Baala Shakya, Contributing Photographer

Tabitha Sookdeo ENV ’26 struggled to fall asleep Tuesday night after watching a red wave steadily spread across the nation’s electoral college map.

Sookdeo — executive director of undocumented youth advocacy organization Connecticut Students for a Dream — estimates that she managed to get an hour of rest before launching into nonstop preparations for President-elect Donald Trump’s second administration.

“I haven’t had time to process the results. I feel like I’m in a trance,” Sookdeo said, describing her state of mind since the Associated Press called Trump’s victory in the presidential race early Wednesday morning. “It’s just been go time. I’ve been on so many calls … People are nervous, people are not sure what to do, but also, people are ready to get going, to protect the community.”

Sookdeo, as well as other New Haven immigrant activists and attorneys, have spent months preparing contingency plans to minimize the harm of a second Trump administration on the local immigrant community. 

Trump’s decisive White House win, coupled with Republicans regaining control of the Senate — and on track to maintain their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives — has heightened anxieties about the president-elect’s planned restrictive immigration policies. 

Trump has promised to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, nix birthright citizenship and expand the U.S. Border Patrol. He also said he would call for Congress to outlaw “sanctuary” cities — municipalities, such as New Haven, that discourage local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

“Now, a president is arriving who has a rhetoric of hatred and xenophobia, and who also controls  the Senate and [possibly] the House,” John Jairo Lugo, who heads the New Haven immigration advocacy group Unidad Latina en Acción, said in Spanish. “It’s like the perfect presidency. He has all the tools at his disposal.”

Activists, attorneys double down on pre-inauguration preparations 

For Sookdeo, preparing for Trump’s second administration has involved meeting with community members, immigrant advocates and city officials, including New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker on Thursday, to discuss how to aid immigrants on the neighborhood, city, state and national levels. 

In a Wednesday morning statement about the election results, Elicker reiterated New Haven’s enduring position as a “place of inclusion and belonging for all,” regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. 

Sookdeo highlighted plans to host “know your rights” workshops and guide individual families through Governor Ned Lamont’s family preparedness plan, a resource for parents worried about being deported and separated from their children.

At New Haven’s Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, or IRIS, immigration attorneys are boosting their support for pro se litigants, or asylum seekers representing themselves in court due to a scarcity of immigration attorneys.

Removal defense lawyer Maggie Rodriguez pointed to a weekly IRIS clinic that guides refugees through the asylum application process. The clinic meets every Saturday for four weeks; its third meeting is this Saturday. Rodriguez said IRIS plans to launch another clinic in the spring.

Lugo predicts that Trump’s reinauguration will lead to a rise in courthouse arrests of non-criminal undocumented people by federal immigration authorities. During the president-elect’s first administration, Lugo and other ULA members often accompanied undocumented immigrants to court in case agents from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services showed up to detain them.

In October 2019, ICE agents tried to arrest Domar Shearer, a Jamaican immigrant who had overstayed his visa, during an unrelated hearing at the Derby courthouse. As Shearer took refuge in the Public Defender’s Office, a handful of ULA activists guarded the courthouse hallway for six hours until the ICE agents left. 

ULA’s strategy is to “create a scandal in the court” by videotaping, photographing and bothering federal immigration authorities until they leave, Lugo said in Spanish. He also plans to reimplement a ULA emergency hotline, which community members could use to contact activists if ICE agents arrived at their home.

Maureen Abell, an immigration attorney at the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, plans to review her caseload and prioritize legal processes that may be restricted once Trump is reinaugurated. 

She anticipates that the number of immigration attorneys may drop once Trump returns to office, with some attorneys retiring or switching to other practice areas “rather than dealing with this again.”

“There’s potentially a point at which [practicing immigration law] doesn’t do any good, and you feel like participating in a system that’s that dysfunctional gives it an illusion of legitimacy,” Abell said.

Despite their worries about the threat Trump’s reelection poses for local immigrants, the activists and attorneys underscored their organizations’ dedication to continuing the fight.

Lugo hopes to better educate New Haven’s immigrant community about their collective organizing power. He cited the 2006 immigration reform protests, an eight-week period where millions of immigrants boycotted work and school in more than 200 cities and towns.

“We have the power to stop the country,” he said in Spanish.

Trump will be sworn into office on Jan. 20, 2025.