Trump’s mass deportations demand local news coverage

The global movement of people seeking to flee tyranny, poverty and violence or to search for freedom in a distant land is a continuum of human history. It is as ancient as the Bible; as modern as the waves of early immigrants from Europe who established what was forged into the United States of America and as contemporary as the jarring images unfolding this week as President Trump lives up to his campaign promise to stop migration at the southern border and carry out mass deportations.

Amid an onslaught of executive orders and hastily shaped policies, we are watching an organized approach to doing nothing less than take full control of the federal government and to transform immigration policy in America. Let’s be clear: this is not the same as the ritualistic changes from one White House to the next. This is something far more extreme. The question now is whether this is a revolutionary moment of change that will restore the unfettered commerce and spirit of innovation that, to borrow a phrase, made America great. Or, if it is a crass authoritarian coup that seeks to eradicate opposition, erode the foundations of our democracy and impose a vision that Trump and the far right have been presenting all along.

Journalists will need to work hard to get at the real stories unfolding in local communities – ‘ground truthing’ as we call it – and not cover the Trump circus and the overwhelming chaos and fear-mongering that the 47th president’s administration is scripting for those sitting ringside in Washington like something out of his beloved pro wrestling or reality TV.

So what exactly has Trump done on immigration in his first 10 days in office? He has signed 10 executive orders on immigration and issued a stream of edicts that called for mass deportation and greater border security, and he has unleashed a torrent of fear among immigrant families.

Under Trump, officers can now arrest people without legal status if they run across them while looking for migrants targeted for removal. These are known as “collateral arrests” and those were banned under Joe Biden and other previous administrations as a violation of due process.

Trump also has removed time-honored guidelines that restricted ICE from entering and making arrests at so-called “sensitive locations” such as schools, churches, or hospitals. That decision has worried many migrants and advocates who fear children will be traumatized by seeing their parents arrested in the drop-off line at school or that migrants needing medical care won’t go to the hospital for fear of arrest. Trump has also said he will target so-called “sanctuary cities” where local authorities have said they will welcome immigrants. There are new threats from the Trump administration to cut off federal funding for such cities.

The green light for immigration enforcement agents to step up their efforts has had a direct impact on the number of arrests. According to the Associated Press, ICE’s daily arrests, which averaged 311 in the year ending Sept. 30, stayed fairly steady in the first days after Trump took office, then spiked dramatically Sunday to 956 and Monday to 1,179. If sustained, those numbers would mark the highest daily average since ICE began keeping records and about 10 percent higher than the administration of President Obama, which was aggressive in its enforcement of immigration law.

While some of these changes took place immediately, there are other strategies that will face legal challenges, such as targeting sanctuary cities. Some may take years to happen, if ever, but have still managed to instill widespread fear across immigrant communities in America.

Going forward, a great deal of this effort will come down to levels of funding. Congress is expected to consider additional support soon. And, according to AP, Trump may use emergency powers to tap the Defense Department, as he did for a border wall in his first term.

The very real consequences of deportations

We have to do the ‘ground truth’ to get out to these distressed communities and document the challenges they are facing. And this week we are doing just that by offering a story map of work by local journalists with Report for America, showing how communities have been bracing for months for Trump’s policies, not just in immigration, but on environmental, health and labor rights issues.

Days after Trump’s inauguration, corps member Hannah Gross reported for NJ Spotlight News on how New Jersey’s Department of Education issued guidelines for schools “including instructions on recognizing valid warrants, protecting immigrant students’ rights, and addressing deportation-related trauma, wrote Gross, adding that “officials stressed the importance of clear communication with families, proactive policy revisions, and ensuring school staff are trained to handle potential ICE enforcement actions.”

In the Pacific Northwest, Rachel Spacek spoke with advocates that help families that receive unaccompanied immigrant children who are bracing for a return to the harsh policies of the first Trump administration, which detained and deported not just the children, but some of the families that hosted them. According to her reporting for InvestigateWest, this is already deterring many from offering a home to these children.

