President-elect Donald Trump ran his election campaign on a tough-on-immigration stance that appears to have resonated with voters.
During Trump’s first term in the White House, it was all about the border wall. Now he’s secured a second term promising mass deportations by invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport noncitizens from a country the U.S. is at war with.
These anti-immigration policies have deep implications for millions of undocumented migrants and their families, many of whom are U.S. citizens.
READ MORE: Looking for immigration resources? We’ve rounded up a list
It’s uncertain when and how Trump’s actions will take shape. But in Los Angeles County, where immigrants make up 35% of the population, including 800,000 undocumented immigrants, according to a report by USC’s Equity Research Institute, the stakes are high. And in Latino-immigrant communities like Boyle Heights, they’re even higher.
We asked Dr. Chris Zepada-Millan, a Boyle Heights native and associate professor of public policy and Chicana/o studies at UCLA, about how a second Trump term will impact residents on the Eastside.
BHB: What does a Trump Presidency mean for the immigrant and undocumented population on the Eastside?
Zepada-Millan: If he keeps his promises, this is going to be a disaster for our community, especially for undocumented and mixed-status families. He will likely do several high-profile deportations to get media attention, similar to what happened following 9/11 when the Bush Administration used the terrorist attacks as an excuse to target Latino immigrants and in 2006 when he also launched several large-scale Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) workplace raids and deportation campaigns.
BHB: Could Trump really carry out a mass deportation plan and kick out hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who entered the country?
Zepada-Millan: To begin, it’s important to understand that undocumented immigrants have been entering the country for decades, including during the first Trump administration. The main exception being during the COVID-19 pandemic, for obvious reasons (there were no jobs). Immigrants come because our economy wants and needs them, because our working age population is in decline, and because employers like to maximize their profits by taking advantage of vulnerable workers.
Trump will likely deport many people and make a big show out of it to increase the sense of fear in immigrant communities (allowing them to be more exploited by employers) and to make his voting base think he’s keeping his promise. That said, I doubt he will actually try, or be able to, deport over 10 million undocumented immigrants since that would instantly tank our economy and create a national security crisis because our entire food supply chain would collapse without Latino immigrant labor.
He knows this and will say that Democrats are stopping him from deporting everyone rather than admit that he’s always known how important immigrants are to our economy. However, should he actually deport all undocumented immigrants, if you think inflation is high now, wait until Americans see what it really costs to farm, cook, and serve their food, or how much it really costs to build and buy a new home when workers have to actually get paid what their labor is worth.
BHB: What does it mean for the local Latino community if Trump ends birthright citizenship for people born in the U.S. whose parents are both in the country illegally?
Zepada-Millan: It would mean that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of U.S.-born Latinos would lose their citizenship and be deported. But this is highly unlikely because like many of Trump’s promises, this is something he knows he can’t do. From my understanding, he would need a constitutional amendment to do this, which would be practically impossible for him to get. He always makes outlandish statements like this to increase anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiments.
BHB: Are you concerned about Trump’s negative rhetoric around immigrants? How does this affect the safety of local residents?
Zepada-Millan: Yes. Whenever a vulnerable population that lacks full rights is targeted by powerful elites, it leaves them open to physical and other forms of violence. Just look at the last major immigration debate we had in 2006, when lawmakers pushed for a bill that would have made it a felony to be in this country illegally. Hate crimes against Latinos and immigrants increased significantly, likely because many white Americans felt that they wouldn’t be held accountable for their actions if they were acting on the anti-immigrant sentiments of the White House (then also controlled by Republicans).
BHB: Do you believe one of the reasons Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election was because of the mishandling of the immigration and border crossings?
Zepada-Millan: No party has been able to stop immigration because the business community doesn’t want it to stop, including during the Trump administration. They don’t want citizen workers because those workers know their rights and are more likely to unionize and demand a living wage and good working conditions. Undocumented immigrants are more likely to put their heads down and work and not complain about being treated badly or not getting paid fairly because they live in constant fear of deportation. Harris was asked to look into the root causes of migration, why people come in the first place, instead of just sensationalizing what was happening at the border.
But Harris ultimately lost the election because the Democrats couldn’t figure out how to remind Americans how bad Trump left the economy. They couldn’t figure out how to explain to Americans that corporations were price gouging and keeping prices high because they wanted to maximize their profits, not because of inflation. Most Americans just know that the cost of food, gas and rent is still high, so Trump took advantage of this and told them President Biden was to blame for high prices. This argument was compelling to many misinformed voters, despite President Biden leaving Trump with a growing economy, the strongest economy in the world.
BHB: Can you speak more on how the economy impacted the election outcome and how this speaks to the challenges facing the Democratic Party?
Zepada-Millan: The Biden-Harris administration spent the last four years cleaning up the economic mess Trump left behind. Now they are leaving Trump with a booming economy that Trump had nothing to do with, but will try to take credit for. The same thing happened the last time Democrats won the White House. George W. Bush left Obama with the economy in shambles, Obama spent eight years fixing it and left Trump with a growing economy with lots of job growth. Part of why Trump won was because the Biden administration was horrible at promoting its accomplishments.
Overall, it’s a moment of reckoning and Democrats must go back to the drawing board and rebuild their messaging and outreach strategies because this election’s results showed that they need to figure out how to better appeal to working-class voters with concrete policy plans on economic issues.
BHB: According to an exit poll, Trump was backed by 42% of Latino voters, a 7% increase from 2020. About half of Latino men said they voted for him. Can you talk about this shift and what it might say about how Latino demographics have changed?
Zepada-Millan: We have to wait and see what the final voter files show since exit polls are notoriously bad for Latinos because oftentimes they’re only conducted in English. But there’s no denying that some Latinos have shifted to voting for Republicans/Trump. This shift is largely driven by working-class, non-college educated Latino males. Sexism and transphobia likely explains some of that shift but what’s interesting to me is that Latino men and some other key groups who shifted to the right this election, were the same groups who voted for Bernie Sanders, a socialist. So while social media will try to blame this shift on racism and self-hating Latino men, I think there’s a big economic aspect that they’re missing.
Relatedly, there’s also a reason why Trump wants to abolish the Department of Education and cut public school funding. He wants to keep working class people uneducated and be able to manipulate them on social media with false promises of populist economic reforms, promises that he didn’t deliver on his first time in office.
Unfortunately, Democrats had no exciting economic policies this election, all they offered was a vague campaign slogan of an “Opportunity Economy.”
Dr. Chris Zepeda-Míllan was born and raised in Boyle Heights and is the Chair of UCLA’s Labor Studies Program and an associate professor of public policy and Chicana/o and Central American studies at UCLA. He is the author of “Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism” and “Walls, Cages and Family Separation: Race and Immigration Policy in the Trump Era.”
