Immigrant communities across the country have been bracing for Donald Trump’s avalanche of anti-immigration actions, which are already drawing legal fire and constitutional challenges while stranding thousands of people across the U.S. Mexico border, desperate for a better life.
In Chicago, where Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan promised to launch the president’s mass deportation operation, community groups have been preparing “know your rights” training and fielding dozens of questions from immigrants and their families about what the future holds, including what happens if federal law enforcement agents descend in their schools and workplaces.
“I think the idea that there is some sort of an emergency here in Chicago will come as a surprise to people who live here,” Ed Yohnka, director of communications and public policy at the ACLU of Illinois, told The Independent.
“I think the only emergency is the fear and confusion among people who are here looking for a better life for themselves and for their families,” he said. “It’s the fear of kids who are going to school and worried about raids — that’s the emergency.”
The legal arm of Chicago’s Latinos Progresando, based in the city’s historically Mexican immigrant Little Village neighborhood, has been focused on rapid response legal services and connecting DACA recipients with federal agencies to process their renewal requests before Trump takes office.
“There’s a lot of unknowns — we thought that mass deportation was going to be ground zero here, so folks have been preparing for that, and the questions have been like, ‘What does that mean? What happens to my kids?’” chief programs officer Nubia Willman told The Independent.
“There was this belief that maybe there was only going to be a certain group of people that were going to be targeted. And I think now folks are understanding that this is going to be much more expansive and not necessarily precise,” Willman said. “If you don’t have status, if you’re not a citizen, I think everyone is understanding that they may be at risk.”
Trump’s 10 orders include a national emergency declaration to surge troops to the border and “erect physical barriers.” Another “clarifies” that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution “does not recognize” citizenship for children born to parents who arrived in the country without legal permission.
Another order reinstates the “Remain in Mexico” policy to force people to stay on the other side of the southern border while their immigration cases are pending with U.S. courts and authorities — despite no agreement with Mexico to do so.
The administration is also freezing asylum claims — a right guaranteed under both U.S. and international law — and pausing a decades-long refugee resettlement program for at least four months.
Trump is also ending the CBP One app, which has been used by more than 900,000 people to schedule appointments with immigration authorities at the southern border since it was introduced in January 2023.
Roughly 270,000 people on the other side of the border were trying to get an appointment through the app when it was abruptly shut down on Monday.
The app was effectively the only way that people living outside the country could request an appointment at an official port of entry to begin their asylum claims and immigration paperwork, but was falsely characterized by Trump and his allies as a fast track for illegal immigration.
On Monday, a notice on the app’s website said that the app is “no longer available” and all appointments have been “cancelled” without notice.
At ports of entry across the southern border, where hundreds of people were lined up for their appointments, they all received the same message: “Existing appointments through CPB One are no longer valid.”
Another woman and her two minor children, who have been embroiled in a long-running lawsuit over constraints on asylum claims, were scheduled for their appointment on January 25. It is now cancelled.
The app had previously processed up to 1,450 people seeking asylum each day.
But “as a result of the appointment process’s elimination, the right to seek asylum at the border no longer exists, no matter how great the danger faced by migrants, including families with children,” a group of civil rights attorneys wrote in a court filing on Monday.
Last week, Chicago’s City Council voted 39-11 to block a vote on an amendment to the city’s so-called sanctuary ordinance that would allow police to work with federal immigration authorities in cases in which undocumented immigrants have been arrested or convicted of certain crimes.
Chicago police do not document immigration status nor share information with federal immigration authorities, but the agency will not intervene with “other government agencies performing their duties” in the city, according to a spokesperson.
“There are limits to immigration enforcement and if it’s appropriate and where it’s appropriate. If those limits are crossed, we will look to enforcement mechanisms,” Yohnka told The Independent. “But I think it’s hard to even speculate on what that might look like.”
Trump has promised to carry out mass arrests and deportations targeting millions of people across the country. Homan has repeatedly said that U.S. citizen children could end up being detained and deported alongside their noncitizen parents, while families have asked for clarity from advocates and legal groups about the specter of immigration raids that could target workplaces, schools, and places of worship.
“It destroys the communities by destroying the lives of people,” said Mario Garcia, executive director of Chicago’s Onward House, a nonprofit group that supports asylum seekers.
“It’s going to be devastating to business, it’s going to be devastating to the social fabric, and it’s going to impact women and children in particular,” he told The Independent.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, said Trump’s attempts to address immigration “requires the precision of a scalpel, not the blunt force of a sledgehammer.”
“A sweeping enforcement dragnet that doesn’t distinguish between serious offenders and those who have become valuable community members without incident for decades would be cruel and counterproductive,” she said in a statement shared with The Independent. “Our nation’s strength lies in thoughtful, targeted solutions, not indiscriminate policies that abdicate our moral obligations, shatter lives, and devastate local economies.”
The return of “Remain in Mexico” and freezing of asylum claims is “déjà vu of the darkest kind,” she said.
“Barely 24 hours into his second term, President Trump is already seeking to implement his harmful, racist, anti-immigrant agenda with these executive actions,” said Amy Fischer, director of Amnesty International USA’s refugee and migrant rights program.
Upending asylum law “will only exacerbate the chaos across the country and the humanitarian crisis at the border,” she said.
