Trump’s immigration plan: Is WA ready for mass sweeps with state troops?

At a protest encampment outside the Tacoma gates of one of the largest immigrant detention centers in the country, activist Maru Mora Villalpando said she was ready for whatever the presidential election might bring.

She and other activists who set up the encampment aren’t happy with President Joe Biden’s detention policies. The number of people his administration has detained at the 1,575-bed Northwest ICE Processing Center has climbed to roughly 800 from about 200 during the height of the pandemic. A man died there March 7 for reasons yet unknown.

And Biden’s stance toward immigration has become increasingly tough as the southern border crisis moves to the forefront of the national agenda.

Yet, Mora Villalpando said she knows the policies she deplores will accelerate if former President Donald Trump returns to office.

“We feel more prepared than ever,” she said, pointing to a network of activist groups locally and around the country willing to engage in aggressive civil disobedience.

But are activists really ready? Is Washington?

Trump and his team have laid out a plan for mass roundups of undocumented immigrants and large detention camps holding people awaiting deportation flights. Stephen Miller, a top Trump adviser, said in a November podcast this “monumental” effort would seek to remove at least 10 million undocumented immigrants throughout the country.

Such a crackdown would be far more severe than actions taken under the previous Trump administration. Immigration officials then caused turmoil and panic in some parts of the country, like Washington’s rural Pacific County, by arresting longtime community members, but ultimately carried out fewer deportations than under former President Barack Obama.

To scale deportations up, Miller envisions calling upon National Guard troops. In “unfriendly” states, troops from neighboring cooperative jurisdictions would be sent in. Following this model, one could imagine red-state Idaho’s National Guard descending upon Washington, one of the most hostile states to Trump there is.

Hyperbole? Pasco Mayor and Republican attorney general candidate Pete Serrano thinks so. “I don’t foresee that being a reality,” he said.

Former U.S. Attorney for Western Washington Nick Brown, a Democrat running for the same office, isn’t so sure, suggesting it would be wise to take the former president and his adviser at their word. “We need to have a real wake-up call,” he said.

An “invasion” of troops

Not everyone is sure Trump would have the power to deploy National Guard troops across state borders since they are normally under the command of governors. But Brown and others believe Trump could utilize the Insurrection Act, which gives the president authority to federalize National Guard troops in cases of civil disorder.

Some in Washington would welcome more rigorous immigration enforcement.

Washington GOP Chair Jim Walsh, also a state representative from Aberdeen, this week filed an initiative that would require local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal enforcement of immigration law — currently a violation of the 2019 Keep Washington Working Act.

Walsh said that at town halls he’s been holding across the state, people keep asking him what can be done to reverse so-called sanctuary policies.

Serrano said he is particularly concerned about cartel members and other criminals who might be coming from the southern and northern borders. “We’ve seen a lot of trafficking issues that have picked up here in the Tri-Cities.”

But many Washington leaders lean heavily the other way, citing the desperate conditions undocumented immigrants are often seeking to escape and their contributions to agriculture and other state industries.

Gubernatorial candidate and former member of Congress Dave Reichert, a Republican who has not said if he supports Trump, called the National Guard idea tantamount to having “one state essentially invade another.”

The outcome of the election is far from clear. Some polls have shown Trump leading, others a close match. And it’s a long way to November.

Still, in some communities, fear of a second Trump presidency has taken hold.

An estimated 300,000 immigrants lived in Washington without legal status as of 2021, according to the Pew Research Center. Only eight states have more.

Preparing to leave, trying to stay

Many of Seattle immigration lawyer Vicente Omar Barraza’s clients are putting off buying homes and cars, saving money, and making sure all their kids’ medical needs are taken care of.

“Most people I’ve spoken with are operating on the assumption that if Trump wins, they will be placed in deportation,” Barraza said.

Even Barraza has what he calls a “Plan B,” referring to a house in Mexico. He’s an American citizen. But reflecting the visceral emotions at play, he said: “If Trump wins, I’m afraid he might even come after the immigration attorneys and send me to prison. I’ve never felt so paranoid in my life.”