With so much news tied to deportations and so much human suffering around it, we tend to forget that many of those deported are “dreamers,” as those who arrived as children with their parents and have lived nearly all their lives in the United States are known. When they are deported, they are dropped overnight in a strange land where many don’t even speak the language and may no longer have any relatives. Across the border, in Tijuana, Report for the World’s Janette de los Reyes has been following these stories, reporting for Conexión Migrante on how the local government is turning office buildings into shelters, anticipating an influx of deportees who will need food, shelter and guidance on how to rebuild their lives.

An island gripped by fear

These issues were also unfolding right in front of me here on the island of Martha’s Vineyard where I serve as the publisher of the local newspaper, the MVTimes. In our ramshackle, harbor-side newsroom this week, police radios crackled all day and we had teams canvassing every corner of the small island. It is largely viewed as a liberal enclave of the rich, but the reality of the year-population of 20,000 is extraordinarily diverse, with a great heritage of African-American families; a native American population known as the Wampanoag, and of course, hard-working families in the fishing and construction industries some of whom trace their ancestry back many generations and some who are very recent immigrants. While the community swells to 100,000 in the summer months, during the school year there are fully 20 percent who migrated from Brazil over the last 30 years. In the schools, an estimated 40 percent of the students speak Brazilian Portuguese at home.

In the Island’s Brazilian community this week, the fear was palpable. Workers fearing they may be deported were not showing up at job sites and students were being kept home from schools by parents who were reacting to unconfirmed rumors that ICE agents were descending on the Island and an erroneous report on social media that there were charter planes at the local airport that would be used for mass deportation. Our reporters on the ground did not see ICE agents nor did they see any planes preparing to assist in deportations. The officials they spoke with confirmed the rumors were false even if the fear was very real.

Rachel Self, a top immigration attorney, who gained notoriety when she stood up to the antics of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 when he led a cynical ploy to deceive approximately 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers into being flown from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard with the false promise of jobs and housing. Self served as an attorney for these Venezuelan asylum seekers in an ongoing court case, and she was at the center of an Island response in which the Venezuelans were warmly received and helped by Island families and local advocates for immigrants, recognizing the asylum seekers were being used as pawns in a political game. Islanders, including Self, have remained in touch with these Venezuelan immigrants who were among the 600,000 granted what is known as Temporary Protected Status under the Biden administration in recognition of the severe humanitarian and economic crisis in Venezuela under the dictatorship of President Nicolas Maduro. The Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security has just revoked those protections.

Amid the panic of the new Trump administration, Self makes a deceptively simple, but powerful statement: She says being undocumented is not illegal.

In a letter to the MVTimes that we are sharing with the community, she stated, “I cannot emphasize enough: As of today, the act of being present in the US without documentation is not a crime under federal law. It is a civil infraction. In fact, Congress refused to make undocumented presence a crime in 2005… People in the US, regardless of citizenship, have due process rights.”

A correspondent who works with us at the MVTimes, Paula Moura, is from Brazil and she was reporting this week on the public schools and how parents who are immigrants were handling the rising fear and what local school officials were doing to try to restore an atmosphere of safety.

Moura interviewed a Brazilian woman who was on an afternoon shift and nervously looking out the window of the shop where she was working. She eyed the streets outside, worried that ICE agents would soon be circling. She felt consumed with fear that if she were to be arrested she could be separated from her 12-year-old daughter, who was home alone, until her husband would get home from his job in construction. She said her neck was sore from all of the tension and worry, and she explained that she and her husband are undocumented but that they work hard and serve the community.

If her family and other Brazilian immigrants are deported, she asked, “Who is going to serve the super-rich in the summer? We are mostly honest working people. Why spread terror?”

Her question and the dark cloud of fear that descended over the island in the last few days is truly what authoritarianism is all about: Fear.

Democracy is built on trust, dictatorship is based on fear, keeping a community afraid, divided and on edge. The challenge for local journalists like those in the Report for America corps is to serve in the local communities and to bear witness to unjust efforts by Trump’s immigration agents to instill fear, to divide communities and fulfill his campaign promise for mass deportations. The job of journalism, wherever possible, will be to counter the rumors, to hold enforcement agencies accountable and to do our best to present facts through human stories that challenge the climate of fear and try to help communities build upon trust.

Read the full column on Substack