Lawyers for immigrants say they have been preparing for months for what a Donald Trump presidency could mean for immigration enforcement — including large-scale workplace raids, roundups in immigrant enclaves, new restrictions on asylum, the expansion of detention and the termination of programs temporarily shielding some people from deportation, the New York Times reports. Becca Heller, founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, which sued the government over the Muslim ban, said she and her allies are ready for a second Trump term. “We literally have a blueprint of what they are planning to do, and so we had months and months to figure out how to protect people,” she said. “Trump has told us what to expect — hate and persecution and concentration camps,” she said, referring to his team’s plans to use military funds to build “vast holding facilities.” “None of us have any illusions about what we are up against this time.”
When, early in his first term, Trump issued an order barring entry to the U.S. from several predominantly Muslim countries, a call went out to immigration lawyers across New York to head to Kennedy Airport, where arriving passengers were already being detained. By noon, hundreds of lawyers were interviewing relatives and friends of travelers who were being held, challenging their detention and drafting petitions for their release. It was that mobilization in 2017 that spawned a network of hundreds of lawyers who say they are now ready to fight the crackdown on immigrants that Trump promised to carry out in a second term in office. But unlike in 2016, when he won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote, Trump won both in this election, the first Republican to prevail in the national vote in two decades, after campaigning on harsh immigration policies — and he will enter office with a Supreme Court that counts three of his first-term nominees among the nine justices. Heller said that winning the popular vote was not a license to ignore the law. “He can’t act outside the bounds of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” she said.
Comments