Others are rushing to take advantage of whatever opportunities they may have to obtain legal status. One potential step toward that goal is through a Seattle-based program for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients.

The government grants DACA recipients, who came to the U.S. illegally as children, permission to live and work in the U.S. on a temporary, renewable basis. However, the person is technically still considered undocumented, Barraza noted.

As such, DACA recipients who leave the country won’t be let back in — unless they get authorization to return through something called “advanced parole.” Only trips for educational, employment or humanitarian purposes qualify.

In 2021, DACA recipient Ray Corona founded Culturally Travel, which offers two-week educational trips to Mexico and other countries that are designed to qualify for advanced parole.

It’s often a chance for DACA recipients to see relatives they haven’t seen in years, or ever. But there’s a less well-known benefit, explained Barraza, who offers services to Culturally Travel’s clients. People who enter the country with advance parole do so legally.

That can smooth the path to getting a green card if someone has married a U.S. citizen or meets other criteria, Barraza said. Trying to do so with only an illegal entry in your past is an onerous process that could require leaving the country for years, with no guarantee of coming back.

“For a lot of us, we are thinking this is the last time for people to be able to do advance parole,” Corona said. As president, Trump attempted to end DACA and recipients’ access to advanced parole, but was stymied by the courts. DACA still faces a legal challenge and, many believe, would face additional blows if Trump takes power.

“Anyone with DACA seems to understand, they need to scramble,” Barraza said. With their quasi-legal status, “DACA’s actually caused some people to fall into a lull,” he said. Now, he’s hearing: “I’ve got to get this done right now.”

Expanding legal teams and hotline operations

The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project is swamped.

“There’s already so many more people who need our services than we have the resources to provide,” said Matt Adams, legal director. The nonprofit devotes most of its resources to representing people applying for visas, asylum and other forms of legal status.

So, no, Adams said, the organization is not exactly ready for another likely explosion of need should Trump win. Still, he said, he and his colleagues are asking: “OK, what can we do?”

The legal advocacy group is soon to add a fifth member to a small team working on litigation challenging government policies and practices. Adams expects lawsuits would proliferate under a Trump administration.

That’s because mass roundups inevitably mean substantial legal violations, Adams said. Immigration officials may raid a workplace and detain large groups of people without individualized suspicion, as required by law. Or, he said, officials could go to an apartment complex with warrants for two or three people, and then “go door to door, start barging into apartments, and arresting all these folks.”

A staffer at the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network in April stepped into the new role of “rapid response” organizer, and announced he is offering immigrants’ rights training and holding monthly meetings to prepare for whatever the political winds may bring. The network is also expanding the number of operators for its hotline, where people can report raids and get immigration attorney referrals and material support.

It’s hard to tell at this point how local governments might respond, or what they would have the power to do. Case in point: Washington lawmakers tried to shut down the Northwest detention center with a 2021 law banning private, for-profit prisons, but state officials conceded they couldn’t enforce it after a California ruling said a similar attempt in that state interfered with federal powers.

Interviews with a wide variety of officials and politicians suggest they’re thinking about Trump’s immigration plan, but are still in early stages of coming up with counterstrategies.

“One word: diplomacy,” Reichert said by email when asked what he would do about a National Guard “invasion.”

Brown said he wants to build up the civil rights division of the attorney general’s office, because he, like Adams, believes mass sweeps would generate lawsuits.

State Sen. Manka Dhingra of Redmond, another Democratic contender for attorney general, said she would make sure all local agencies understand the Keep Washington Working Act prohibits them from participating in immigration enforcement. (An exception is the state Department of Corrections, which last year provided immigration authorities with information about 91 people wanted for deportation proceedings.)

Since Trump’s first days in office, state and local governments have enacted other protections for undocumented immigrants, including legal defense funds supporting nonprofits like the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.

