Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.

Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.

In May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” 

This is more than just bluster. Reuters reported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.” 

In Trump’s first term, “his instincts were to bring as much federal power as he could to bear on essentially peaceful protests,” Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute and a journalist who has studied First Amendment law for decades, told me. This time, there will be fewer guardrails. “It was complicated enough before Trump was elected. Now you’re going to have various demagogues in Congress and the Trump administration actually bearing down in various ways on universities and on university students, seeing it as the bastion of the enemy within.”

“Given how it’s been under Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do.”

Many of the plans for targeting protesters are taken from tactics employed by Democrats in recent years. For years, Palestinian-rights activists in the US—and Palestinians in the US, whether activists or not—have often been smeared as terrorists and threatened with deportation and imprisonment. In 2023, a wave of protest was met with a crackdown. The Department of Education pressured schools to stop pro-Palestine student organizing, as Mother Jones reported in September. Dozens of universities across the nation instituted strict new disciplinary codes prohibiting many forms of public assembly. Over 3,600 protesters were arrested.

Just months ago, Cornell University threatened PhD student Momodou Taal with revocation of his F-1 student visa—and, effectively, deportation—after Taal spent much of the previous year attending various pro-Palestine actions. On September 18, Taal and fellow students disrupted a career fair Cornell held that featured weapons manufacturer L3Harris. The university alleged that Taal had shoved police on his way in, a charge he denies.

After public pushback, Cornell backed down on deportation. But Taal has still been banned from campus and is no longer permitted to teach his classes. When we spoke the week of the election, he told me that he was still negotiating the opportunity to use library resources to write his thesis. (“I don’t want to budge on library access,” he said.) 

“Given how it’s been under [President Joe] Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do,” he said. “I think, if the position taken by the [Biden] administration was that these kids should be protected, there would be more of an outcry if Trump then did a clampdown. I think what Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”

One piece of potential infrastructure is the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act—a House bill designed to strip tax-exempt status from any nonprofit the Treasury Department designates a “terrorist-supporting organization.” A version of the bill was introduced last year with broad bipartisan support. But earlier this week, it was voted down on the House floor, as a majority of Democrats were concerned that the bill would hand undue power to Trump to silence his political enemies. 144 Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted against the fast-tracked bill. Nearly all Republicans—and dozens of Democrats—still supported it.

“All of us support stopping terrorism,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told The Intercept. “[But] if he is on a march to make America fascist, we do not need to supply Donald Trump with any additional weapons to accomplish his ill purpose.” Doggett had initially supported the bill but changed course after Trump’s election.

The “nonprofit killer” bill, as critics have dubbed it, is not dead. It will go back for a vote next week. This time, with a simple majority, the bill will likely pass.

“I think we should anticipate something akin to the McCarthy era in terms of government being turned against certain categories of citizens,” Kalven said of this legislative trend.

The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group behind Project 2025, has also given Trump a workable plan to stop pro-Palestine dissent. It is called Project Esther. Nominally a policy proposal to tackle antisemitism on the left, it reads instead as a blueprint for taking down pro-Palestine activists. It suggests deporting “foreign Hamas Support Organization members,” classifying anti-war nonprofits—like American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace—as members of a shadowy “Hamas Support Organization” network that is “attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government.”  

Attorney Zoha Khalili at Palestine Legal, an organization that has spent the past decade providing legal advice and support to Palestinian-rights activists, said Trump’s election gives universities a chance to change their role.

“[Now] it’s one of those situations where, you know, universities who have been repressing student activism might also now find themselves in this position where they have to care a bit more about their students,” Khalili said. “Because of the values that they claim to uphold—wanting diversity, not wanting to have their students deported for political purposes.” 

What worries Khalili most, though, is not so much Trump’s crackdown on protesters in the United States, but how his presidency will harm the people in Gaza on whose behalf Americans protest in the first place. 

“The broader question that is on my mind is: How is the Trump administration going to impact Palestinians on the ground?” she asked. Trump’s plans for the region are unclear—though he has expressed a desire for the war to end, he’s also said he wants to ban refugee resettlement from the Gaza Strip and looks to be stocking his administration with war hawks, including an evangelical end-times Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who has declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”

“How aggressively Israel is engaging in genocide also impacts the climate here for activists, who are increasingly desperate to try to save people’s lives,” Khalili said. “So the stakes are quite high at the moment.” 

Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.

Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.

In May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” 

This is more than just bluster. Reuters reported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.” 

In Trump’s first term, “his instincts were to bring as much federal power as he could to bear on essentially peaceful protests,” Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute and a journalist who has studied First Amendment law for decades, told me. This time, there will be fewer guardrails. “It was complicated enough before Trump was elected. Now you’re going to have various demagogues in Congress and the Trump administration actually bearing down in various ways on universities and on university students, seeing it as the bastion of the enemy within.”

“Given how it’s been under Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do.”

Many of the plans for targeting protesters are taken from tactics employed by Democrats in recent years. For years, Palestinian-rights activists in the US—and Palestinians in the US, whether activists or not—have often been smeared as terrorists and threatened with deportation and imprisonment. In 2023, a wave of protest was met with a crackdown. The Department of Education pressured schools to stop pro-Palestine student organizing, as Mother Jones reported in September. Dozens of universities across the nation instituted strict new disciplinary codes prohibiting many forms of public assembly. Over 3,600 protesters were arrested.

Just months ago, Cornell University threatened PhD student Momodou Taal with revocation of his F-1 student visa—and, effectively, deportation—after Taal spent much of the previous year attending various pro-Palestine actions. On September 18, Taal and fellow students disrupted a career fair Cornell held that featured weapons manufacturer L3Harris. The university alleged that Taal had shoved police on his way in, a charge he denies.

After public pushback, Cornell backed down on deportation. But Taal has still been banned from campus and is no longer permitted to teach his classes. When we spoke the week of the election, he told me that he was still negotiating the opportunity to use library resources to write his thesis. (“I don’t want to budge on library access,” he said.) 

“Given how it’s been under [President Joe] Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do,” he said. “I think, if the position taken by the [Biden] administration was that these kids should be protected, there would be more of an outcry if Trump then did a clampdown. I think what Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”

One piece of potential infrastructure is the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act—a House bill designed to strip tax-exempt status from any nonprofit the Treasury Department designates a “terrorist-supporting organization.” A version of the bill was introduced last year with broad bipartisan support. But earlier this week, it was voted down on the House floor, as a majority of Democrats were concerned that the bill would hand undue power to Trump to silence his political enemies. 144 Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted against the fast-tracked bill. Nearly all Republicans—and dozens of Democrats—still supported it.

“All of us support stopping terrorism,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told The Intercept. “[But] if he is on a march to make America fascist, we do not need to supply Donald Trump with any additional weapons to accomplish his ill purpose.” Doggett had initially supported the bill but changed course after Trump’s election.

The “nonprofit killer” bill, as critics have dubbed it, is not dead. It will go back for a vote next week. This time, with a simple majority, the bill will likely pass.

“I think we should anticipate something akin to the McCarthy era in terms of government being turned against certain categories of citizens,” Kalven said of this legislative trend.

The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group behind Project 2025, has also given Trump a workable plan to stop pro-Palestine dissent. It is called Project Esther. Nominally a policy proposal to tackle antisemitism on the left, it reads instead as a blueprint for taking down pro-Palestine activists. It suggests deporting “foreign Hamas Support Organization members,” classifying anti-war nonprofits—like American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace—as members of a shadowy “Hamas Support Organization” network that is “attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government.”  

Attorney Zoha Khalili at Palestine Legal, an organization that has spent the past decade providing legal advice and support to Palestinian-rights activists, said Trump’s election gives universities a chance to change their role.

“[Now] it’s one of those situations where, you know, universities who have been repressing student activism might also now find themselves in this position where they have to care a bit more about their students,” Khalili said. “Because of the values that they claim to uphold—wanting diversity, not wanting to have their students deported for political purposes.” 

What worries Khalili most, though, is not so much Trump’s crackdown on protesters in the United States, but how his presidency will harm the people in Gaza on whose behalf Americans protest in the first place. 

“The broader question that is on my mind is: How is the Trump administration going to impact Palestinians on the ground?” she asked. Trump’s plans for the region are unclear—though he has expressed a desire for the war to end, he’s also said he wants to ban refugee resettlement from the Gaza Strip and looks to be stocking his administration with war hawks, including an evangelical end-times Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who has declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”

“How aggressively Israel is engaging in genocide also impacts the climate here for activists, who are increasingly desperate to try to save people’s lives,” Khalili said. “So the stakes are quite high at the moment.” 

Late Sunday night, President-elect Donald Trump announced one of his top picks to staff the incoming administration: Tom Homan as the “border czar.” Homan “will be in charge of all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin,” Trump posted on social media. “I have no doubt he will do a fantastic, and long-awaited-for, job.”

There was no surprise there. Having served as acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first term, Homan has been vying for the job since leaving government. He joined the Heritage Foundation as a fellow and became a Project 2025 contributor while launching his own anti-immigration enterprise that spread fearmongering about a “border invasion.” Homan has made no secret of his enthusiasm for this new position with the administration. “Trump comes back in January,” Homan bragged at a conservative conference this summer. “I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”

“I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”

Throughout his campaign, Trump vowed to start a mass deportation campaign on day one and, as Homan has noted, “no one is off the table.” The tough-looking and tough-talking man soon to be tasked with realizing Trump’s promise to detain and remove an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants from the United States has a long career in law enforcement and within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

During the Obama administration, which deported a record number of people, he served as head of the ICE branch charged with arresting and deporting immigrants. For his work, he even won the nation’s highest civil service award. “Thomas Homan deports people,” declared a 2016 profile about him in the Washington Post. “And he’s really good at it.” (Homan reportedly keeps a framed copy of the story in his office.) After taking office, Trump said he had heard people describe Homan as “nasty” looking, and said, “That’s what I’m looking for.”

Homan is the intellectual father of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that separated thousands of children from their parents at the border—more than 1,300 of them remain apart even today. “I’m sick and tired [of] hearing about the family separation,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last year. “I’m still being sued over that, so come get me. I don’t give a shit, right? Bottom line is: We enforced the law.” As far as Homan is concerned, families who crossed the border “chose to separate themselves.”

In interviews, Homan has further underscored his indifference to the human cost of such policies. When asked on 60 Minutes whether it was possible to carry out mass deportation without separating families, he fired back: “Of course there is—families can be deported together.” What this cavalier response conveniently ignores is that millions of US-born children live in mixed-status households with at least one undocumented parent.

Recently, after Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said the state police wouldn’t assist the federal government with carrying out sweeping deportations, Homan suggested politicians in states led by Democrats should “get the hell out of the way.”

“If we can’t get assistance from New York City,” he told Fox News, “we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City. Because we’re going to do the job. We’re going to do the job without you or with you.”

In January, former President Donald Trump will reclaim the White House after years of vowing to unleash an unprecedented overhaul of the immigration system in the United States. With mass deportation as a central promise of his campaign, Trump will undoubtedly build on the sweeping crackdown that marked his first term.

He already has promised to restore the travel prohibition on foreigners from Muslim-majority countries (often called the “Muslim ban”). He wants to revive “Remain in Mexico”—which left thousands of vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers awaiting court hearings stranded in dangerous border towns. Trump has also taken his anti-immigrant rhetoric and proposals to new heights, notably by pledging to carry out the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and attacking legal immigration. 

Indiscriminate workplace raids, massive detention camps, and around-the-clock deportation flights. That’s the radical vision to remove millions of undocumented immigrants put forward by Trump.

Trump’s efforts to reshape the immigration landscape are likely to start immediately. Appearing on Fox News the morning after the election, the president-elect’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt celebrated a “resounding victory” and a “mandate to govern as he campaigned to deliver on the promises that he made, which include, on day one, launching the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants.”

Immigrant rights groups and lawyers have been diligently preparing for the possibility of a Trump comeback. Not unlike the first time around, they will inevitably pursue strategic litigation to stop some of the next administration’s harshest, and possibly unlawful, policies. “I’ve sued every president since George W. Bush, including Presidents Obama and Biden,” Karen Tumlin, founder and director of Justice Action Center, said in a statement. “We have a simple message for President-elect Trump or his deputies if they decide to make good on their despicable plans: We will see you in court.”

Still, the breadth and depth of Trump’s agenda will have lasting impact, not only on immigrants who will directly bear the brunt of a heightened militarized immigration enforcement environment, but also on all Americans.

Here’s how.

Launch Mass Deportation

Indiscriminate workplace raids, massive detention camps, and around-the-clock deportation flights. That’s the radical vision to remove millions of undocumented immigrants put forward by Trump and Stephen Miller, his senior adviser on immigration. They would attempt to accomplish it by invoking a 18th-century wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act—last used during World War II for the internment of Japanese, Italian, and German nationals—and deploying the full force of law enforcement agencies and the US military in violation of due process rights and the law.

A mass deportation campaign would permanently change the United States. It could lead to racial profiling, the potential separation of families, and the wrongful deportation of Americans and lawful residents. It would also ruin the economy.

The logistical and practical challenges of purging even 1 million people a year are considerable, not to mention the moral and human devastation. But, if realized, a recent analysis by the American Immigration Council found that such a project would cost $967.9 billion over more than a decade. The deportation of immigrant workers who are the backbone of so many critical industries would also break the economy, resulting in an estimated drop of up to 6.8 percent in gross domestic product.

