Yale Daily News

Backdropped by the messages “Deport Illegals Now” and “End Migrant Crime,” former President Donald Trump condemned illegal crossings at the Mexican-U.S. border during an Oct. 12 rally in Aurora, Colorado.

“[Vice President] Kamala [Harris] has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world … from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions,” Trump said at the rally. “She has had them resettled here beautifully in your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”

For six New Haven immigration attorneys and activists, Trump’s aggressive anti-immigrant rhetoric evokes memories of his first term, marked by procedural chaos and widespread fear in immigrant communities. 

In conversations with the News about a possible second Trump presidency, all six painted a picture of continuity with — and an intensification of — the restrictive immigration policies of Trump’s first term. 

But almost a decade since Trump was elected, attorneys and activists aim to be better prepared. 

With Americans viewing immigration as the nation’s second-most pressing issue, both Trump and Harris have promised to bolster border security in their presidential bids. 

Trump, specifically, has upped the ante on his anti-immigrant rhetoric. He promises to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants in the millions, reinstate his 2017 travel ban on majority-Muslim countries and build camps to detain immigrants.

“Looking ahead, I would think more chaos, certainly more draconian changes to immigration policy,” Sister Mary Ellen Burns LAW ’89, executive director of Fair Haven’s Apostle Immigrant Services, told the News. “And of course, that means a lot of our time invested in keeping up.”

The Trump and Harris campaigns did not respond to the News’ request for comment.

Heightened chaos, immigrant fears during Trump’s first term

Trump’s first term was a “completely chaotic” period for Burns. Rapidly evolving immigration policies required Burns to constantly relearn clients’ eligibility and application minutiae.

Burns was echoed by other New Haven immigration attorneys and community activists. One major shift in immigration policy, they said, was Trump’s reduction of the number of asylum seekers admitted to the U.S.

In 2020, Trump capped the number of refugees at 15,000, a historic low since the 1980 law that established the annual refugee ceiling. Former President Barack Obama set the ceiling at 85,000 during the 2016 fiscal year, and President Joe Biden set it at 62,500 in 2021.

Trump’s administration also required refugee resettlement agencies to resettle at least 100 refugees each year in order to keep receiving federal funding. More than 100 refugee resettlement agencies nationwide shut down throughout his first term. 

Maggie Mitchell Salem, executive director of New Haven’s Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, told the News that IRIS managed to stay afloat because of steady donations. Other Connecticut refugee resettlement agencies, such as the Catholic Charities, Archdiocese of Hartford resettlement program, closed because of insufficient funding.

Though Trump campaigned on the promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, his immigration enforcement lagged behind that of his predecessor. During Trump’s time in office, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement made 549,000 arrests and carried out 935,000 removals, down 17 and 24 percent, respectively, from Obama’s second term.

Still, Burns and Tabitha Sookdeo ENV ’26, executive director of undocumented youth advocacy organization Connecticut Students for a Dream, emphasized the negative impact of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. 

“People were afraid; even people who didn’t have reason to be afraid were afraid,” Burns said.

Burns added that under Trump, immigrants faced an increased risk of deportation for simply applying to legal pathways for citizenship. If immigrants were denied, they could be routed to removal proceedings. 

For example, the U.S.’s Violence Against Women Act provides undocumented domestic abuse victims — who were abused by a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident — with a special pathway to lawful immigration status.

“The old policy was always, ‘we’re not going to seek to have you deported if you bring yourself to our attention through one of these applications, because we don’t want to frighten people off,’” Maureen Abell, an immigration lawyer at the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, told the News. 

Yet during Trump’s first term, undocumented people whose applications for VAWA special visas were denied were often placed in removal proceedings. 

The Trump administration also tightened the definition of public charge, a factor that determines if an undocumented person receives legal permanent residency, based on their likelihood of becoming primarily dependent on government assistance. Some local undocumented community members, Sookdeo said, avoided food pantries despite being food insecure because of worries about their public charge evaluation.

Burns said that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric filtered down into individual interactions with immigration agency employees.

