Immigration advocates brace for Trump: 'Buckle up'

Immigration advocates are bracing for Trump 2.0, whose pledge of mass deportation is sending waves of panic and anger throughout the movement.

Even before President-elect Trump’s resounding victory on Tuesday, immigration advocacy was facing an identity crisis after decades of relying on Hispanics as their primary voting constituency and with neither political party fully embracing their priorities.

“I think that part of the challenge … has been the movement has been very insular. The movement has been focused on undocumented immigrants,” said Marielena Hincapié, a scholar at Cornell University's Immigration Law and Policy Program.

“When I was heading up the National Immigration Law Center, I would be the person to be like, 'I'm a Latina, and this is so much more than just about [Latinos],' right? It's about Asian Pacific Islanders. It's about Black immigrants. But it also has to be like, when we talk about — or the directly impacted, the directly impacted by immigration is not just someone who is undocumented, right? It's about the U.S. citizen spouses. It's the U.S. citizen children. It's the business owners that are relying on them. It's the homeowners whose houses are being rebuilt in, you know, Asheville, North Carolina, or Florida after Milton.”

The immigration advocacy umbrella has grown since the first Trump administration, notably with the elevation of Haitian American civil rights groups and closer ties between advocacy and business through organizations such as the American Business Immigration Coalition.

In 2023, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called on Congress to move forward a series of bipartisan bills directed toward border security and immigration reform.

“The antiquated legal immigration system and its woefully insufficient supply of worker visas have for years significantly hindered the ability of companies to meet their workforce needs. In addition, the vast shortcomings of the legal immigration system are a significant contributing factor to the continuing challenges at the southern border,” wrote Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the Chamber, in a letter to Congress.

But neither the outgoing, divided Congress nor the Democratic-controlled Congress of the first half of the Biden administration made any headway on immigration — a pattern that’s held for nearly four decades — or on border security, a government duty that’s been institutionally stagnant but consistently growing in scope and cost over the past two decades.

That’s a painful bottom line for a movement whose main goals are to modernize and humanize the immigration system and to curb the growth of the detention-deportation industrial complex.

"When you look beyond the binaries served up to American voters this election cycle — a felon or democracy, toughness or chaos, a ban or a welcome — you see them as false choices that overshadow real, necessary and in many cases broadly supported policy solutions. The pressures of irregular migration and the recycling harms of crime and incarceration will not go away on their own, nor can they be blotted out by sheer bravado. They must be reckoned with in ways that create lasting change," said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an organization that bridges big tech and immigration advocacy, in a statement.

Trump’s victory sent private prison operator stocks soaring. Investors are betting on his promises of mass deportation and mass internment coming true, funneling millions in tax dollars to those companies.

As of midday Friday, the GEO Group’s stock grew nearly 75 percent over five days, and CoreCivic stock went up nearly 68 percent.

But some remain skeptical that Trump will be able to — or truly want to — build the infrastructure needed to carry out millions of deportations.

“Is he going to deport 20 million people? I really don't think so. That's unrealistic,” said Rob Wilson, president of Employco USA, a national human resources firm.

Still, Wilson said companies should prepare for Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids by screening for proper work authorization.

“The good thing is unemployment — it's turned back to an employer market versus an employee market so the employers can be a little bit more selective. A couple of years ago, when people still weren't working coming off of COVID, it was the employees who were really running the marketplace. And now those have flipped. So as an employer, I just think you've got a little bit more flexibility,” said Wilson.

That flies contrary to two central tenets of the immigration advocacy world: belief in Trump’s threats and that the U.S. economy is dependent on undocumented labor.

According to Hincapié, Democrats have historically missed the opportunity to communicate the latter.

“You can just do three bullets and say that message time and time again to shift the conversation away from just the border to human beings who everybody in the United States relates to in one way or the other,” she said.

“If you eat in this country, you owe that to immigrants. If you go to a restaurant. You go to, you know, shopping. You have children who need to be taken care of. You have an elderly or a family member who is ill, guess what? Who is taking care, who is rebuilding our cities after climate disasters, is immigrants, and so they just haven't done that, right? They haven't told the stories of who we are and who will be impacted by Trump's agenda.”

Though Trump’s immigration message has been the through line of his political career, his pledge to fix economic woes is what most resonated with voters; according to NBC News exit polling, 32 percent of voters in key states named the economy as their top issue, while only 11 percent pointed to immigration.

"While the dust is still settling on how Latinos actually voted in this election, it's clear that our community is primarily concerned with the economy and the same pocketbook issues as other Americans, such as the rising costs of food, housing and other essentials. Deep concerns with inflation and making ends meet almost singularly drove how Hispanics voted in this election,” said Janet Murguía, president of UnidosUS, in a postelection statement.

Of the 11 percent of voters who prioritized immigration, 90 percent voted for Republicans and only 9 percent for Democrats, showing that Vice President Harris’s immigration pitch resonated much less than her positions on abortion or on defending democracy, the top issue for 34 percent of voters in the poll.

“In a year where the stakes could not be higher, young, Black, Brown, queer, and working-class communities urged Vice President Harris and Democrats as a whole to embrace pro-immigrant policies that resonate with the majority of young people,” Michelle Ming, political director of United We Dream Action, said in a statement.

“By refusing to run on a bold, progressive agenda, Democrats failed to lead with the message voters needed to stop an authoritarian from taking back the White House. We demand the Biden-Harris Administration, Congress, and state and local officials across the country leave no stone unturned in delivering vital protections for immigrants at this moment. No matter what, we are ready to put our bodies on the line to protect our communities.”

For decades, advocates have fought an uphill battle to keep immigration a priority for Latino voters, many of whom have never seen Congress pass significant legislation on the issue.

Though the dispersion of the Latino vote — gender, national origin, age and geographical gaps tell the story of the 2024 Hispanic electorate — makes it a precarious constituency, in poll after poll large majorities of Latinos say they favor a path to citizenship.

“The obligatory question is what could Democrats have done to stop the erosion among the voters that comprise their base, like Latinos. For decades, Democrats have been told they cannot assume they have absolute support among specific sectors. They have to invest and court that vote and not only go out looking for it during election season. The Democrats knew about the erosion of support among Latino men. Still, they didn't have a sense of urgency, perhaps thinking they would win the Hispanic vote at any rate, even with a lower percentage,” wrote Maribel Hastings, a senior adviser for America’s Voice, in an op-ed widely distributed throughout Spanish-language media.

America’s Voice is a leading progressive immigration advocacy group, formed by longtime advocate Frank Sharry in 2008, amid comprehensive immigration reform negotiations that momentarily brought the far sides of the political spectrum to the same table.

Even before Trump’s first term, lines of communication between immigration advocates and restrictionists had been severed, and there will be little motivation to mend that rift in a second Trump administration.

But immigrant advocates have been laying the groundwork for advocacy on economic terms, highlighting immigrants, documented and undocumented, as a force in both the labor and consumer markets, and they see an opening to engage a broader electorate concerned with civil rights under Trump.

“I know that there is a broader political constituency that we haven't been tapping into, and that that is who we need to build with. And frankly, I would say that there are a lot of people that supported Trump, that voted for Trump, that voted because of the economic issues or for other issues, or because, you know, strong man attitude, like whether it was machismo that led that, whatever, for whatever reason, we need to bring them back. We need to get them to understand,” said Hincapié.

The prevailing frustration and anger in the immigration advocacy world is not only directed at Trump, but at those voters.

“Despite everything, people in the United States gave him a second term,” wrote Hastings in her Spanish-language op-ed.

“Buckle up because there is a lot of turbulence ahead.”