End Birthright Citizenship

Trump promised to sign an executive order on day one to end the long-standing constitutional guarantee of citizenship for those born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The order would instruct federal agencies to require that at least one parent be a US citizen or lawful permanent resident for a child to be granted automatic citizenship.

“This current policy is based on a historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocate,” Trump has said. Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution—and reaffirmed in Supreme Court decisions—which states that, with very few exceptions, “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

Revive the “Muslim Ban”

During his first term, Trump took 472 executive actions in his bid to reshape the immigration system. One of them was the infamous “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” order, which permanently suspended the resettlement of refugees from Syria and barred the entry of travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The policy created instant chaos, sparked international repudiation, and galvanized Americans all over the country.

Trump has vowed to restore the so-called Muslim ban. The original iterations faced repeated legal challenges. Federal appeals courts ruled against the Trump administration, concluding that the executive order’s “stated national security interest was provided in bad faith” and “drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.” But in a 5–4 decision in June 2018, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to carry out a version of the ban. On his first day in office, President Joe Biden issue a proclamation reversing it.

End Immigration Programs

Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world who currently benefit from Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—granted to those fleeing wars, natural disasters, and other country-specific circumstances—are at risk of losing protection against deportation.

That includes nationals of Haiti, Yemen, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Venezuela. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook, crafted by a number of administration-in-waiting former officials, specifically calls for the repeal of TPS designations.

While in office, Trump tried to rescind the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that shields from deportation the undocumented youth brought to the United States as children. There were as many as 535,030 active DACA recipients as of June 2024. Miller has said a second Trump administration would again attack the program, whose fate already lies with the courts. “It would be absolutely catastrophic,” Michelle Ming, political director at United We Dream, says of the prospect of tens of thousands of young people losing status. “It would destroy families. It would destroy entire communities.”

Roll Back Refugee Resettlement

In a September social media post in which he introduced to concept of remigration, Trump said he would “suspend refugee resettlement.” The first Trump administration dealt a massive blow to the US refugee resettlement program, and it likely wouldn’t be different this time. In September, Trump said he would “ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip.”

As president, he set an annual cap of 15,000 refugee admissions. The number of admissions went from 84,994 during President Barack Obama’s last year in office to a record low of 11,814 in 2020. Ultimately, the Trump administration resettled fewer refugees than any other going back at least to the Carter administration. Upon taking the White House, Joe Biden worked to restore the program, resettling 100,034 refugees in fiscal year 2024—the most in decades.

Restrict Legal Immigration

While Trump has tried to signal that he’s in favor of legal immigration pathways, his allies have been preparing the terrain to severely restrict them. “Decades of ‘we’re not against legal immigration’ will culminate in the largest cut to legal immigration in US history,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, posted on X.

Their plans include severely curbing asylum, ending diversity lottery visas, and doing away with temporary legal programs like parole that have allowed immigrants from countries such as Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba to come to the United States after being vetted and securing a sponsor. They could even resuscitate the public charge rule making it harder for low-income immigrants to qualify for visas and green cards.

Immigration lawyers have additionally warned that, in a second Trump administration, visa processing might be subject to delays and increased denial rates. “If Donald Trump is elected president in November 2024,” the National Foundation for American Policy stated, “he should be expected to restrict legal immigration, including green cards and [high-skilled] H-1B visas.”

The Project 2025 agenda contemplates undermining T and U visas for undocumented immigrant victims of trafficking and certain crimes who cooperate with law enforcement. (These temporary protections serve as a powerful tool to encourage victims to report crimes and keep their communities safe.) It also envisions winding down crucial temporary agricultural worker programs.

Projecting a scenario in which Trump’s policies result in less immigration and even more people leaving the United States than entering, a preelection Brookings Institution analysis concluded the GDP in 2025 would be $130 billion lower than under a Harris administration.

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In 2016, Andrés García fled anti-LGBQT+ violence in his native El Salvador. Until a few years ago, he lived in Virginia without papers. Then, he got flagged by the police over a minor infraction and transferred to the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He spent a year in ICE detention. In July 2023, García won his asylum case. Now, he fears the outcome of the US presidential election could make him vulnerable to deportation—and danger back home.

I fled my country because I was escaping. I’m a gay man and back in my country it’s kind of hard to be yourself. You can be incarcerated. You can be killed. We don’t have legislation so that we can say: “You know what, I’m gonna be whatever I want to be and the law is going to protect me.” You don’t have freedom as much as you have here.

So, I came here eight years ago looking for safety and a better life for me and my family. I’ve been living in Virginia since I came to the United States and with my sister for the past couple of years. I did go to school to learn English. I’m the type of person who always tries to contribute and to be better each and every day.

If I get deported to my country, it will be the end of me. It scares me to my core just even thinking about it.

Everything was okay. But then, two or three years ago, I was detained by ICE. I was in detention for over a year and was released in 2023. That just made me feel differently because I saw the injustice in the system. In Virginia, you don’t have the right to legal representation if you’re an immigrant in court. You don’t have anyone to tell you what you can apply for or what your rights are. Not knowing the law, not knowing the language, not knowing anything.

I thought I was going back to my country. I thought I was getting deported. But one day, I was like, you know what? I’m just going to fight. And I saw this poster on the phones. It was about CAIR Coalition [now the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights]. I called them hoping they would take my case. A couple of weeks later, they told me they had good news and had accepted my case. They helped me through the whole process. They gave me not just legal representation, but they helped me establish communication with my family back in my country. They saved my life, pretty much.

In the past, I was scared. I was afraid to make my voice heard because of my [lack of] papers. When we won our asylum case, I thought: “I need to give something back to the community.”

I’ve been attending rallies. [My boyfriend and I] went knocking on doors this past weekend. Now, I’m going back to school on November 16. I’ve always been into interior design and that’s what I want to do.

I’m in a safer place now, but I’m still on the immigration system. I will never get off of the system until I become a citizen. What if Trump’s policies become reality where they are going to deport everybody who has a record? If I get deported, my country is in a state of emergency where you don’t have any civil rights. The army is on the streets and they can just detain you and put you in jail without reason. If you have tattoos, they are putting you in jail for a year just to be investigated. The jails are full of gang members and they have zero tolerance to people from the LGBTQ+ community. If I get deported to my country, it will be the end of me. It scares me to my core just even thinking about it.

I’m nervous because it’s not just about me. I have friends, I have family, I have neighbors who are not rightfully here. I have so many gay friends who don’t have papers. They don’t even have a record and they can be deported anytime. It affects everybody.

I heard that Trump also has in mind to pass this law so that companies will be actually forced to just hire people with [legal] papers. I would say 80 percent of my friends are hardworking people, they are loving people, they have no record. Everybody in my community is scared.

It’s frustrating because most of the people, including myself, can’t vote. The people who are actually going to suffer cannot vote so we’re in everybody else’s hands.

Hopefully Trump winning is not going to happen. But we need to be ready for anything, right? I don’t even want to say it because it just breaks my heart knowing that that’s a possibility. I don’t think America can afford four more years of Trump’s era.

Claudia Garcia had never watched a televised presidential debate. On September 10, she tuned into ABC News’ showdown between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris and was stunned to hear the Republican nominee repeat lies about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. “I was like, what?” Garcia recalls. “What is he saying? We are not that [as] people. We don’t eat dogs. We don’t eat cats.” 

An infrequent voter, Garcia will be going to the polls for only the third time in her life this November. Born in Riverside, California, but having spent most of her childhood in Mexico, she felt disconnected from politics. Her father told her voting did not make a difference. “If it’s not affecting me directly,” she thought, “it’s not affecting me.” But her husband, Salvador, a newly naturalized US citizen born in Mexico, felt otherwise. This year, he will be casting his first vote since pledging the Oath of Allegiance in February. Their two adult children will also be voting.

“Why would we support someone who sees us as trash?”

“I think a lot of these migrant and Hispanic homes,” Garcia says, “it’s not just they don’t want their kids to vote or they don’t want to vote themselves. I think we’re not informed…There’s a lot of education still to do in many of our communities.”

The Garcias live in Tulare in California’s Central Valley. Latinos account for 60 percent of eligible voters in the 22nd Congressional District. As my colleague Noah Lanard recently reported from the area, Democrats’ waning support in the region could determine the balance of power in Congress. In one of the closest House races of this election, Rudy Salas is facing a rematch against Republican incumbent Rep. David Valadao to become the first elected Latino congressman from the Central Valley. In 2022, Valadao, who is of Portuguese descent, beat Salas by three percentage points.

For Democrats to have a shot at picking up that seat, they need to not only hold on to Latino voters, but also hope for an end to—as one political strategist put it to NBC News—“anemically low” turnout. In the midterms, the 22nd Congressional District had the third lowest voter turnout of the House districts across the country. To do so, they could use the help of people like the Garcias: Latino voters who have not traditionally voted, or even first-time voters. In California and beyond, the path to controlling Congress and securing the White House may hinge on it. 

The main issues on their mind? The cost of living and immigration. “I was an immigrant myself,” Salvador, who gained legal status as a result of Ronald Reagan’s amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the 1980s, says, “and I want more for the immigrant workers of this country.” He and his wife oppose Trump’s plans to mass deport millions of people from the United States and fear that more family separations are on the horizon if he returns to the Oval Office. 

They also hope comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist remarks about Latinos at a recent Trump rally where he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” can persuade voters to go for Democrats. “In his mind,” Garcia says of Trump, “we don’t matter. If you don’t look like him, then you’re you’re not worth it for him…Why would we support someone who sees us as trash?”

Immigration isn’t the single, or even the most, salient issue for Latino voters nationwide. But it intersects with broader concerns Latino communities have about the economy, jobs, and housing. In the battleground state of North Carolina, a pre-election poll by the civil rights and advocacy organization UnidosUS found that pocketbook issues rank as high priority for the state’s Latino voters. (Many also favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.) There are about 300,000 registered Latino voters in North Carolina.

Numbers showed that 19 percent of the more than 100,000 Latinos who had already voted in North Carolina were first-time voters and 39 percent were infrequent voters.

The daughter of two Mexican immigrants, Irene Godinez started Poder NC Action in 2020 to foster civic participation among the growing US-born Latino youth population in the state. That year, the organization sent out thousands of political mailers featuring the face of iconic Puerto Rican astrologer Walter Mercado as a strategy of tapping into culture to mobilize young people. In that election—which Trump carried by fewer than 75,o00 votes—first-time Latino voters comprised a large share of total voter turnout in North Carolina.

This year, Poder NC Action released a multi-part telenovela called “Alexia the Voter,” inspired by the Netflix show Jane the Virgin, to encourage young North Carolinians to vote. They have also hosted voter engagement events where people can learn about who’s on the ballot while getting their nails or hair done. “Our ultimate goal is to build independent political power,” Godinez, who served as Latino outreach director in North Carolina for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, says, “But while we do that, we are building a political home for progressive Latinos in the state.”

Prior to Election Day, she says, numbers showed that 19 percent of the more than 100,000 Latinos who had already voted in North Carolina were first-time voters and 39 percent were infrequent voters. “These are exactly the people that we’ve been targeting and activating because that’s where we see the opportunity to expand the electorate.”

Among the issues driving that electorate in the state are the economy, reproductive rights, and climate justice, especially in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The young Latino voters Poder NC Action courts also tend to bring up the war in Gaza as a point of concern. (The organization didn’t endorse President Joe Biden, but released a “defensive endorsement” of Kamala Harris because her victory would block a right-wing opponent.)

“The thing I have been hearing from voters that we’ve been talking to is how they haven’t felt seen by the parties whether they’re Democrats or Republicans,” Godinez says, “They don’t feel that either party is reaching out to them and trying to talk to them.” She believes the Democratic Party could have done more to appeal to Latinos in North Carolina, including sending bigger surrogate names to the state and crafting political mailers with original messages that weren’t just translated to Spanish from English.

“Even if we are 300,000 voters in the state right now,” Godinez adds, “we’re going to continue to increase at a faster pace than any other demographic because 50,000 Latinos will age into the electorate every single year. This could have been a really great year for them to lay the foundation of what it could look like to do Latino outreach in a very intentional way.”

In California, Garcia attributes her political awakening to her work, first as a canvasser and later as an organizer, with the group Poder Latinx to get people registered and out to vote. “I cannot be preaching and not doing,” she says. “I need to be a voice to those who don’t have one.”

She says she would like to see immigration reform that would benefit her neighbors and family members who “work out in the field, picking the food that we have on our table.” She also thinks of her nephews who are DACA recipients and whose lawful presence and ability to work and study in the country are in jeopardy. “It hits home,” Garcia says, adding: “Immigration is what motivates me and scares me, and that’s why I’m going to make sure that my ballot gets in the mail today.”

This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

In public remarks, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims about the threat of widespread voting by “illegal aliens” and noncitizens in the 2024 election.

Away from the spotlight, though, at least one Republican National Committee official is telling volunteer poll watchers a completely different story: that such voting is close to impossible.

In a private Oct. 29 training session for poll watchers in Pennsylvania, an RNC election-integrity specialist told volunteers not to worry about noncitizen voting in the 2024 election because the electoral system had safeguards in place to prevent illegal votes.