Should mass sweeps happen, pro bono lawyers would surely jump in, too, as they did when Trump issued executive orders banning people from a number of primarily Muslim countries from entering the U.S.

Takao Yamada, a Seattle tech consultant instrumental in setting up a website connecting people affected by Trump’s 2017 travel ban with volunteer lawyers at airports nationwide, said he’s been informally reaching out to previous participants to ask if they’d still be available.

“They’re pretty tired, but they’re up for it,” Yamada said. Tired, he said, because of “a certain amount of burnout and honestly PTSD leftover from that time.”

Even then, the number of volunteer lawyers dwindled as time went on, noted immigration lawyer Tahmina Watson, who also worked on the airport website and cofounded a network of pro bono lawyers. She argues for a system of publicly funded stipends to keep lawyers going.

And burnout is not just a function of past crises. Watson said lawyers and immigrant advocates are overwhelmed now as they seek to help waves of Afghan and Ukrainian refugees and at least 1,000 migrants who have made their way from the southern border to the Riverton Park United Methodist Church in Tukwila.

Buying time

On a March Saturday morning in a former Tukwila bank building, Jennifer Tenorio, a Riverton church case manager, surveyed a roomful of volunteers who turned out for a free legal clinic offering help filing asylum applications.

“It is truly amazing,” Tenorio said. “We could not do this without people who have come out of the woodwork.”

The clinic, one of a series for migrants who have stayed at Riverton, shows how volunteer legal help has progressed since Trump’s first days in office, and suggests a possible model for future crises.

But it’s one with limits. By midday, this clinic was expected to result in about 14 applications. Others have produced more. Still, Paul Soreff, a retired immigration attorney leading the effort, said at the current rate it will take 10 to 15 months to get through Riverton clients — making him doubt the model could be scaled up to meet the need of mass roundups.

Among the first round of volunteers on this day are a University of Washington law student who fled Algeria’s 1990s civil war, a former teacher from Brazil now working as a Bainbridge Island nanny, and a paralegal and former Tukwila City Council member whose son dated a woman stopped on a bus by immigration officials and detained for months at the Tacoma detention center.

Working in pairs of an interpreter and a legally trained volunteer, they will spend the morning meeting with migrants who have moved, with King County funding, from the church to a nearby DoubleTree hotel.

The morning volunteers will take a first run at filling out the asylum applications, going over the copious information needed, some of which has already been entered into an online form created by the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. In the afternoon, adhering to an assembly line of sorts, the lawyers will arrive to meet with clients again and finalize the applications.

“Now, we are not going to be submitting perfect applications,” Soreff cautioned the volunteers. “When I’m doing an asylum application with a client I will spend anywhere from 40 to 100 hours.”

“Some of these clients don’t have what appear to be strong cases,” he continued. The grounds for asylum are fairly narrow, limited to fears of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion. But just filing the application buys them time, he said. “And if you’re buying them time, you may be saving their life.”

It takes an hour or two of answering questions about past addresses, employers and schools for Leonardo to reveal why he, his wife and five kids left Angola and came to the U.S. after a year’s journey.

He was wearing a painful ankle bracelet attached by immigration officials at the border as he sat down at a table with paralegal Verna Seal and interpreter Matheus De Oliveira. Leonardo told the full story gradually, circling back to reveal more details, his quiet, matter-of-fact tone belying the horror of his account.

He worked as a 2022 election observer for Angola’s opposition party. He believed there was fraud and refused to sign a form saying the ruling party won.

Men soon came to his home and beat him up. They returned to rape his wife in front of him. She was pregnant. Their children banged on the bedroom door where their mom was being attacked and cried out for help.

Leonardo said he was later arrested without charges and jailed for weeks.

Now, there’s an important election in this country, and he’s heard Trump wants to send immigrants back to where they came from.

But, speaking through an interpreter, he said he has no way to prepare. “I’m already running away from somewhere. If I have to run away from here, I have nowhere else to go.”

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