.
'Get it done,' he told members of Congress. 'We need the funds to get this done.'
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