ProPublica obtained a recording of the training session. The RNC official’s comments have not been previously reported.

The RNC official’s assurance contradicts statements made by Trump and his Republican allies warning about “illegal aliens” casting ballots this year and potentially swinging the election in favor of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

“It is good to see the RNC official recognizing the truth, in contrast to the many lies about noncitizen voting coming from Trump and his allies,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and election-law expert at the UCLA School of Law. “It would be even better for the officials to say it publicly.”

The RNC official who led the training session and a spokesperson for the RNC did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ProPublica that Democrats were “pushing for non-citizens to vote and influence the future of our country,” adding, “President Trump and the RNC will continue the fight to secure tomorrow’s election so that every American vote is protected.”

Voting by noncitizens is illegal under federal law and it almost never happens. State and federal elections require voters to be U.S. citizens. Government election officials from both parties have emphasized that there are protections in place across the country to prevent noncitizens from casting a ballot.

Yet that hasn’t stopped Trump and some of his most high-profile supporters from making unfounded claims that noncitizens are registering and voting in large numbers this year. “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September. Other prominent Trump supporters, including billionaire tech investor Elon Musk and House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, have also amplified unfounded claims about Democrats seeking to “import” such voters.

But on the ground, Trump’s own party, at least in the important battleground state of Pennsylvania, is undercutting those dark visions of illegal voting. During the Oct. 29 training session, Joe Neild, a member of RNC’s election integrity team in the state, said such a scenario is nearly impossible.

A participant in the training session asked Neild about the potential for noncitizens to cast votes in the election and what poll watchers could do to stop them.

Neild replied that, in Pennsylvania, undocumented people can’t legally register to vote and so they would not be included in the list of eligible voters used at voting precincts, known as poll books.

Here is the exchange:

Training participant: “I have two questions. The first one is: How do you know if they are illegal aliens or not, like, when they’re voting, as far as what you were explaining with the ID? And if they’re from another country it was OK as long as they had an ID. How do you know if they’re illegal aliens? How can you stop that?”

Neild: “Well, if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be inside the poll book. Because if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be able to register to vote, because they’ll need a driver’s license number or a Social Security number.

“And since the recent litigation in the years past, you do have—to be able to get a driver’s license here in Pennsylvania, you have to show proof of citizenship. So that is one way that they will not be able to get a driver’s license.

“And then you have to be—since they’re illegal, they’re not going to be able to get a Social Security number either.”

Three election-law experts reviewed the exchange between Neild and the poll-watcher trainee. All of them said that Neild’s description of the law and the safeguards in place against noncitizen voting were accurate.

Adam Bonin, a lawyer in Philadelphia who practices election law, said Neild gave an accurate description of Pennsylvania law and the safeguards against noncitizen voting there. Bonin said Neild’s comments were “absolutely consistent” with what Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, a Republican, has said about preventing noncitizen voting.

“As has been the case before, Trump has local experts on his team who know what the law is here in Pennsylvania and who understand the reality of how our elections work,” Bonin said.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and an expert on voting rights who worked in the Obama and Biden administrations, said he applauded Neild for using factual information in his training session. Levitt added that he was not surprised to hear Republican volunteers raising fears of noncitizen voting given Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

“There’s been a very effective effort to misinform,” Levitt said. “But I’m glad that when push comes to shove and it comes time to really get training, they’re being set straight.”

In addition to the registration hurdles Neild pointed out, Levitt explained that there are clear incentives to discourage noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. Criminal penalties can include a hefty fine and prison time as well as deportation and losing the ability to become a U.S. citizen in the future. What’s more, Levitt added, the very act of voting creates a clear and obvious paper trail, making it that much easier for law enforcement to bring criminal charges for illegal voting.

“Every once in a blue moon you see noncitizens showing up on the rolls,” he said. “It’s usually by mistake because it’s just not worth it, and they’re gonna get caught, guaranteed.”

Levitt said that he only wished the factual information given out by the RNC at the grassroots level was also reaching the party’s presidential nominee. “It sounds like the former president should be sitting in on some sessions with the people training his poll watchers,” Levitt said.

Do you have information about the Trump campaign or voting irregularities that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by phone or Signal at 202-215-6203.

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This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

In public remarks, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims about the threat of widespread voting by “illegal aliens” and noncitizens in the 2024 election.

Away from the spotlight, though, at least one Republican National Committee official is telling volunteer poll watchers a completely different story: that such voting is close to impossible.

In a private Oct. 29 training session for poll watchers in Pennsylvania, an RNC election-integrity specialist told volunteers not to worry about noncitizen voting in the 2024 election because the electoral system had safeguards in place to prevent illegal votes.

ProPublica obtained a recording of the training session. The RNC official’s comments have not been previously reported.

The RNC official’s assurance contradicts statements made by Trump and his Republican allies warning about “illegal aliens” casting ballots this year and potentially swinging the election in favor of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

“It is good to see the RNC official recognizing the truth, in contrast to the many lies about noncitizen voting coming from Trump and his allies,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and election-law expert at the UCLA School of Law. “It would be even better for the officials to say it publicly.”

The RNC official who led the training session and a spokesperson for the RNC did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ProPublica that Democrats were “pushing for non-citizens to vote and influence the future of our country,” adding, “President Trump and the RNC will continue the fight to secure tomorrow’s election so that every American vote is protected.”

Voting by noncitizens is illegal under federal law and it almost never happens. State and federal elections require voters to be U.S. citizens. Government election officials from both parties have emphasized that there are protections in place across the country to prevent noncitizens from casting a ballot.

Yet that hasn’t stopped Trump and some of his most high-profile supporters from making unfounded claims that noncitizens are registering and voting in large numbers this year. “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September. Other prominent Trump supporters, including billionaire tech investor Elon Musk and House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, have also amplified unfounded claims about Democrats seeking to “import” such voters.

But on the ground, Trump’s own party, at least in the important battleground state of Pennsylvania, is undercutting those dark visions of illegal voting. During the Oct. 29 training session, Joe Neild, a member of RNC’s election integrity team in the state, said such a scenario is nearly impossible.

A participant in the training session asked Neild about the potential for noncitizens to cast votes in the election and what poll watchers could do to stop them.

Neild replied that, in Pennsylvania, undocumented people can’t legally register to vote and so they would not be included in the list of eligible voters used at voting precincts, known as poll books.

Here is the exchange:

Training participant: “I have two questions. The first one is: How do you know if they are illegal aliens or not, like, when they’re voting, as far as what you were explaining with the ID? And if they’re from another country it was OK as long as they had an ID. How do you know if they’re illegal aliens? How can you stop that?”

Neild: “Well, if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be inside the poll book. Because if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be able to register to vote, because they’ll need a driver’s license number or a Social Security number.

“And since the recent litigation in the years past, you do have—to be able to get a driver’s license here in Pennsylvania, you have to show proof of citizenship. So that is one way that they will not be able to get a driver’s license.

“And then you have to be—since they’re illegal, they’re not going to be able to get a Social Security number either.”

Three election-law experts reviewed the exchange between Neild and the poll-watcher trainee. All of them said that Neild’s description of the law and the safeguards in place against noncitizen voting were accurate.

Adam Bonin, a lawyer in Philadelphia who practices election law, said Neild gave an accurate description of Pennsylvania law and the safeguards against noncitizen voting there. Bonin said Neild’s comments were “absolutely consistent” with what Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, a Republican, has said about preventing noncitizen voting.

“As has been the case before, Trump has local experts on his team who know what the law is here in Pennsylvania and who understand the reality of how our elections work,” Bonin said.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and an expert on voting rights who worked in the Obama and Biden administrations, said he applauded Neild for using factual information in his training session. Levitt added that he was not surprised to hear Republican volunteers raising fears of noncitizen voting given Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

“There’s been a very effective effort to misinform,” Levitt said. “But I’m glad that when push comes to shove and it comes time to really get training, they’re being set straight.”

In addition to the registration hurdles Neild pointed out, Levitt explained that there are clear incentives to discourage noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. Criminal penalties can include a hefty fine and prison time as well as deportation and losing the ability to become a U.S. citizen in the future. What’s more, Levitt added, the very act of voting creates a clear and obvious paper trail, making it that much easier for law enforcement to bring criminal charges for illegal voting.

“Every once in a blue moon you see noncitizens showing up on the rolls,” he said. “It’s usually by mistake because it’s just not worth it, and they’re gonna get caught, guaranteed.”

Levitt said that he only wished the factual information given out by the RNC at the grassroots level was also reaching the party’s presidential nominee. “It sounds like the former president should be sitting in on some sessions with the people training his poll watchers,” Levitt said.

Do you have information about the Trump campaign or voting irregularities that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by phone or Signal at 202-215-6203.

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

It was no surprise. Instead, call it the October reveal.

In the final days of the 2024 election, ugly rhetoric from Donald Trump’s campaign drew major national attention when a speaker made a racist joke about Puerto Rico as part of the ex-president’s Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden. The event was an inevitable culmination for the Trump campaign, a six-hour pageant of divisiveness and bigotry that featured multiple speakers launching racist and misogynistic attacks on Kamala Harris. It concluded with Trump at the podium delivering the same demagoguery he has used in dozens of rallies this year: painting a wildly exaggerated picture of national decay, promoting baseless conspiracy theories, and stoking fear and anger about an alleged “invasion” of America by murderous migrants.

Such themes have been at the dark heart of Trump’s politics ever since he entered the presidential race nearly a decade ago. As he has taken these tactics to new extremes over the past few months, law enforcement and national security sources I’ve spoken with have warned about a growing danger of far-right political violence inspired by Trump’s messaging.

This is not theoretical. It’s based on a lengthy history of violence associated with Trump’s rhetoric, which by 2021 led a bipartisan group of top national security experts to take the extraordinary step of labeling Trump, effectively, a terrorist leader—the de facto head of a violent extremist movement within the United States.

Given that another central tactic of Trumpism is to try to cover up the truth and push anything damaging down the memory hole, the time is ripe to revisit some of the major violence coinciding with Trump’s incitement. I’ve been documenting these grim events for more than six years.

As I reported in an investigation begun in summer 2018, white supremacist attacks grew deadlier during Trump’s tenure in the White House. The violence unfolded amid a surge in far-right plots and threats, according to law enforcement sources I spoke with then. That included a wave of menace specifically targeting journalists, who Trump and his allies smeared repeatedly as “the enemy of the American people.” Two devastating mass shootings—one at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and another at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas—involved perpetrators who were focused on a migrant “invasion,” a core theme also emphasized back then by Trump. The echoes of Trump’s rhetoric in the El Paso case were particularly stark, as I detailed again recently:

The gunman had driven to the border city from 650 miles away. In custody, he told police he’d come to kill Mexicans. Some writings he’d posted online said his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that his mission was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as “The Great Replacement.”

These were not obscure ideas. The gunman wrote that he agreed with a recent mass shooter in New Zealand who had espoused them. He also knew some of these themes were being championed at the time by President Donald Trump. With help from Fox News pundits, Trump was whipping up fear and hatred of an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border—the message was central to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2019, a focus of his ads and speeches warning ominously of a national demise.

At the end of the shooter’s screed posted online, he sought to validate his attack with a pseudo-clever twist, suggesting that his views predated Trump in the White House. “I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric,” he wrote. Then he used Trump’s own rhetoric as supporting ammo: “The media is infamous for fake news.”

Notably, Trump backer Tucker Carlson, who has long pushed Great Replacement themes, alluded to the ideology again in his caustic speech at the Madison Square Garden rally. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, has also been emphasizing it down the campaign homestretch.

Most infamously, of course, Trump’s incitement provoked the brutal insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The former president and his allies have spent the years since then trying to erase the truth about Trump’s indelible role in motivating that unprecedented attack on American democracy.

Numerous Republican Party leaders have consistently helped deny, justify, and cover up Trump’s incitement of political violence, and some have since adopted his tactics. Others, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have just played dumb. As one national security source told me recently, “Silence is its own form of participation.”

Trump continues to weave his virulent strands of demagoguery into a grand conspiracy theory alleging the election will be “stolen” from him. As I reported in late October, the further escalation of his extreme rhetoric has been accompanied by a rise in violent threats reflecting his messaging. With the 2024 voting results imminent, the question now is where this defining feature of Trumpism may take us next.

A few days before the start of early voting, Michelle Vallejo, a 33-year-old Democrat, was greeting a dozen or so supporters in a shady corner of a municipal park in Edinburg, Texas, when she received a visit from an old friend. The volunteers, who had shown up to grab walk lists and water bottles for a pre-election canvass, were filling her in on the latest developments in their ongoing efforts to protect yard signs from being defaced and removed. Vallejo, who is challenging first-term Republican Rep. Monica de la Cruz in a rematch of one of Texas’ closest US House races last cycle, listened politely, in a blue t-shirt that featured her name between a pair of exclamation marks, and running shoes embossed with the Texas flag.

The guest was US Rep. Sylvia Garcia, who now represents a safely Democratic seat in the Houston area but was raised in the district in rural Jim Wells County. The 74-year-old Garcia has served as both surrogate and life-coach during Vallejo’s short political career. They recently spent three hours together raising money for Vallejo’s campaign over Zoom. Vallejo calls her “My tía, my godmother, my political mom.” Garcia says, “She’s grown as a candidate—you know, like all candidates, she listens to some of my advice, and sometimes she doesn’t.” Today, Garcia had brought a gift—a pink-and-white t-shirt that said “Comadres con Kamala.”

