The consequences of president-elect Donald Trump’s new push for a crackdown on immigration and mass deportations will unfold not just in areas close to the U.S.-Mexico border or in major metropolises, but in places like Painesville, Ohio, a small city of 20,000 near the shore of Lake Erie whose population has been transformed in recent decades by immigration, primarily from Mexico. An estimated 130,000 undocumented immigrants live in Ohio, the Washington Post reports . Most of those in Painesville have been in the country for more than a decade, mirroring the national trend, and nearly all of them live in “mixed-status” families — families that also include U.S.-born children, naturalized citizens or legal immigrants. For such families, deportations nearly always separate parents from their children.
Veronica Isabel Dahlberg, the head of HOLA Ohio, a local nonprofit, has built relationships with elected officials, employers, police officers and school administrators in the city. “I don’t believe that they would just stand by and let our community get destroyed,” she said. She paused. “But I could be wrong.” Dahlberg founded HOLA in 1999 as a grassroots initiative and is transparent about its principles. She isn’t opposed to the deportation of criminals. She thinks Customs and Border Protection personnel do important work and are a “total asset to our country.” But she is against massive workplace raids and other types of immigration enforcement that target families whose only offense is being in the country illegally and who have worked and paid taxes for years.
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