Well, that didn’t take long.
After running another campaign fueled by anti-immigrant rhetoric and racist fear-mongering, Donald Trump began his second term as president last week and promptly made good on his threats of an immigration crackdown.
Just moments after being sworn in, the CBP One app went dark, leaving migrants along the border without a way to request asylum, and crushing the hopes of thousands who already had appointments. Then, in the midst of an executive order spree, he closed the southern border, reinstated the disastrous (and dangerous) “Remain in Mexico” policy, and ended birthright citizenship — a move that’s already to drawn more than 22 legal challenges, considering it’s a right that’s been guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution since 1868.
Over the weekend, “enhanced targeted operations” took place in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and the Rio Grande Valley.
To be clear, Trump was already walking into a dumpster fire. For years, the U.S. immigration system has been… to put it mildly … an absolute clusterfuck. Thanks to years of prioritizing border enforcement rather than funding for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), we’re just not equipped to meet rising numbers of asylum seekers and are faced with a historic backlog of more than one million cases and rising.
“It’s going to put an incredible strain on our communities.”
RAICES processes thousands of immigration, asylum and refugee cases each year and has offices statewide, including in Dallas, according to its external affairs officer, Faisal Al-Juburi.
Over the last eight years, Al-Juburi tells The Barbed Wire he’s seen the immigration system get progressively worse for those seeking asylum, as well as the immigration professionals attempting to help them — while both have been forced to grapple with a broken and overwhelmed system.
“The U.S. spends billions more on border militarization, from CBP to ICE, to criminalize and incarcerate asylum seekers than they do on our immigration court system and USCIS,” Al-Juburi says. “They’ve done little to nothing to address the backlogs that have existed and that cause the system to buckle under pressure. I think that shows where our national values are at.”
With Trump back in office, Al-Juburi isn’t hopeful there will be much progress in chipping away at a mountain of asylum cases. “Every day, there are civil servants out there trying to make a dent in it,” he says. “But now we’re in a scenario where it looks like things are only going to get worse. You want to be optimistic, but there’s no sign that any of these pain points will be alleviated, and instead, they’ll only be exacerbated.”
Navigating these changes in Texas adds yet another complication for the lawyers at RAICES and other immigrant legal aid groups. Gov. Greg Abbott’s controversial approach to border enforcement, including the costly and legally fraught “Operation Lone Star,” has earned Trump’s stamp of approval, with the president singling him out in his inauguration speech as a “leader of the pack.”
Al-Juburi also points to Abbott-backed legislation, like SB 4, which passed last year, categorizing “improper border entry” as a criminal offense, and allowing police to question and arrest anyone they believe entered into Texas illegally. The law does prohibit police from making arrests in public/private schools, churches and places of worship, and healthcare facilities, though this Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced they had rescinded Biden-era guidelines concerning “sensitive” areas.
“It’s not just fear, it’s the very real consequences of rhetoric and policies aimed at attacking a community that’s already vulnerable to exploitation and isn’t afforded many protections.”
In a statement, acting DHS Secretary Benjamine Huffman said, “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest. The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”
“I think both Abbott and Trump stand to be emboldened by one another in terms of their dystopian vision of immigration in America,” Al-Juburi says. “It’s going to be a rude awakening for the American people with some of the disruptions we stand to see with the potential for ICE raids in schools, places of worship, or hospitals. It’s going to put an incredible strain on our communities.”
In the Texas Legislature, Workers Defense Action Fund Policy Director David Chincanchan says there are a number of concerning bills that have been filed since the start of the session earlier this month. Their members — Latine immigrant workers — are still reeling from the passage of SB 4, and bracing for what could be coming ahead during a second Trump presidency.
“I think for a lot of us, the images of families being torn apart and children in cages are still burned in our brains,” Chincanchan says. (Notably, Trump appointed the architect of the cruel and deeply unpopular family separation policy from his first term, Tom Homan, as his border czar.) “The terrorizing of immigration and Latino communities in general is something that we really felt during Trump’s last term. It’s not just fear, it’s the very real consequences of rhetoric and policies aimed at attacking a community that’s already vulnerable to exploitation and isn’t afforded many protections.”
On WDP’s radar are House Bill 1554, which seeks to target immigrant legal defense funds, as well as HB 1491, which would require Texas counties to enter into 287(g) agreements to cooperate with ICE under the threat of denying state funds. But one of their biggest priorities is HB 1310, which would require healthcare providers to ask for their patients’ immigration status to report the amount of funds spent on providing them healthcare.
“They want political theater — something that looks good to their base on TV.”
“Medical experts have expressed concern that this would deter people from seeking necessary medical treatment because they’re afraid of the immigration consequences,” Chincanchan says. “We’re doing our best to make it clear to everyone in the state that you know that they have a right to seek medical treatment, especially in the case of an emergency, regardless of immigration status. But you know, with all of the attacks on the immigrant community, that may not be enough to reassure folks.”
The state of Texas is home to roughly five million immigrants, just a little more than three million of whom work here and make up 22% of the labor force, a figure Chincanchan points to in order to emphasize the ripple effect anti-immigrant policies will have. “If these laws go into effect, it will impact immigrants and undocumented immigrants most directly, but I think it’s something that the entire state would feel.”
In Eagle Pass, Amerika Garcia Grewal has been vocal about the deadly impact of these policies as they’ve played out in her community. Since 2014, the Center for Migration Studies has reported a minimum of 5,405 people who have died or gone missing along the border, with those figures at a record high since 2021. The International Organization for Migration characterizes the U.S.-Mexico border as the world’s “deadliest land migration route,” a designation that the country has earned through a “prevention through deterrence” strategy dating back to the 1990s that’s made the crossing exceedingly dangerous.
“When you force people to cross in areas that are more and more remote, they’re more likely to run into a dangerous situation, and less likely to get any help,” Garcia Grewal says. “Operation Lone Star has just made things more deadly, and more expensive by turning people away from the safer and legal ways to come into this country.”
Garcia Grewal tells The Barbed Wire that the strategy is inefficient by design — a “spectacle” that’s cost more than 11 billion in taxpayer dollars. As a co-founder of the Border Vigil and member of the community organization Eagle Pass Border Coalition, she’s seen the deadly consequences of Operation Lone Star up close, and she worries about how being endorsed by President Trump might make things worse — or lead other states to follow us.
“If they really wanted to crack down on illegal immigration, they would start going after employers all over the big cities and start shutting them down,” she says. “But that’s not the kind of enforcement they want. They want political theater — something that looks good to their base on TV.”
With a rise in migrant deaths, there’s also been an increase in efforts to identify a growing backlog of unidentified bodies (many of whom died from drowning or dehydration while crossing the border). Members of the Eagle Pass Border Coalition have begun receiving forensic fingerprint training, collecting information to provide to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database in the hopes of potentially identifying them and reuniting their remains with their families or loved ones.
“Unfortunately, Texas has become a role model for inflammatory immigration laws,” she says, citing examples in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Idaho. “Our anti-immigrant rhetoric is being exported across the country, and even across the world.”
“It’s horrible, and we only anticipate seeing more of it,” says Garcia Grewal.