“Comadres love to talk,” Garcia told the volunteers a few minutes later, using an affectionate term for old friends or godmothers. “They love to chisme”—gossip. She urged them to hit the doors with that same energy. Bug family members. Text friends from the carpool pickup line. Check in on ex-boyfriends. “We’ve got to make her campaign and Kamala’s campaign the big chisme for the next 20 days.”

The 15th district, which stretches like a rusty fishhook from the Rio Grande, a few miles south, to the city of Seguin northeast of San Antonio, is a big district with even bigger stakes. Democrats are hoping to flip the seat as part of their quest to take back the House of Representatives this fall. But to do that will require coming to terms with why the district has become so close. Democrats routinely won the area by double digits until 2020, when, thanks to huge swings among Tejano voters, Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez barely held on against an underfunded Republican, de la Cruz. The shifts in the district were stunning: Trump improved his showing in Hidalgo County (which includes Edinburg and McAllen) by 24 points. In rural Brooks County, voters delivered a 34-point improvement to the GOP. Jim Wells went red for the first time since 1972. 

Conservatives hailed a historic demographic realignment in South Texas, and redrew the maps to make the district slightly more Republican. Gonzalez promptly migrated to a neighboring district that is safer but still competitive. With the party on the defensive in 2022, national Democrats triaged Vallejo’s race, and de la Cruz defeated Vallejo by 12,000 votes. But it wasn’t exactly a red wave either. After spending big, Republicans managed to flip just one of the three races they targeted. This cycle, the DCCC believes Vallejo can win, and the campaign has received support on the airwaves from an affiliated outside group, House Majority PAC. The group recently released a survey showing Vallejo just three points behind—within the margin of error. 

The election in the Rio Grande Valley offers a glimpse of just how much the debate over border security has shifted during the Trump years. Criticism of Joe Biden’s border policies have been a potent political issue in the district. And Vallejo, who ran as progressive in her first campaign, has sought to project a tougher image in her second run. It is a test of whether Democrats’ have found a message that works in a border region that, as much as anywhere else, embodies the evolution of both political parties in the Trump era.

From the moment Trump delivered his first remarks of the 2015 campaign, the border—and the wall he planned to build along it—was the symbolic heart of the MAGA movement, and the backlash it engendered. It was a “racist” wall, Texas Rep. Colin Allred said during his first run for Congress, promising to help tear it down himself. It was an “immorality,” said former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Hillary Clinton called it “useless.” Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Hakeem Jeffries, and Kamala Harris called it “Medieval.” Activists, and even candidates, talked about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and of halting the growth of the Border Patrol itself.

But that rhetoric largely ended with Trump’s first term. “We saw the shift as soon as Biden was in office,” says Michelle Serrano, a co-director of Voces Unidas RGV, a non-profit that opposes border “hyper-militarization.” With a Democrat in the Oval Office, many of the policies stayed the same, but the resistance to those policies seemed to fade. “It felt like crazy town,” she told me. “Like nobody was talking about it, even though we were talking about it.”

Now, in Trump’s final campaign, Democrats have completed their transformation. At a recent CNN town hall, Harris mocked the former president for only building “2 percent” of the wall he promised. (Trump built 458 miles, often replacing far less obtrusive earlier barriers with 20-foot steel slats.) Like many Democrats on the ballot this fall, she now touts her support for a Republican-drafted bill that Trump killed, which decoupled border-security funding from comprehensive immigration reform and included $650 million funding to continue wall construction. Harris’ campaign has produced ads touting her tough-on-the-border credentials. One spot even featured footage of the wall that Trump’s administration built. 

Vallejo, who was raised in the district and co-owns a popular flea market with her family in Mission, Texas, ran for the seat last cycle as an unabashed progressive, after being endorsed early on by the political wing of La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), which was founded by United Farmworkers leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and now organizes on behalf of residents of border colonias. She promised to fight for Medicare for All and campaigned with Bernie Sanders in the final weeks of the campaign. During that race, Vallejo “attacked the border wall as a failure,” Michelle Garcia reported for Mother Jones that year.

Today, no one would necessarily confuse Vallejo with Henry Cuellar, the now-indicted conservative Democratic congressman from Laredo who has spent decades beating a drum for more border-security projects. But her rematch with de la Cruz offers a glimpse of how candidates with more progressive backgrounds are navigating a set of issues that have nudged some Hispanic voters inside and outside the district to the Republican Party. In August, she released an ad saying that “our community is being overwhelmed by the chaos at the border, and it’s time to get serious. I’ll work with Republicans and Democrats to add thousands of new Border Patrol agents—and take on the cartels and human trafficking.”

It ends with her standing on the Rio Grande. “We’ve had enough talk,” Vallejo says. “It’s time to secure the border.”

After the ad came out, Politico reported that some longtime supporters were furious at the law-and-order rhetoric, and that board members of LUPE Votes were even considering pulling their endorsement. The group stuck with her, and has been turning out voters on her behalf.

“There was a response online, but also what we saw at the doors and what we saw among our voters is that it allowed us to take leadership on this issue,” Vallejo told me, after the canvassers had received their instructions and begun to trickle out. “It allowed us to have that conversation about what we actually can do, and we know that you could do both. You could secure the border and also work to implement legislation that’s based on humanity and the reality of what people are experiencing here in our communities. We are a border region. We’re always going to be a border region, and it’s important that we modernize our legislation so that there’s a timely, legal, humane way for people to access citizenship and what they’re seeking when they come asking for help.”

She expresses support for Republican Sen. James Lankford’s bill which would have increased Border Patrol funding and allocated millions of dollars for wall construction. Another ad running in the district, from House Majority PAC, features aerial footage of the border wall while boasting that Vallejo will work with both parties to secure more resources for border protection. When I asked Vallejo what she meant by the phrase “secure the border,” she talked about “the flow of fentanyl and drugs and human trafficking through our ports of entry,” and the need for technology and manpower to “stop the flow of those harmful things into our homes.”

But Vallejo also emphasizes the need to make the judicial process work for immigrants—to “clear up the backlog of people who’ve been living in the shadows for, if not decades, their entire lifetime,” and for “improving access to legal representation.” Unlike some Democrats, she still talks a lot about a “pathway to citizenship” for people who currently lack legal status. 

That message resonates with supporters like Florentino Guerrero, who is now retired after working for 20 years as a customs officer. “I’ve just seen the mess that Trump and even [Vallejo’s] opponent have done here on the border,” he told me. “I started with Bush, right after 9/11. There was no problem on the border. Then eight years with Obama there was more immigrants going back than coming. Then we got Trump and it was chaos—separating families and all that stuff. And he had the majority in Congress to change the immigration laws and he didn’t do it.”

Vallejo’s message is that in all the politicization, the actual needs of her community are given short shrift. And it’s not just about immigration politics. Foremost among those is health care, which she often discusses in personal terms, as someone whose family often traveled across the border for medical attention. Vallejo does not call for “Medicare for all” like she did in her first campaign, but now floats lowering the age of the program to expand coverage described her position as “access to affordable healthcare any way that we could get it.” The campaign, and its backers, have placed a huge emphasis on protecting abortion rights, rejecting old assumptions that Democrats in the region are too socially conservative to be moved by such appeals.

“My own OBGYN told me this year that all of her residents are no longer with her, and that she’s very alarmed for her patients and the women and families that she cares for, because the care just isn’t there anymore,” Vallejo said.

One Vallejo ad features a testimonial from Lauren Miller, a Texas woman who had to flee the state for health care because one of the two twins she was expecting was non-viable.

Eventually, Garcia, Vallejo’s congressional mentor, wandered over to the picnic bench where we were sitting to join the conversation with her newly appointed comadre. Her big thing was that they needed to “knock and drag”—that is, ”we just have to do a better job of dragging people out of their homes or work and to making the time to actually vote.” Even with the new national investments in the race—Democratic groups have outspent Republicans by a more than two-to-one margin—she was “a little disappointed that I didn’t see the heightened activity that I would have wanted.”

“Quite frankly, and I know this will piss off some of my national friends, I just don’t think that they get South Texas,” Garcia complained. She’d spent the previous two days campaigning with Cuellar—who is, improbably, cruising to re-election—and Gonzalez, who faces an expensive rematch with former Republican Rep. Mayra Flores. “You know, they focus so much on New York and California, sometimes maybe Chicago. But what’s good in New York doesn’t necessarily work well here in South Texas.”

When her colleagues did come to the area, it was for one or two days, and their focus was often on “the whole border discussion.” She wanted politicians to pay attention to the way people actually lived and worked in the region, and to understand the value of immigration. Vallejo, who chose her words carefully during our interview, opened up.

“I think that there is a missing voice in the conversation about what is the most effective path forward—immigration challenges, border challenges, they’re not something that you could fix with a tagline, they’re not something that you could fix with a talking point,” Vallejo said. “It’s going to take discussion and it’s going to take nuance to be able to drive forward the solution that we need to serve our families. Our communities are dynamic. They are multi-generational. They’re experiencing many challenges economically, like Congresswoman Garcia said, that are not understood. And that’s why I feel very strongly that we need voices like mine speaking on behalf of my community. Who knows what it’s like to work with our immigrant communities, our multi-generational communities. I myself am a daughter of Mexican immigrants, very proudly, and I know that my family hasn’t been met in the place that they’re at with what we need from our own government, whether that’s local, state or national.”

“And I’m sure she’s going to sponsor my DREAM Act,” Garcia said, jumping in, referring to the long-stalled effort to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented residents who came to the US as children.

“Definitely,” Vallejo said.

On the evening of January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to, ostensibly, “protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals.” It was among a slew of presidential actions announced in those first days of the administration aimed at rolling back the agenda of his predecessor, from defunding sanctuary cities to tearing down the Affordable Care Act. (Over his four years in office, Trump went on to implement 472 executive actions in an effort to reshape the immigration system.)

“When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before.”

But for many observers, “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” would go down as the most memorable and infamous: the “Muslim ban.”

Touted as an anti-terrorism measure, the first iteration of Trump’s travel ban on foreigners from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—was a watershed moment. It had a particularly harsh toll on Syrian refugees, indefinitely suspending their resettlement (which was considered “detrimental to the interests of the United States,” despite America’s role in the conflict). But, more so, it showed the extent to which the new administration would make its nativist agenda real.

The morning after Trump signed the proclamation, thousands of protesters rushed to airports across the country as word got out that travelers were being stopped and detained. House and Senate Democrats gathered outside the Supreme Court in opposition to the ban. International condemnation followed, with global leaders denouncing Trump’s actions as shameful and divisive. Former President Barack Obama praised in a statement “citizens exercising their constitutional right to assemble, organize, and have their voices heard by their elected officials.”

Back then, the anger and outrage that this could not be normal or, indeed, American, felt palpable and spurred fierce resistance among a cohort unmoored by the Trump administration. But years of anti-immigrant policymaking and rhetoric—especially a flip by Democrats away from condemnation of Trump to tough border talk to win back centrist voters—have changed the landscape. There is now a normalization of the idea that America should restrict immigration.

Facing the prospect of a second Trump administration—and, with it, an escalation in hostility against immigrants and organizers—immigrant rights activists, advocates, and lawyers are building their defenses back up.

In a time of apparent collective amnesia about Trump’s actions, many of the activists have not forgotten what they had to stand up against. Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), an advocacy organization representing more than 200 groups across the state, helped lead a nationwide pushback against the travel ban. “As a Muslim American,” he later recalled in a USA Today op-ed, “it was impossible not to feel directly and personally targeted.”

Now, Awawdeh, and countless other veteran immigrant rights organizers who were at the forefront of the firewall to mitigate the harm of the Trump White House’s attacks on immigrants are gearing up for another battle. Only this time around, they have the benefit of knowing what to expect—and something of a blueprint for how to respond.

“In the scenario where Trump is elected,” Awawdeh tells me, “we go into defend and protect mode. We’ve seen what he’s done to our communities in his first term…He had no regard for the law and he continued to run afoul of the laws on the books, even our own constitution. That didn’t stop him.”

They have their work cut out for them. The former president has promised a seemingly never-ending catalog of crackdowns on all forms of immigration: the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants; deploying the military within US borders (against migrants and, presumably, protesters); ending birthright citizenship for American-born children of undocumented immigrants; and possibly reviving the “zero tolerance” policy of family separation.

If reelected, Trump has also vowed to restore the “Muslim ban” executive order. “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before,” he said in 2023. “Remember the famous travel ban?” Trump reportedly said in September about stopping refugees from Gaza from being allowed into the United States. “We didn’t take people from certain areas of the world.” He added: “We’re not taking them from [terror] infested countries.”

Trump has made expelling the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants from the United States the cornerstone of his 2024 presidential campaign. In interviews and rallies, he has repeatedly vowed to conduct the largest deportation operation in US history, a sweeping effort that would involve gulag-like detention camps on the border and likely the use of the military within US territory—on top of the human cost to immigrants and their families and economic devastation.

“Even if he is unsuccessful in moving mass deportation forward,” Awawdeh says, “What he will do is instill a deeply chilling fear within our communities.”

