Advocates lean on Walz to protect immigrants from Trump’s proposed raids

WASHINGTON — In the weeks before the election, the ACLU in Minnesota met with Gov. Tim Walz’s staffers in an effort to make sure protections of the state’s immigrants remained in place if Donald Trump won the White House again.

“We wanted to create a ‘bright line’ that could not be crossed,” said Julio Murphy Zelaya, an advocacy director with the Minnesota ACLU.

Zelaya and others are seeking assurances that the state maintains and even strengthens a “firewall” that protects immigrants in the face of Trump’s promised crackdown on the foreign born.

The ACLU has asked for a special session of the state Legislature to limit the impact of Trump’s immigration policies in the state.

The ACLU and other immigration advocates want companies and state law enforcement agencies to be limited in the information they may collect, use and share with federal immigration agencies.

They also want to ensure that state and local law enforcement agencies do not help enforce federal immigration law and that law enforcement officials refrain from asking the immigration status of those with whom they come in contact.   

And in its request for a “firewall,” the ACLU said it wants the state to oppose and denounce the use of the federalized National Guard or military against immigrant Minnesotans and nonviolent protesters.  

Since those meetings, Trump has been elected the nation’s next president and repeated his vow to slash immigration and ramp up deportations. Trump said that on the first day of his new term, he will invoke a “national emergency” to allow him to implement mass roundups of immigrants who are not citizens with the help of the military.  

The threat of a crackdown has reverberated throughout Minnesota’s immigrant communities, prompting a flood of calls to immigration lawyers who say there’s been a rush in applications for citizenship. President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama took steps to tighten immigration, but Trump has taken the targeting of the foreign born a step further.

In his first term he also sought to end programs that gave immigrants provisional legal status, so the concerns in Minnesota’s immigrant communities are widespread. 

“The fear is very palpable,” Zelaya said.

He said the governor’s staff “indicated they were also concerned” about Trump’s immigration policies “and would get back to us.”

Walz has responded to one request. He says he will not call for a special session of the Legislature, currently scheduled to go into its normal session on Jan. 14.

Still, Zelaya is confident the ACLU and other immigrant advocates who were blindsided by the immigration policies of the first Trump administration are now better prepared for battle.

“They have their plan and we have our plan,” Zelaya said.

Provisional status

Those who would be the most vulnerable in an immigration crackdown are not only the undocumented, but also those who have permission to live and work in the United States on a provisional basis.

“These programs are considered more permanent than they are,” said Julia Decker, policy director at the Immigrant Law Center in St. Paul. “But anyone who is not a citizen can be deported under current law.”

One federal program called Temporary Protection Status (TPS) was created by Congress in 1990 to give nationals of certain countries confronting war, environmental disasters or other extraordinary conditions refuge in the United States for a limited time, with the opportunity to renew their applications until the president thinks this protection from deportation is not needed.

Somalis, Nicaraguans, Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans, Salvadorans, Sudanese, Ukrainians and other nationals are eligible for this status. But Trump has the authority to decline to renew these programs.

The programs are administered nation-by-nation and have different deadlines for renewal. Those with the most immediate deadlines are the TPS programs for Salvadorans that will end March 10 and one for Ukrainians that will end April 20.

According to the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS,) there were 4,551 immigrants with TPS protections in Minnesota last year.

Trump disparaged some immigrants with provisional legal status during his presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, calling Haitians with that status “illegals” and falsely accusing them of eating the pets of residents of Springfield, Ohio.

Another temporary program that allows people from certain countries to enter the United States is called humanitarian parole. This allows people from nations such as Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to apply for temporary U.S. residence and work permits if they pass a rigorous background check and have a U.S. sponsor who will vouch for their financial support.

Like TPS, the White House has authority to end or restrict the humanitarian parole program.

Trump also has the authority to end another program that protects from deportation the children who have arrived in the United States with undocumented parents. Called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era program has helped hundreds of thousands of immigrant children. According to the USCIS, there were 4,540 DACA youth living in Minnesota as of March of last year.

Not all immigrants in Minnesota with provisional status are fearful of a second Trump presidency.

Vladimir Poveda, a Nicaraguan who emigrated to Minnesota in 2005, is the president of Liga Venezolana de Softball de Minnesota. He started the league with two teams six years ago, and it has now expanded to 22 teams as the number of Venezuelans moving to the state has increased.

He said some Venezuelans with TPS status or admitted to the United States under humanitarian parole are concerned it will end.

But others who left Venezuela because of the authoritarian regime of socialist President Nicolas Maduro and the country’s dismal economy are confident Trump’s opposition to Maduro will keep them safe. Poveda said he’s not sure of that.

“I’m trying to teach them that it’s not just politics; it’s your livelihood and life that you should be concerned about,” he said.

One thing that concerns those with provisional permission to live in the United States is that, when filing for their special status, immigrants gave federal immigration agencies home addresses, names of family members and other information that could help U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (ICE) find them in an effort to deport them.

“The government has a lot of their information,” Zelaya said.

‘Shock and Awe’

Still, immigrant advocates expect ICE to focus on rounding up undocumented immigrants in workplace raids — at poultry and meat processing plants and other places — as Trump seeks to keep his promise of massive deportations.

It’s difficult to know how many undocumented immigrants are in the United States. The Migration Policy Institute estimates the number at 11.4 million and says that 81,000 live in Minnesota. The largest group of these newcomers to Minnesota, 35,000, come from Mexico, the institute said.

Trump has signaled he means to keep his campaign promises by tapping immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as his top immigration policy adviser and Tom Homan as the head of ICE. Homan has promised to unleash “shock and awe” at the U.S.-Mexico border and Miller has said that “vast holding facilities” would serve as “staging centers” for the operation.

Last week, a Texas state official offered the federal government more than 1,000 acres near the border to erect detention centers.

Trump may be on shaky legal ground with his plans to use the military to round up immigrants, and the cost of the massive deportations is expected to be prohibitive.

Lindsey Greising, policy counsel at the Minneapolis-based The Advocates for Human Rights, said that by threatening the deportations, the Trump administration may have already completed some of its mission.

“They are banking on the fact that fear will result in self-deportations,” she said.

Greising also said her organization, which provides legal services to asylum seekers, trafficking victims and unaccompanied minors who seek asylum in the United States, “are trying to prepare as much as possible” for Trump’s return to the White House.

Editor’s Note: Ana Radelat wrote this story for MinnPost.com. Radelat is MinnPost’s Washington, D.C., correspondent. 

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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