The undocumented youth temporarily shielded from deportation by President Barack Obama are worried they might be next in line for forced removals after President-elect Donald Trump said he would immediately move against immigrants convicted of crimes.
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Trump said Sunday on CBS's 60 Minutes that he planned to immediately expel as many as 3 million people, with a focus on gang members, drug dealers and other criminals. That was scant comfort to the more than 1 million undocumented known as "Dreamers," who moved into the country as children. They handed over information including fingerprints and relatives' home addresses when they applied for protection under the president's 2012 executive order, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
"We're scared for our lives," said Greisa Martinez, 28, policy director at the nonprofit group United We Dream in Washington, and an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who received shelter from deportation in 2014.
Trump built his campaign on a pledge to drive out the more than 11 million illegal aliens living in the U.S., which would be one of the largest forced expulsions since President Dwight Eisenhower deported more than 1 million Mexicans in the 1950s. Now, as Trump prepares to take office, his plans for fulfilling his central promise are taking shape and leaving many uncertain of the future.
"A large number of immigrants in the country today have to be very concerned," said Muzaffar Chishti, an attorney at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
Obama already has deported more people than any prior president, formally removing almost 2.8 million people since taking office, compared with 2 million under George W. Bush and 870,000 under Bill Clinton.
In 2012, the president issued the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order after a decade of attempts in Congress to pass the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act. The measure would have provided a path to legalization for the namesake Dreamers.
Obama's program entitled more than 1 million people ages 31 and under who were pursuing or had completed an education and who had been in the country for at least five years to receive work permits.
Martinez came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child. She grew up in Dallas, attended Texas A&M University, worked off the books as a used car salesman and lived in constant fear of deportation. In 2014, she was elated when the Deferred Action order gave her the chance to work.
"I cried," she said. "It was the Social Security number. The Social Security number was something that had haunted me since I was an elementary school kid, when I didn't have anything to put in those nine little boxes."
Still, the president's actions, which shielded nearly half of the nation's undocumented population, deeply angered Republicans who saw them as an end-run around the will of the people.
Trump said Sunday that he would begin his crackdown with criminals. He said that after securing the border, he would make a determination on the remaining immigrants. He called them "terrific people," according to a CBS transcript.
And like Obama did with his executive order, Trump can take unilateral action with the stroke of a pen.
About 1.9 million "removable criminal aliens" are in the U.S., according to the Department of Homeland Security. An analysis of those numbers by the Migration Policy Institute found that those include both legal and illegal immigrants who committed a variety of misdemeanor and felony offenses. The institute estimated that, of those, about 820,000 are unauthorized immigrants.
There are an additional half-million fugitives who fled from deportation proceedings and who remain at large, said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which has argued against admitting high numbers of people.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a Bloomberg Television interview Monday that it would cost "billions" to carry out Trump's mass deportations in short order, and that U.S. policy already prioritizes deportation of criminals.
Trump might not be able to move swiftly. Anyone deported would be entitled to a hearing before a judge. Immigration courts already have more than 500,000 people in line, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that distributes government data obtained through freedom-of-information requests. Wait times can exceed three years.
"I don't think there will be 3 million removals in the first couple years," Vaughan said.
Information for this article was contributed by Michael McKee of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 11/15/2016