Awawdeh hopes to take lessons from those first four years of resisting not only the travel ban, but also family separation and a rule punishing immigrants for accessing public benefits. “The biggest piece that we did but didn’t do as strongly in his first go-around was litigation,” Awawdeh says, “and I think that’s the piece that we’re all going to be doubling and tripling down on.”

Policy and legal experts at the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) are actively keeping a growing list of policy proposals from the Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook and drafting legal memos for potential lawsuits. “Part of the analysis is really asking: What are the things that we know are patently unconstitutional?” says Kica Matos, president of the NILC Immigrant Justice Fund. That list includes the promise to end birthright citizenship for US-born children of undocumented immigrants and the plan to deploy the US military to conduct arrests and deportations in the interior of the country.

“The threats to carry this in a bloody way are indicative to us of intentionality to willfully disregard the constitutional rights that we all have and to violate the civil rights of people who might be impacted,” Matos adds.

During “Trump 1.0,” as she puts it, the federal courts served as a bulwark against some of the former president’s most extreme policies. But the Supreme Court has only gotten more conservative and willing to see the limits of presidential power extended, including to dictate immigration policy. In this environment, fighting back will require a collective effort, from inside the courthouses all the way out to the streets.

“We are bracing for the worst, and we have to think ahead because the stakes are too high to wait,” Awawdeh says. “Think of the worst case scenario in your mind of what a white supremacist would do in office with Project 2025 as their manifesto. That’s the way we’re planning right now.”

Strategic litigation is only part of their calculus. Another huge component is community education and readiness. Across the country, advocates are expanding know-your-rights trainings and campaigns about interactions with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They’re also distributing family safety plans to immigrant households and coordinating with local communities to establish safe spaces—including offices doubling as rapid response hubs—where immigrants can seek shelter during raids or roundups, and setting up emergency funds.

In scenario-planning meetings with partner organizations, Lindsay Toczylowski, the co-founder and CEO of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), says they have been asking themselves: Can we look at the past post-election periods and what can we learn from how we all responded as an immigrant rights movement?

ImmDef is a 200-people legal services organization based in Los Angeles that specializes in deportation defense work. (The city has one of the largest number of immigrants with pending deportation proceedings in immigration courts in the country—113,292, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC.) In 2023, the nonprofit represented about 2,500 immigrants in removal proceedings and assisted many more with other legal issues, including newly arriving asylum seekers.

“Every time somebody goes into a courtroom,” Toczylowski says, “their potential exile from their communities, their permanent separation from their families, and oftentimes their life itself is on the line.” For clients facing persecution or violence in their countries of origin, she puts in no uncertain terms, “we’re talking about death penalty cases in immigration court.”

The former president has promised a seemingly never-ending catalog of crackdowns on all forms of immigration

What keeps Toczylowski up at night these days, having seen parents in her own neighborhood get picked up by ICE after dropping off their children at school, is the thought of cases where a lawyer couldn’t intervene in time to stop a deportation. As the November election nears, she wonders what a mass deportation operation will do. “We see what gets left behind when someone is ripped out of our community,” she says.

If sweeping raids and mass deportation come to pass, boosting the legal defense infrastructure to be able to quickly mobilize a network of pro-bono immigration attorneys will be critical. ImmDef has long been investing in building deportation defense capacity. For one, they have been recruiting and training lawyers who are interested in doing that work but lack the legal expertise, cultural competency, or language skills, and have brought on more attorneys to join the strategic litigation and advocacy teams.

Over the last couple of years, the group has tripled their team in San Diego to help prospective asylum seekers with their initial screening credible fear interviews and launched a welcoming project to inform immigrants facing deportation orders about their rights. To that end, they have partnered with Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO), an organization serving indigenous migrants, to create and disseminate educational videos in languages other than English and Spanish.

Toczylowski acknowledges a “whole of immigrant rights movement response” will be necessary, but she believes they’re ready. “We’ve survived things once before and we will survive this time around,” she says, “because there’s no other choice. Our communities need us to be there.”

If implemented, the Project 2025 agenda could undermine deportation defense services and further strain critical and already scarce legal aid for asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors. Among other things, the project’s playbook chapter on DHS pushes for restricting access to federal funds to organizations unless they “support the broader homeland security mission.” Advocates also fear the conservative plot could lead to pressure on local and state jurisdictions to defund legal services, make immigration courts more hostile to immigrants, and even open up legal providers to criminal penalties.

“There’s no question that Project 2025 would shift the landscape enormously,” Shayna Kessler, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s advancing universal representation initiative, says, “and require some real recalibration.” In 2017, in response to an environment of heightened immigration enforcement, the organization established a network of governments, service providers, and advocates to implement publicly funded deportation defense programs at the state and local governments, for immigrants who, unlike their counterparts in the criminal justice system, aren’t entitled to free legal representation.

“If we do enter a period of really intense immigration enforcement again,” Kessler says, “those legal teams will be poised to continue that defense.”

In our conversations, Kessler and others stressed that the fight for immigrants’ rights doesn’t stop at the ballot box. Nor is it contingent on the outcome of the election. If elected, Vice President Kamala Harris might continue the Biden administration’s crackdown on asylum at the southern border. And the immigration system will not cease to be broken. While preparedness is key, so is mobilizing the American public to resist the vilification and dehumanization of immigrants. That will require large scale mobilizations, not unlike the resistance to the travel ban, to draw visibility and push for intervention from elected officials.

“Grave injustices preceded the former administration,” says Faisal Al-Juburi, chief external affairs officer at Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a Texas legal services nonprofit founded in 1986. “And for all intents and purposes will continue into a next administration, no matter who is elected into office.”

This year, former President Donald Trump’s central campaign pledge has been to conduct the “largest deportation operation in American history.”

In his first term, Trump couldn’t deliver mass deportation. This was partially a result of his administration’s haphazard policy implementation, but also because a mass deportation campaign would require an almost unimaginable amount of resources: Removing one million people from the country a year would cost an estimated $88 billion annually, according to the American Immigration Council.

Still, Trump’s potential second administration wants to try again, even if it appears they only have concepts of a plan for how to do carry out mass removal without bankrupting the economy and likely harming millions of immigrants and many more US citizens in the process.

On Sunday, Tom Homan, the one-time cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, appeared on 60 Minutes to sell the plan as not potentially catastrophic. Homan, the “architect” of family separation who said he didn’t “give a shit” about being sued over the infamous practice, has been defiantly positioning himself as the man to get the job done.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he said at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, in July. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

But when asked by CBS’s Cecilia Vega how feasible—or humane—the rollout of a mass deportation proposal would be, his answers inspired little confidence.

Cecilia Vega asks: “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?”

“Of course there is. Families can be deported together,” says Tom Homan, head of ICE during Trump’s family separation policy. https://t.co/If9G1sNEzj pic.twitter.com/TIWhi25Vdu

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 28, 2024

“Let me tell you what it’s not going to be first,” Homan said. “It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all, it’s ridiculous.” Instead, he claimed, there would be “targeted arrests.” But, as I’ve reported before, that’s quite different from the actual plans Trump’s hardline adviser Stephen Miller has been publicly laying out:

When asked by the hosts of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton radio show how the mass deportations project would be realized, Miller said it would require a “switch to indiscriminate or large-scale enforcement activities.” Miller described going to every place where there are known congregations of “illegals” and taking people to federal detention. 

To detain immigrants before carrying out their deportations, Miller said the Trump administration would build massive holding facilities that could accommodate between 50,000 to 70,000 people at any given time. Such an undertaking, he said, “would be greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date.”

In an exercise of semantics, Homan went on to say he doesn’t use the term “raids,” but that “worksite enforcement operations” would be necessary. When Vega pressed him on how the agency would prioritize immigration enforcement against national security and public safety threats, he left no room for doubt that anyone would entered the United States unlawfully would be a potential target. “So you’re carrying out a targeted enforcement operation,” Vega said, “grandma is in the house. She’s undocumented. She gets arrested too?”

“It depends,” Homan said. “Let the [immigration] judges decide. We’re going to remove people that the judges order deported.”

As a retired government official, Homan has making the rounds of conservative media to declare an “invasion” at the southern border. And he has made an enterprise out of it by launching the nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc. and traveling across the country spreading fear-mongering about migrants.

When asked on 60 Minutes how many people would be deported under Trump’s proposed mass deportation operation, Homan said “you can’t answer that question” because it would depend on how many enforcement agents they would have. Currently, ICE has about 6,000 deportation officers. Arresting and removing the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, most of whom have been in the country for more then a decade, would require hiring hundreds of thousands of government employees.

“If there’s no memo, if there’s no plan, is this fully baked?” Vega asked.

“We’ve done it before,” Homan said, presumably referencing the less than successful slur-named militaristic “Operation Wetback” from the Eisenhower administration that Trump has repeatedly invoked as a model. But historians agree that campaign not only led to far fewer deportations than the federal government claimed, but also ensnared US citizens.

A mass deportation of the scale Trump and Homan have been touting would likely have the same result. And as immigration experts have noted, such a plan would negatively impact mixed-status households, potentially tearing families apart. To that, Homan offered an alternative. “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Vega asked. “Of course there is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.”

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Space X and Tesla, and the world’s richest man, is convinced that immigrants who have lived and worked in the United States without legal authorization are destabilizing American democracy. It sounds like another conspiracy theory from a man who spouts a lot of them. But on Saturday, the Washington Post reported on one such figure, hiding in plain sight:

Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by the Washington Post.

As the Post story laid out, Musk was working for his first company, an online business and city directory called Zip2, while living in the United States, officially, as a student. But he never actually took classes at Stanford University—a precondition for staying in the US. A former board member, Derek Proudian, supplied the story’s money quote. The mindset within the company at the time, he told the paper, was “we don’t want our founder being deported.” 

The mindset within the company at the time, he told the paper, was “we don’t want our founder being deported.” 

Musk has been cagey about his immigration status during his first years as an entrepreneur, but as the story makes clear, his brother, Kimbal, has often made light of it, describing himself and his very famous sibling in public forums as “illegal immigrants.” 

It’s tempting to call this a big bunch of hypocrisy. Musk has, after all, spent more than $100 million to elect a candidate who promises the mass deportation of immigrants who have overstayed their visas. But I think that overlooks both what’s driving his demands for immigration restrictions and misreads his vision for the world. Musk does not really have a problem with South African computer programmers skirting the rules. He, like Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has a problem with the specific kinds of migrants coming from specific kinds of places. In a 2023 response to an antisemitic X user who claimed that Western Jews deserved no sympathy because they invited “hordes of minorities” to their countries, Musk wrote, “You have said the absolute truth.” 

What makes migrants undesirable, to the people demanding these crackdowns, is not their status but who they are and why they’re here. It’s why Vance can say that Haitians with legal status are “illegals” anyway. As a proponent of scientific racism, Musk believes migrants from the Global South are being imported as part of a massive plot to reshape the country’s demography and elect Democrats forever. This is delusional in so many different ways—not the least of which is its ignorance of the long-term voting patterns of immigrant groups themselves—but it is not hypocritical any more than it is hypocritical to embrace restrictions on speech in support of Palestinians and Turkish dissidents but to reject restrictions on the speech of right-wing Brazilians. The animating principle is not supposed to be consistent and objective. His position merely reflects the animus and preference of a red-pilled bigot. What does the oligarch want? He wants what he wants.

This week, the Guardian published a pre-election bombshell alleging that Donald Trump sexually assaulted a model in 1993—the latest in a string of dozens of similar accusations dating back decades. Stacey Williams, now 56, claims that Trump groped her during a visit to Trump Tower, in an encounter she said was orchestrated by Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased financier and convicted sexual predator, whom she had been dating. Williams told the Guardian that Trump felt up her breasts, waist, and buttocks. “I just had this really sickening feeling that it was coordinated,” she later told CNN. “I was rolled in there like a piece of meat in some kind of weird twisted game.” Williams also told her story during a public “Survivors for Kamala” Zoom call on Monday night. The Trump campaign denied the accusations.

With the election less than two weeks away, Trump’s treatment of women is now back in the spotlight, at the same time as his harsh disparagement of immigrants has taken on an increasingly dark and vitriolic air. “This election cycle,” wrote my colleague Isabela Dias, “former President Donald Trump has made mass deportation his foremost campaign promise.” It is a long-standing promise, Isabela reported, as she recapped Trump’s 2016 pledge to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants; his sweeping worksite raids; his Muslim-ban; and brutal family separations. As Isabela showed, Trump’s plans for a second term would escalate these policies significantly: He has pledged “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

These two big themes of Trump’s presidency—his treatment of women and his far-right immigration policies—first fused for me in reporting I did during Trump’s 2016 campaign. At the time, my investigation revealed that models working for his prized firm, Trump Model Management, were brought into the United States on tourist visas that did not allow them to work. Former Trump models told me they were encouraged to mislead federal officials and instructed to lie on customs forms. Once here, they were housed in a cramped, basement apartment, charged sky-high rent, and levied with dizzying fees and expenses, leaving many in debt and in legal precarity. “It is like modern-day slavery,” one model told me. Another said in a lawsuit she “felt like a slave.”