Throughout Trump’s first term, Burns accompanied many of her clients to their interviews at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Hartford, hoping to prevent miscommunications between applicants and immigration officers. During one interview, in which Burns represented a U.S. citizen petitioning for his father’s naturalization, she remembers the immigration officer saying, “it is my job to try to find reasons to deny this.”

The officer found issue with the petitioning son as well, questioning his grant of naturalization and his prior green card approval, according to Burns.

“This guy really took the Trump rhetoric and ran with it,” she said.

A spokesperson for the USCIS Hartford office did not immediately respond to the News’ request for comment.

Abell said that application forms frequently changed during the Trump administration, leading applications to be rejected because attorneys accidentally used outdated versions of the forms. 

She recalled “ridiculous policies” on application forms, ones that would counterproductively prolong and complicate applications. For example, applicants were required to fill in every blank space — including fields that the forms state the applicant should skip if not applicable, such as information about their spouse. 

“The more work hours every case requires, the more [attorneys] have to charge — so that prices more people out of representation — and also just the less work they can get done in a day, and therefore the fewer clients they can represent,” Abell said. “More people weren’t able to access legal services by just dozens and dozens of stupid, tiny things like that.”

Preparations for a possible second Trump presidency

Sookdeo was “caught off guard” by Trump’s 2016 presidential win, a sentiment echoed by other local immigrant activists and attorneys. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, she joined a group of over 60 Connecticut organizations preparing for a potential second Trump administration. 

Trump and his strategists promise to go beyond the restrictive immigration policies of his first term, initiating mass raids and forcing local law enforcement collaboration with federal immigration authorities.

“This time around, we’re just trying to be coordinated, because we owe that to our communities,” Sookdeo said.

Attorneys and immigrant advocates said they have strengthened communication between organizations and aim to boost immigrants’ awareness of their rights and help undocumented people feel safer. 

Addison Dickens, an immigration attorney at IRIS, said she has met with other organizations since January to prepare for the next administration. One aim they have identified is combating misinformation among immigrants, often spread through WhatsApp and Facebook, about ICE’s authority and immigrants’ eligibility for benefits under the next president.

John Jairo Lugo, community organizing director of New Haven immigrant advocacy group Unidad Latina en Acción, told the News his top priority is educating fellow immigrants on their rights, especially if Trump is reelected.

“You knock on the door of an immigrant and they open the door,” he said in Spanish. “The police stop them and they start to talk. People don’t understand that they have basic rights: the right to remain silent, the right to not open their door, the right to have a lawyer, the right to not be detained simply because of the color of their skin.”

The immigrant attorneys and activists expressed concern about Trump’s mass deportation plans and increasingly anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Though Lugo acknowledged that Trump did not fulfill his promises to deport millions of undocumented immigrants during his first term, Lugo said the former president has had four years to shape a more concrete mass deportation plan.

Salem recalled a recent conversation with an immigrants rights activist who has begun advising undocumented immigrants to select a provisional guardian for their children in case they are deported. “These are unimaginable conversations to have to think of,” Salem said. 

Both Lugo and Abell pointed to ICE’s increased courthouse arrests of non-criminal undocumented people during Trump’s first term, which discouraged immigrant communities from reporting crime. In preparation for a possible second Trump presidency, Abell has been researching whether courts could accommodate remote appearances in order to protect the safety of undocumented immigrants.

Burns also anticipates that a second Trump administration would re-implement bureaucratic measures, such as excessive background checks, to slow down the process of granting immigration pathways. 

Increased vitriol towards immigrant communities during a possible second Trump presidency worries Sookdeo and Lugo.

“He empowers a ton of racists that until now have remained quiet, because it’s not politically correct to speak against immigrants or Black people or minorities,” Lugo said in Spanish. “But with Trump, everyone talks to you openly and insults you openly.”

Regardless of the election outcome, though, the activists and attorneys plan to continue pushing for immigration reform — just as many of them have for decades, spanning multiple presidential administrations. 

Lugo emphasized that New Haven’s immigrant community isn’t going anywhere, pointing to the crucial role migrant workers play in the New Haven, and overall American, economy. 

“This country can’t survive without immigrants,” he said in Spanish. 

In the 2016 presidential election, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 carried New Haven with 86.4 percent of the vote.