After the results of the 2024 presidential election, violent anti-immigrant rhetoric and media depictions of “militarized mass deportations” increased. Response to the threats of mass deportation were varied. Human rights organizations and grass-roots immigration advocates were not derailed by the 2024 presidential election outcome. On November 6, 2024, the hosts of a local California Central Coast podcast Chicas Politicas, proclaimed that this is not the end of their advocacy or work in immigration reform and migration justice.[i] This sentiment was shared among immigration advocates in the weeks leading up to the 2025 inauguration. Organizations such as the Detention Watch Network avidly held Know Your Rights campaigns and Family Preparedness Plans to meet the moment. While organizations and advocates responded with preparation, some Christian churches responded with silence and others responded with practical resistance tactics. This paper will summarize key observations about local, regional, and national responses to the threat of mass deportations championed by Trumpian politics. Based on an emic ethnography, this paper engages three predominant responses to the Mass Deportation Rhetoric (MDR): preparation, silence, and resistance.
While my research was conducted between May 2023 and March 2025, this paper will focus on my participant observations between October 2024 and March 2025. My research is based on a seemingly wealthy, small, and leaning liberal (with pockets of conservative) county on the central coast of California. The county is supported by underpaid agricultural, construction, and service laborers who are undocumented and their mixed status households. I interviewed twenty interlocutors with varying degrees of immigration status and followed their sentiments prior to, during, and after the 2024 presidential election. As an emic ethnography, I describe my own efforts to stymie the violence caused by mass deportations. I partnered with two local and one regional immigration advocacy groups and learned the modes of agency and tactics of resistance that they employed.
Scholars point out the resemblance between current U.S. immigration policy and systems of control and incarceration. Barbara Sostaita refers to the carceral system to illustrate the criminalization of people who seek asylum in Sanctuary Everywhere (2024). Natalia Molina describes the creation of anti-immigrant and race-based immigration laws as the immigration regime in her 2014 book, How Race is Made in America. Kay Fischer and Mario Espinoza-Kulick utilize the term crimmigration to connote the increasingly and intentionally close connection between the criminalization process and immigration policy in Introduction to Ethnic Studies (2023). The terms carceral system, immigration regime, and crimmigration, and territorial racism indicate similar phenomenon but in distinct ways. Each scholar notices the entanglement between local and national systems of control.
Migration analysts of the U.S.-Mexico border provide a mixed account of the impact of the 2024 election year and the number of new arrivals in the United States. Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America reports that immediately following the election results, the number of Border Patrol (BP) captures sharply decreased.[ii] In November, data from the Customs and Border Protection report published on December 19th indicated 46,612 BP captures, “the smallest monthly apprehensions number since July 2020.”[iii] However, Isacson also reports that BP apprehensions in Texas started to increase again in the middle of December, one month before the Presidential Inauguration. With Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy set to return and promises of mass deportations aided by military force, a few migrants have either turned themselves in or were deterred from crossing.
Amidst this backdrop, immigration advocates attempted to refocus undocumented people and their loved ones away from fear and towards action. During one weekly meeting for Spanish and Mixteco-speaking parents in an under-resourced neighborhood, instead of talking about parenting strategies, parents wanted to talk about how the election results would impact their everyday life. Most of the group shared feelings of confusion, fear, and frustration. A few in the group, one older lady and a younger couple, encouraged everyone to seguir adelante, to keep going to work and school. The agency of seguir adelante was repeated by a number of my interlocutors and community partners during the interviews without provocation. My paper will go over regional and national efforts to prepare undocumented community members and share stories where these efforts proved crucial for the prevention of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests.
One glaringly loud response to mass deportation among several churches in my research area is that of silence. I will make the case that silence is a form of agency but when understood through the lens of Christian Nationalism it is a form of complicity. This section will survey Matthew Taylor’s The Violent Take it By Force to decipher the reaction of silence and anti-immigrant preaching among Pentecostal churches of the Central Coast.
The paper will end with outlining the tactical resistance methods from everyday migrants (including my community partners and interlocutors) to regional non-profit and pro-immigrant organizations. I title this section “The Agency of Resistance in an Epistemological and Practical Mode” to connote the significance of maintaining both an epistemological resistance to re-colonization and a practical resistance to mass deportations. In this section, I center the voices of my community partners and interlocutors as they resist a form of mental colonization that deems their/our experiences as undignified and our lives as disposable. I also detail the strategic systems that were quickly developed by one local organization to respond in real-time to a deportation arrest. In the end, this paper will argue that preparation, silence, and resistance are not new responses to the tactic of fear-mongering rhetoric but that preparation and resistance reinvent themselves in new, strategic, and impactful ways. As my community partners emphasize, we seguimos adelante, keep working towards immigration justice and reform that centers human dignity and well-being.
[i] Yessenia Echevarria and Rita Campoverde, Chicas Politicas Podcast,November 6, 2024. Accessed December 3, 2024. https://rss.com/podcasts/chicaspoliticas/1741048/.
[ii] Adam Isacson, “Weekly U.S. – Mexico Border Update: Migration trends, Mass deportation, Border wall parts,” News by WOLA, Dec 20, 2024. Accessed December 20, 2-2024. https://www.wola.org/2024/12/weekly-u-s-mexico-border-update-migration-trends-mass-deportation-border-wall-parts/.
[iii] Ibid.
After the results of the 2024 presidential election, violent anti-immigrant rhetoric and media depictions of “militarized mass deportations” increased. Response to the threats of mass deportation were varied. Human rights organizations and grass-roots immigration advocates were not derailed by the 2024 presidential election outcome. Organizations such as the Detention Watch Network avidly held Know Your Rights campaigns and Family Preparedness Plans to meet the moment. While organizations and advocates responded with preparation, some Christian churches responded with silence and others responded with practical resistance tactics. This paper will summarize key observations about local, regional, and national responses to the threat of mass deportations championed by Trumpian politics. Based on an emic ethnography, this paper engages three predominant responses to the Mass Deportation Rhetoric: preparation, silence, and resistance.