Here’s a video recap of the media storm that ensued after publication:

As Trump ramps up “zero tolerance”, don’t forget the foreigners Trump’s own company had zero issues with letting into the US to work without authorization: models at his NYC agency @TrumpModels. Here’s a video reminder my 2016 @MotherJones campaign exposé https://t.co/R5bvuhBdkF pic.twitter.com/KfVl6sFn6i

— James West (@jameswest2010) July 7, 2018

My investigation—eight articles over eight months in all—became a potent example of Trump’s duplicity. And it foreshadowed his double standards, as Trump mixed his business practices with the presidency. The story created an instant shockwave through the campaign, albeit briefly during what was a scandal-plagued race to the White House. Models began fleeing Trump Model Management, with insiders attributing the firm’s rapid decline to Trump’s increasingly controversial public persona. The once-celebrated Trump brand, they said, had become tainted.

Ultimately, after my reporting, Trump Models joined the list of defunct Trump ventures, alongside Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Airlines, and Trump Magazine—yet another shuttered firm run by the man who continues to tout himself as an expert businessman who, alone, can fix everything.

Read my original investigation here.

Donald Trump’s rhetoric during his 2024 campaign has been the darkest in modern memory. He has emphasized grievance and demagoguery ever since he first ran for president, most infamously with his build-up to the January 6 insurrection. But in recent months he has gone to new extremes. In numerous speeches and media appearances, he has peddled false conspiracy theories about the two assassination attempts against him and stoked fear and anger nonstop about an alleged “invasion” of murderous migrants, who he claims are “poisoning the blood of” America and “conquering” cities and towns nationwide.

Throughout the election homestretch, Trump has woven these virulent strands into his core message about a supposed grand conspiracy by Democrats to steal the White House from him. Trump and multiple top surrogates have spent months asserting that his political opponents “even tried to kill him” as part of this plot—a canard Trump further amplified when he returned for a second rally at the site in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman opened fire in mid-July.

During a speech in Atlanta, Trump reiterated lies about Democrats conspiring to use undocumented migrants to transform America. “It’s so sinister,” he said, “but they want to sign these people up to vote, and if they do that, this country is destroyed. We’d become a dumping ground for the entire world.” Trump has drawn on such “Great Replacement” themes—an extremist ideology embraced by multiple mass shooters—ever since he was in the White House. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, is now also advancing this theme, speaking at Trump rallies and posting with massive reach on his social media platform, X.

Most news media rarely, if ever, frame Trump’s rhetoric for what it is: methodical, sustained incitement. Proving a direct connection between Trump’s incendiary messaging and acts of violence can be all but impossible—a gap of plausible deniability that is central to the method of stochastic terrorism, as it’s known to national security experts. Nonetheless there is a long history of Trump’s rhetoric correlating strongly with subsequent menace and violence: a surge in threats targeting journalists as “the enemy of the people,” a Trump supporter attacking an FBI field office after Trump raged against the raid on Mar-a-Lago, threats to kill FBI agents over a “stolen election” and the Hunter Biden case.

The intensifying demagoguery from Trump this election season has caused high concern among threat assessment and law enforcement experts, as I’ve been reporting since June. Fortunately, their worst fears about the kind of catastrophic violence it might provoke have yet to be realized. But according to two senior federal law enforcement sources I spoke with in recent weeks, Trump’s extremism has been accompanied by a rise in violent threats reflecting his messaging.

According to these sources, multiple cases of threats have involved individuals citing or parroting Trump’s ongoing claims about violent migrants invading and taking over the country. Trump’s continual focus on that alleged menace has produced a noticeable hardening effect, one source told me: “We see that the longer it’s talked about, the more it becomes perceived as fact.” Other cases have included talk of “payback or revenge” against Trump’s political adversaries for the assassination attempts, including threats focused on elected officials.

“It’s really poisonous, and it’s giving justification to people who are on the edge to take extreme actions.”

Trump’s hyperbole at recent rallies has included macabre descriptions of alleged rape and murder by migrants, such as telling his supporters, “they’ll cut your throat.” After his rally last Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, most media coverage focused on his lewd comments about golf legend Arnold Palmer’s genitals, but less noted was that Trump also conjured a specter of war against migrants: “We will not be invaded, we will not be occupied, we will not be conquered. That’s what they’re doing. This is an invasion into our country of a foreign military.”

He has continued to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for this non-reality: “She’s letting vicious gangs take over whole communities,” he inveighed at a rally on Monday in Greenville, North Carolina. “She’s bussing and flying them in by the millions.”

A threat assessment expert who consults for federal law enforcement told me that the fear and contempt generated by such rhetoric is potent, and can be interpreted by some people as permission to commit violence. “It’s really poisonous, and it’s giving justification to people who are on the edge to take extreme actions.”

In September, the town of Springfield, Ohio, endured waves of paralyzing bomb threats and other harassment after Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, spread lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating neighbors’ pets. Risk for violence escalated in the southeastern US when Trump and his allies seized on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, falsely accusing FEMA and the Biden administration of abandoning victims. These repeated lies were debunked by state and local leaders, including Republicans, but that didn’t stop Trump. “They spent their money on illegal migrants,” he declared again at Monday’s rally in Greenville. “They didn’t have any money left for North Carolina.”

Trump has continued to tell this lie in his stump speech—even after a Trump supporter armed with multiple guns was arrested in western North Carolina in mid-October for allegedly threatening to harm FEMA workers. That and other armed threats disrupted the agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims.  

Risk for violence around Election Day remains a high concern and a focus for law enforcement, the sources confirmed to me. As one longtime election official in Georgia explained this week to the Wall Street Journal: “People have had four years of just marinating in all sorts of different conspiracy theories, and we worry they’ll come in looking for a problem. Then you got, ‘Hey everyone come down to the polling place,’ and mobs showing up, maybe armed, and it can really snowball very quickly.” 

The temperature also has been rising with adversarial partisan crowds, as seen in Pennsylvania on Sunday in the vicinity of a McDonald’s where Trump posed briefly as a fry cook. Concern will extend well beyond Election Day, through a period of uncertainty about voting results that is likely to follow—and that undoubtedly will be further weaponized by Trump and his allies using baseless claims of fraud, sand-in-the-gears litigation, and beyond.

National security and threat assessment experts told me after the January 6 insurrection that quashing the violent extremism unleashed by Trump requires a fundamental change in what political leaders treat as acceptable rhetoric. But through the years of Trump’s continuing grip on the Republican Party, that standard has trended in the wrong direction, with many Republican politicians excusing or even joining in on Trump’s tactics.

With Election Day fast approaching, no Republican member of Congress or high-profile figure in the party is speaking out forcefully against Trump’s dark rhetoric. House Speaker Mike Johnson and others stick to misdirection or feigned ignorance, if they address the matter at all. As one threat assessment source told me: “Silence is its own form of participation.”

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Six years on, families remain separated. The Trump administration’s so-called “zero tolerance” policy of splitting families at the border to deter migration is not just a shameful chapter of US history but an ongoing disaster. To this day, the Biden White House is still scrambling to clean up the mess. Some families may never reunite.

It was previously unthinkable: a government program for immigration deterrence predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms.

The cruelty of that policy defined the first Trump term. Images of separated children held in Walmarts converted into shelters sparked comparisons to the detention of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Audio obtained by ProPublica and released in June 2018 underscored the brutality: Guards joked, over the sounds of children wailing and calling for their moms and dads while in custody of Customs and Border Protection, “Well, we have an orchestra here, right? What we’re missing is a conductor.”

The idea of family separation as an immigration deterrence strategy had floated around before during the Obama administration. But it wasn’t until Donald Trump came into office that hardliner senior adviser Stephen Miller pushed to implement it. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in May 2018 when making the zero-tolerance policy public, months after Trump’s Department of Homeland Security had already started tearing families apart. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.” (Sessions even invoked the Bible to defend the policy.)

The unspeakable—and previously unthinkable—horror of a systematic government policy predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms was such that even Donald Trump seemed chastened. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” he said in 2018 upon signing an executive order ending the practice. 

But it was too late. By then, more than 2,000 children had already been taken from their parents and potentially condemned to a lifetime of trauma and negative health outcomes. Ultimately, around 5,000 children were separated and, as of earlier this year, 1,360 hadn’t been reunited with their parents or legal guardians, according to a progress report by the Family Reunification Task Force launched by the Biden administration.

Lawyers and advocates working on the reunification process have witnessed heartbreaking instances of children who were so young when the separation happened that they no longer recognized their parent. “A lot of children who were separated felt abandoned by their parents and so there was resentment when they reunited,” Nan Schivone, the legal director of the migrant rights group Justice in Motion, told me earlier this year.

Even in face of the irreparable harm done to thousands of children and their parents, the Trump campaign won’t rule out bringing back family separation in a potential second term.

“Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come,” Trump said during a CNN town hall last year. “If a family hears they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come.” When pressed further about whether he would reinstate the policy, Trump added: “We have to save our country, all right?”

All these years later, some of the children victimized by family separation are now speaking out. “The worst thing about being [in the shelter] was at night because I always dreamed about my mother and that she was with me,” one unnamed teen says in a video posted on an X account called Same Story, “but when I woke up she wasn’t there.” In another, Billy describes being separated from his father: “I couldn’t speak English. I couldn’t do nothing at all but just sit back and watch my dad be taken away from me.” Reuniting with his father, he says, “was the best moment in my life because it was the first time that I finally felt like I was secure and I was safe.”

Families belong together and free. In 2018, Billy was separated from his dad when they immigrated to the United States in 2018. Now that he’s reunited with his family, he hopes that no family ever has to experience the same story. Share his story because #FamiliesStillBelong. pic.twitter.com/j9Ban3Uye3

— Same Story (@samestoryvoices) September 24, 2024

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump campaigns for a second term in the White House, the former president has repeatedly promised to enact the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in US history. It’s a bold threat that legal experts say should be taken seriously, despite the significant technical and logistical challenges posed by deporting 11 million people from the United States. 

Even if only somewhat successful, Trump’s hard-line approach to immigration—with its laser focus on removing immigrants who live in the US without permanent legal status—has the potential to uproot countless communities and families by conducting sweeping raids and placing people in detention centers.

Mass deportation would also, according to economists, labor groups, and immigration advocates, threaten the economy and disrupt the food supply chain, which is reliant on many forms of migrant labor.

The ramifications of a mass deportation operation would be “huge” given “immigrant participation in our labor force,” said Amy Liebman, chief program officer of workers, environment, and climate at the Migrant Clinicians Network, a nonprofit that advocates for health justice. Immigration is one of the reasons behind growth in the labor force, said Liebman. “And then you look at food, and farms.” 

“Button your seatbelts, people, because who’s washing dishes in the restaurant, who’s freaking processing that chicken? Like, hello?”

The possibility of deportation-related disruption comes at a time when the US food system is already being battered by climate change. Extreme weather and climate disasters are disrupting supply chains, while longer-term warming trends are affecting agricultural productivity. Although inflation is currently cooling, higher food costs remain an issue for consumers across the country—and economists have found that even a forecast of extreme weather can cause grocery store prices to rise. 

Mass deportation could create more chaos, because the role of immigrants in the American food system is difficult to overstate. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority of them coming from Mexico, legally obtain H-2A visas that allow them to enter the US as seasonal agricultural workers and then return home when the harvest is done. But people living in the US without legal status also play a crucial role in the economy: During the pandemic, it was estimated that 5 million essential workers were undocumented. And the Center for American Progress found that nearly 1.7 million undocumented workers labor in some part of the US food supply chain.

A stunning half of those immigrants work in restaurants, where during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they labored in enclosed, often cramped environments at a time when poor ventilation could be deadly. Hundreds of thousands also work in farming and agriculture—where they might work in the field or sorting produce—as well as food production, in jobs like machine operation and butchery.

The agricultural sector is just one of several industries in recent years that has experienced a labor shortage, which the US Chamber of Commerce has classified a “crisis.” This ongoing shortage makes the Trump campaign’s proposal to force a mass exodus of people without legal status an inherently bad policy, said Liebman. “Part of me is like, ‘Oh, button your seatbelts, people, because who’s washing dishes in the restaurant, who’s freaking processing that chicken?’ Like, hello?”

“With fewer and fewer Americans growing up on the farm, it’s increasingly difficult to find American workers attracted to these kinds of jobs.”

The health and safety risks undocumented immigrants have undertaken to keep Americans fed—both in times of crises and during all other times—have been met with few legal and workplace protections. A bill to give undocumented essential workers a legal pathway to citizenship, introduced by Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California, died in committee in 2023. Padilla told Grist he will continue working to “expand protections for these essential workers, including fighting for a legal pathway to citizenship.”

“Agricultural workers endure long hours of physically demanding work, showing up through extreme weather and even a global pandemic to keep our country fed,” he added. “They deserve to live with dignity.” 

If this workforce were to be unceremoniously deported, without regard for their economic contributions to U.S. society or consideration of whether they actually pose a threat to their communities, it would be disastrous, according to Padilla. 

“Donald Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations as a part of Project 2025 are not only cruel but would also decimate our nation’s food supply and economy,” said Padilla, referring to the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a Trump presidency. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

US farmers, who rely on many forms of migrant labor (including undocumented workers and H-2A temporary visa holders), have said that a crackdown on undocumented immigrants would essentially bring business to a grinding halt. In response to federal and state proposals to require employers to verify the legal status of their workers, the American Farm Bureau Federation has said, “Enforcement-only immigration reform would cripple agricultural production in America.”

The Farm Bureau, an advocacy group for farmers, declined to comment on Trump’s mass deportation proposal, but a questionnaire the group gave to both presidential candidates states, “Farm work is challenging, often seasonal and transitory, and with fewer and fewer Americans growing up on the farm, it’s increasingly difficult to find American workers attracted to these kinds of jobs.”

Small farmers agree. A first generation Mexican-American immigrant who works in Illinois as an urban farmer, David Toledo says that the consequences of mass deportation for the country’s food system would be hard to imagine, especially since he believes that “many Americans don’t want to take the jobs” that many undocumented workers currently fill for very low pay.

“We need people who want to work in fields and in farmlands. [Farmworkers] are waking up way before the sun because of rising temperatures, and living in horrible conditions,” said Toledo. He added that the US should remember “that we are a welcoming community and society. We have to be, because we are going to see a lot more people shifting [here] from countries all over the world because of climate change.” 

Stephen Miller, the advisor who shaped Trump’s hard-line immigration policy, has touted mass deportations as a labor market intervention that will boost wages for American-born workers. But analysts point out that previous programs aimed at restricting the flow of immigrant workers have failed to raise wages for native-born citizens.

For example, when the US in 1965 ended the Bracero Program, which allowed half a million Mexican-American seasonal workers to labor in the US, wages for domestic farmworkers did not increase, according to analysis from the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Additionally, a recent analysis found that a Bush- and Obama-era deportation program known as Secure Communities—which removed nearly half a million undocumented immigrants from the US—resulted in both fewer jobs and lower wages from domestic workers. One reason is that when undocumented immigrants were deported, many middle managers who worked with them also lost their jobs.

Such a shock to the agricultural labor force could result in higher food prices, too. If farmers lose a large portion of their workforce due to mass deportation, they may not have enough people to harvest, grade, and sort crops before they spoil. That sort of reduction in the supply of food could drive up prices at the grocery store. 

Many experts note that even attempting to deport millions of immigrants would disrupt the nation’s economy as a whole. “It will not benefit our economy to lose millions of workers,” said Debu Gandhi, senior director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “There is no economic rationale for it.”

For instance, mass deportation would deprive governments of essential tax revenue. A report from the American Immigration Council found that a majority of undocumented immigrants—or three-fourths—participated in the workforce in 2022. This tracks with other analysts’ understandings of the undocumented workforce. “Undocumented immigrants, when they get to the United States of America, they have an intention to work, to make money and contribute not only to their families, but also to the federal, state, and local government,” said Marco Guzman, a senior policy analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. A recent report co-authored by Guzman found that undocumented immigrants paid a whopping $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.

Moreover, advocacy groups worry about the impact mass deportation would have on families. “What does this look like on the ground?” said Liebman, who wondered who would be tasked with enforcing mass deportation, and whether it would require local law enforcement agencies to carry out raids in their own neighborhoods and communities. She noted that the bulk of migrant families across the country are “mixed status”—meaning that some members of a household have documentation while others don’t. “Are we going to go into people’s houses and rip families apart?”  

“My sense is that it would be impractical and then impossible to implement [mass deportations] a way that doesn’t inevitably violate the Constitution.”

Immigration is the purview of the federal government, and for decades, elected leaders across the political spectrum have failed to pass policies to fix America’s strained immigration system. “It has been very hard to find solutions on immigration reform,” said Gandhi. “And we do have bipartisan solutions on the table. But we just have not been able to get them through.”

In the absence of other policy solutions—such as addressing the root causes of migration to the US from other countries, including climate change—all-or-nothing imperatives to “close the border” have become popular among conservatives. In fact, a Scripps News/Ipsos poll released last month found that a majority of American voters surveyed support mass deporting immigrants without legal status. 

Experts have debated the feasibility of Trump’s promise to enact mass deportations—pointing out that deportations during Trump’s first term were lower than under his predecessor, Barack Obama. (The Biden administration has also enacted considerably more enforcement actions against immigrants than were carried out during the Trump administration.) Although the specific details on how the proposal would be carried out and enforced have yet to be clarified by Trump’s campaign, Paul Chavez, litigation program director at Americans for Immigrant Justice, a nonprofit law firm, is highly skeptical about the likelihood of such a move holding up in federal court. 

“I can’t imagine any sort of mass deportation program that doesn’t result in racial profiling of both immigrants and those perceived to be immigrants,” said Chavez. Any form of racial profiling that came out of such an enforcement process would be in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which effectively prohibits a state from adopting policies that target any person in its jurisdiction based on race, color, or national origin. A mass deportation operation would lead to people being profiled across the country and treated in “a discriminatory fashion based on national origin,” said Chavez—triggering all sorts of lawsuits. 

“My sense is that it would be impractical and then impossible to implement in a way that doesn’t inevitably violate the Constitution,” said Chavez. 

But whether or not courts upheld mass deportation, the threat of raids would send a strong message to workers, according to Antonio De Loera-Brust, an organizer with United Farm Workers, a labor union for farmworkers that represents laborers regardless of their immigration status. He posited that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is purposefully designed to have a chilling effect on US residents without legal status. “The point is not to remove millions, it’s to scare them,” said De Loera-Brust.

For six days, a man we’ll call Martín walked across a remote stretch of the Sonoran Desert between Mexico and southern Arizona with a guide and six other migrants. It was February 2023, and the nights were frighteningly cold. One morning, he awoke to the desert painted white—the first time he had seen snow. They walked and walked. It snowed again, and they kept walking—until Martín couldn’t walk anymore.

Three months earlier, the 23-year-old had left his home in Guatemala’s western highlands. A father of three, Martín (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) had never finished elementary school, and good jobs were hard to come by. So he did what so many others from his region have done: He headed north, hoping to cross the border undetected and find better opportunities in the United States.

Martín’s journey ended on a hillside in the Baboquivari Mountains, 26 miles north of the US-Mexico border. When he began suffering chest pains and stopped to rest, the group continued without him, leaving him with a gallon of water and no food. High on the mountain, his cellphone had enough service to call 911. He kept calling—11 times in total over the ensuing three days. But help never came from official channels—not from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, which has a team of search and rescue deputies, or the US Border Patrol, which has specialized search and rescue–trained agents. Instead, upward of 14 volunteers initiated a chaotic three-day mission to rescue Martín. In their multiple attempts to reach him through locked gates and terrain too punishing to navigate, one question kept surfacing: Why had the agencies tasked with rescue work along the world’s deadliest migration route failed to act? Why had they left this man to potentially die on a mountain?  

Martín’s case is just one example of how the search and rescue system in the borderlands often fails migrants caught up in the US’s decadeslong efforts to deter unauthorized migration. It is symptomatic of a scattershot emergency response system with little accountability, in which responsibility for saving migrants’ lives is divided among Border Patrol agents whose primary duty is law enforcement, not search and rescue; overtaxed county search and rescue teams; and unpaid volunteers from humanitarian groups who take it upon themselves to come to migrants’ aid when no one else will. The result is a system in which stranded migrants like Martín can fall through the cracks—sometimes with deadly consequences.

Migrants crossing the Southwest border have faced particularly perilous conditions since the 1990s, when the Border Patrol began implementing an immigration enforcement strategy known as “prevention through deterrence,” which closed off popular crossing points near urban ports of entry, pushing migrants into more remote parts of the Sonoran Desert. In theory, the harsh natural environment of the desert was supposed to discourage unauthorized migration. But instead of deterring migrants, these policies only made the journey more dangerous—a reality that even the Border Patrol could not ignore. From the mid-1990s, when the prevention through deterrence policies were implemented, to 2005, the number of migrant deaths approximately doubled, with the majority of the increase occurring in the Border Patrol’s Tucson, Arizona, sector, which includes a large swath of the Sonoran Desert.

The federal government created a search and rescue training program called BORSTAR in 1998. Since then, the Border Patrol has conducted thousands of rescues along the Southwest border: In 2022, agents rescued 22,075 people, up from 12,857 in 2021 and 5,336 in 2020. That increase partly reflects overall trends in migration—border crossings surged after 2020 in large part due to Title 42, a Trump administration policy that immediately expelled migrants seeking asylum at the border, prompting more repeat crossings. It also reflects improved search and rescue infrastructure in the borderlands: Cellphone coverage has expanded in some remote parts of the Sonoran Desert, and the Department of Homeland Security has invested more money into resources like rescue beacons and placards instructing migrants to call 911 if they are in trouble. Despite these investments, migrant deaths have remained high. The Border Patrol recorded 895 deaths along the Southwest border in 2022, compared with 568 in 2021 and 254 in 2020. Given that the Border Patrol has long struggled to collect complete data on migrant deaths, those numbers are likely a significant undercount.

Martín’s call for help came from a remote corner of Pima County, which sees the majority of migration-related distress calls in the Sonoran Desert, averaging four to five per day. Throughout the US, county sheriff’s offices are typically responsible for providing search and rescue services for anyone in their jurisdiction, a norm codified under Arizona state law. But unlike neighboring Cochise and Yuma counties, which respond directly to migrants calling in distress, dispatchers at the Pima County Sheriff’s Department refer all calls they suspect are migration-related to the Border Patrol—a practice that critics allege is discriminatory and results in an often-substandard emergency response.

Pima County has significant resources at its disposal to respond to those calls, including seven dedicated search and rescue deputies, the volunteer-run Southern Arizona Rescue Association, helicopters, infrared cameras, drones, and a trained canine team. But according to Deputy Adam Schoonover, a public information officer for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, the Border Patrol can respond faster to lost or injured migrants in remote parts of the borderlands. “It’s all about getting the person help as quickly as possible and that has many variables to it,” he said in an email, noting that the department’s search and rescue deputies often are out on a call and may be unavailable. “BORSTAR units can respond faster and are well equipped to handle calls for service in the border area.”

The data, however, often suggests otherwise. A recent investigation by Tanvi Misra for High Country News and Type Investigations found that of the 3,000 emergency calls handled by the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector in 2022, 38 were categorized as medical emergencies, but only six appeared to have triggered a search and rescue operation. Another 299 callers routed to the Border Patrol were never found.

In the absence of a reliable emergency response from local law enforcement and the Border Patrol, an informal network of volunteers with local nonprofits has for years been navigating the difficult and dangerous work of conducting search and rescue operations themselves.   

The call came at 1 p.m. to the hotline run by an Arizona humanitarian aid group: A man’s brother was stranded somewhere on the US side of the border and needed help. It was Martín’s brother calling. After Martín had called 911 and no one had come for him, he tried his brother, who lives in the US and knew about the hotline. The hotline dispatcher called the Border Patrol, as is the group’s protocol, and relayed the information about Martín, including his location. Hours later, the hotline dispatcher received another call from Martín’s brother. Martín was still out there, his brother said. “Didn’t you call Border Patrol? What’s going on?”

The dispatcher passed the case to the Frontera Aid Collective (FAC), another group that conducts search and rescue missions and water drops along the border. Taylor Leigh and Scott Eichling, two FAC volunteers, decided to mobilize immediately to try to rescue Martín. It was 9 p.m., and as Leigh got ready, she called the Border Patrol, “freaking out,” she said. Temperatures were already below freezing, and Martín had been out there for a night and a day.

As Leigh and Eichling loaded supplies into the FAC vehicle, Leigh was transferred five times to different Border Patrol stations. She finally reached an agent, who she said told her that the Border Patrol couldn’t do anything about Martín. Eichling called back and got the same response from that agent. He called again and said another dispatcher laughed at him.

Although the Border Patrol often touts the existence of BORSTAR and a more recent initiative called the Missing Migrant Program as proof of its commitment to providing search and rescue services, the reality is more nuanced. The agency’s Missing Migrant Program, which began in 2017, was responsible for installing the thousands of 911 signs and more than 170 emergency beacons along the border to facilitate rescues, but many migrants in distress are reluctant to use them until the situation is dire, knowing that contacting the Border Patrol will lead to arrest and deportation. Not only that, neither BORSTAR nor the Missing Migrant Program are independent entities with dedicated personnel to help migrants in distress.

Rather, the Missing Migrant Program is a set of protocols governing how the agency responds to 911 calls from migrants and families inquiring about loved ones who have gone missing while trying to cross the border. For instance, agents first check whether the missing person is in the custody of US Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, before instructing a family to call their consulate for more information (as agents are typically barred from providing direct information on specific cases to civilians).

Similarly, BORSTAR is not the equivalent of a dedicated search and rescue team, ready to mobilize for any emergency call. Rather, it is a relatively tiny initiative, employing roughly 300 agents spread out among the nine Border Patrol sectors along the Southwest border. Essentially, BORSTAR agents are regular Border Patrol agents with specialized training: They attend a five-week BORSTAR Academy, where they learn various search and rescue skills and become certified emergency medical technicians. Despite that training, they actually spend most of their time out in the field performing regular enforcement duties.

Calls from or about lost or injured migrants forwarded to the Border Patrol by 911 dispatchers or humanitarian groups are first categorized and assessed for their urgency, then forwarded to the local Border Patrol station with details like GPS coordinates or a last known location. Rescues—which the Border Patrol also conducts for lost or injured US citizens—are handled by individual stations and often are collaborative endeavors among BORSTAR agents, regular Border Patrol agents, and Air and Marine Operations, another branch of Customs and Border Protection that deploys the helicopters and small planes patrolling the Southwest border, which can also be used for search and rescue. Occasionally, the Border Patrol will also ask local officials for assistance.

“Unless you have family who’s advocating for you and is really good at calling a million people, you’re kind of screwed.”

According to Steven Davis, a former volunteer with Pima County’s Southern Arizona Rescue Association who now volunteers with the humanitarian group the Tucson Samaritans, the Border Patrol does, in theory, have more search and rescue resources than Pima County, particularly in the remote regions of the border where people tend to run into trouble. The problem, he said, is their response is hampered by a lack of personnel to conduct large ground searches. And the Border Patrol is seen primarily as a law enforcement organization. “People often won’t call until it’s too late,” he added.

Leigh echoed Davis’ observations. “Border Patrol is supposed to send out BORSTAR—or just whatever agents are in the field—to go help somebody,” she said. “But it seems like that doesn’t really happen very often or effectively. Unless you have family who’s advocating for you and is really good at calling a million people, you’re kind of screwed.”

I asked Robert Daniels, a public affairs specialist for the Border Patrol, how the agency decides whether to respond to someone in distress. He denied that the Border Patrol ever declines to initiate a rescue. “We don’t do that,” he said, emphasizing that no one deserves to die crossing the desert. “We don’t tell somebody that they’re too far away, that we can’t get to them. If we can’t get to them on the ground, then we’re going to fly.”

When Daniels did not respond to further calls and questions about Martín’s case, I reached out to another public affairs specialist, who spoke to me on background, reiterating that the Border Patrol will always respond to a call for help but that the agency does triage calls. If the person isn’t injured, has food and water, and is in no immediate danger from weather conditions, the Border Patrol might wait to initiate a rescue. “You’re not going to send agents up a mountain overnight in order to get somebody, or fly an aircraft into the mountains to get somebody, when they’re perfectly content and capable of being walked down the next morning,” the specialist said.                       

That night, Leigh and Eichling drove south on State Route 286, a lonely two-lane highway that leads to the border. As the darkened mass of the Baboquivaris blotted out the skyline ahead, the magnitude of what they’d set out to do began to set in. Leigh and Eichling turned down a ranch road, but they kept running into locked gates, blocking their way forward. It was past midnight and they were alone on private property, so they decided to turn back. Another rescue effort that night mounted by members of the Phoenix-based Abolitionists aid group, along with another FAC duo, also proved unsuccessful. Martín would spend his second night out in the cold.

In the morning, Leigh and Eichling set out again with two other FAC members, having finally identified a better route up the mountain where Martín lay. They reached a locked gate. A tense discussion ensued; one volunteer was nervous about trespassing and risking arrest. Kyle Richardson, another FAC member, was adamant they continue. “We’re not going to let this abstract law get in the way of saving him,” Richardson said. The group dismantled part of the gate to get through.

Soon, the road grew so rough that they had to abandon their vehicle and walk down the private ranch road. Past a creepy-looking abandoned cabin, they finally came to a cattle tank at the base of the canyon that led up to Martín. There, they saw a Border Patrol agent sitting in his truck.

Leigh explained what they were doing, and the agent pointed to the mountain in front of them. Martín, he said, was “just on the other side.”

“Why aren’t you going up to him?” Leigh asked. The agent told her that his orders were to stay put. According to the Border Patrol public affairs specialist I spoke with, Border Patrol dispatchers initially had trouble locating Martín, and it was dark by the time they were able to establish contact. “We determined that he was stable and didn’t need immediate evacuation,” the specialist said, before acknowledging that humanitarian aid groups and Martín’s family might not have agreed.

The group headed up the canyon. Between them and Martín lay 4 to 5 miles of dense brush and boulders. The terrain was so steep that at times they had to climb on their hands and knees. A helicopter whirred in the distance and they saw it approach, assuming it had come to rescue Martín. Instead, it hovered near the top of the mountain where they were aiming for 20 seconds and then flew away.

After five or six hours, they reached a grassy saddle between two peaks. They crawled under a barbed-wire fence and walked along the trail, calling Martín’s name. Finally, they heard him. A faint yell in the distance, and then again.

When they reached him, he was lying in the middle of a bare grassy hillside, extremely dehydrated and in the early stages of shock. Richardson was struck by how visible he was—his black faux leather jacket and personal belongings scattered around him stuck out vibrantly against the light green backdrop.

The mood was somber as they slowly made their way back down the steep canyon, Eichling piggybacking Martín when he grew too weak to walk. Martín and his family had scraped together the equivalent of about $16,000 to pay for the journey in the hope that he would make it to the US and find work. Instead, once they reached the Border Patrol agent at the bottom of the mountain, he would be deported.

In the year and a half since Martín’s rescue, volunteers in southern Arizona and along other parts of the border have continued to mount search and rescue operations for migrants, some of whom had called 911 and been transferred to the Border Patrol multiple times, but received no response. There was the woman who called for help deep in the Ironwood Forest National Monument, 25 miles northwest of Tucson. To try to find her, FAC volunteers drove on some of the worst roads they had seen in the middle of the night, far from cell service. She had moved, so they never found her, but two days later, workers on a ranch did. She was nearly dead, but they brought her to a hospital and she survived. And a few weeks after FAC rescued Martín, a 23-year-old woman, also from Guatemala, called for help from the Baboquivari Mountains. Like Martín, her family had called 911 with her exact coordinates more than 60 times, but according to Leigh, every time, the dispatcher would say, “Not Spanish,” and hang up. Frantic, the woman’s family called the hotline for help. When volunteers located the woman, she had already died.

It’s difficult to know how many cases like these never received a response. A report from another humanitarian group, No More Deaths, audited 911 calls in Pima County from June 2022 and found that of 64 emergency cases received by the county and transferred to the Border Patrol during that month, there were 17 in which the distressed person was never located. In at least 10 of those cases, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department took no further action upon learning that the Border Patrol had not found the 911 caller. 

“They have been tasked with stopping an ‘invasion’ at the border. In reality, they’re interacting with people who need basic aid, who need their asylum applications processed.”

The Border Patrol does not disclose how many emergency calls it receives or fails to act on, or the outcome of its search and rescue efforts. This lack of transparency and accountability in efforts to reduce migrant deaths has been well-documented for decades. In 2006, the federal government’s watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, issued a report that found that the Border Patrol’s efforts to reduce migrant deaths could not be fully evaluated due to insufficient data. The report also pointed out that the Border Patrol’s primary role as an enforcement agency often occurred simultaneously with its search and rescue activities, making it difficult to assess their efficacy. More recent GAO reports on the Missing Migrant Program have found that its recordkeeping on migrant deaths has long been incomplete and that Customs and Border Protection has not been transparent about disclosing those data limitations to Congress, though its data collection efforts have improved in recent years.  

Reece Jones, a political geographer at the University of Hawaii who has written extensively about the Border Patrol, attributes the agency’s unreliable response to migrants in distress to a disconnect between its mission and the actual needs it encounters at the border. “They have been tasked with stopping an ‘invasion’ at the border,” he said. “In reality, they’re interacting with people who need basic aid, who need their asylum applications processed.” In the years since 9/11, when the agency’s mission was reframed around terrorism, the Border Patrol has grown increasingly militarized, Jones said. That militarization has only exacerbated the conflict of interest between enforcing border policies and reducing the death toll created by those same policies. “The Border Patrol hired Rambo when they needed Mother Teresa,” Jones said, paraphrasing journalist Garrett Graff. “That’s essentially the problem that’s happened over the last 20 years.”

When I last spoke to Martín, he was back in his hometown, struggling to find a job. What he wants most, he told me, is the opportunity to buy a house and give his children a better future. After what happened to him, Martín has no immediate plans to cross the border again. But he has entertained other possibilities. He had heard that adults who arrive at the US-Mexico Border with their children to seek asylum, handing themselves over to the Border Patrol directly, faced an easier pathway into the United States. “Maybe it will be better with one of my children,” he told me. “Maybe I would do it.”

Last November, I drove with members of FAC along a section of the border wall near Sasabe, a town straddling the border. Hundreds of migrants—many of them young children—had been arriving there, climbing through holes in the wall or walking across the border where the wall ends. They would wait for hours and sometimes days for Border Patrol agents to pick them up so they could claim asylum, a legal right under US and international law. That day, we came across two groups of 100 people or more, waiting in the shade of the wall. Twenty-five-year-old Sharon Mishell Valderramos had traveled 20 days with her son, Esquin, a smiley 6-year-old wearing a tie-dye baseball cap. “The government doesn’t protect us,” she said, when I asked her why she had left. All she wanted was to work and for Esquin to get an education.

A few miles west of Sasabe, the border wall ends in a canyon known colloquially as Smuggler’s Canyon. No fence exists there, just trails crisscrossing an invisible line in the scrubby desert, where a child’s jacket hung from a bush next to the trail. I thought of how Martín had left open the possibility of another journey north, this time with his children, and what might happen if they needed help.

At a town hall organized by Univision on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed a key constituency eluding the Democratic Party: Latino voters. Her pitch, like much of the campaign, focused on the contrast between her and Donald Trump. “I very much believe that the American people are being presented with two very different visions for our country,” she said.

Still, Harris mostly fronted a “tough on the border” position during the appearance. After moments of empathy and a brief mention of fighting for DACA recipients, Harris touted a now-defunct restrictive border bill pushed by President Joe Biden that overlooked groups like the Dreamers. The vice president talked concrete on crackdown and vaguely on policies to help immigrants. She had a chance to be specific on both counts.

One of the first questions Harris fielded came from Ivett Castillo, the grieving daughter of an undocumented Mexican-born woman who had passed away six weeks prior. “You and I have something in common,” Castillo told Harris. “We both lost our mother.”

Castillo, who lives in Las Vegas, went on to describe how she had been able to help her father get legal status, but not her mother. “She was never ever able to get the type of care and service that she needed or deserved,” Castillo said, sobbing. “So my question for you is: What are your plans or do you have plans to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?”

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

Harris expressed sympathy for Castillo and urged her to remember her mother as she had lived. And she also mentioned a bill that the Biden administration proposed to offer a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. (Harris blamed the fact that it wasn’t picked up by Congress on the “inability to put solutions in front of politics.”)

But that was the extent of Harris’ answer to the question about her policies for the 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. Instead, the Democratic nominee quickly pivoted to the one piece of the immigration debate both parties seem to be laser-focused on exploiting this election cycle: the border.

“A bipartisan group of members of Congress, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came together with one of the strongest border security bills we’ve had in decades,” she said, noting how it would have boosted the border patrol force and help tackle the flow of fentanyl. (The vast majority of fentanyl is brought into the country through ports of entry by US citizens, not immigrants.) Harris then accused her opponent of deliberately killing the proposed legislation in order to keep the border a salient electoral issue. “He would prefer to run on a problem than fixing a problem,” she said.

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about longtime undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

In fully embracing the perception that immigration can’t be anything other than a liability for Democrats and a winning trampoline for Republicans, the party has all but ceded the “moral leadership” President Joe Biden so vehemently vowed to reclaim in the aftermath of Trump’s devastation.

But if Harris’ goal was to underscore the differences between her and Trump’s views and policies on immigration, she missed an opportunity to do so. The Univision audience at the town hall and watching from home heard nothing about the Biden administration’s move to make it easier for undocumented spouses of US citizens to obtain legal status. Nor did they hear about the Republican candidate’s disastrous plans to arrest, detain, and mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants, tearing up families and ruining critical industries.

Some polls suggest stricter border enforcement and, to a lesser extent, Trump’s mass deportation proposal resonates with some Latinos. Even if experts say such plans could impact not only undocumented immigrants, but also mixed-status families and those with legal status. The message may not have caught on. In part, because it seems the campaign has done little to explain the potential catastrophe wrought by mass deportation. (As the New York Times reported, many have not heard about the details of the actual agenda.)

It’s not surprising that Harris has adopted a defensive stance on immigration. From the beginning of her expedited presidential campaign, the former prosecutor has been facing attacks from Republicans falsely dubbing her the “border czar.”

But Harris was also once an unapologetically vocal supporter of undocumented immigrants. When vying for the Democratic nomination ahead of the 2020 election, she released a plan to use executive action to provide a pathway to citizenship to millions of Dreamers. Now, her official platform and rally speeches default to a boilerplate appearance of compromise in the form of “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

It’s not for a lack of emotion. Harris, like Biden, seems to thrive when relating to people and their struggles. “It’s about the dignity of people,” she said at the town hall. “And about the importance of doing what we can as leaders to alleviate suffering… What I think it’s backward in terms of this thinking that it’s a sign of strength to beat people down, part of the backward nature of those kinds of thinking is to suggest that empathy is somehow a weakness. Empathy meaning to have some level of care and concern about the suffering of other people and then do something to lift that up.” She later added: “There’ a big contrast between me and Donald Trump.”

If there was ever a moment to highlight what New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer aptly put as “Trump’s dangerous immigration obsession” and what’s at stake—beyond the more abstract warnings about a threat to democracy and the rule of law—that would have been it. If more people understood what mass deportation really means, maybe a quarter of Democrats would not support it.