With Donald Trump in line to be the next president of the United States, immigrant communities across Nevada and the nation are bracing for his promise to carry out the “largest deportation in the history of our country,” removing millions of immigrants in mass roundups and raids. Among the most immediate effects of such a move would be to tear Nevada families apart, experts predict.
Leo Murrieta, executive director of Make the Road Nevada, an immigrant advocacy organization with about 39,000 members statewide, said in a statement on behalf of members that the community was “deeply disheartened and alarmed” by the outcome of the election, adding that the upcoming Trump administration poses a “grave threat” to marginalized communities.
“His campaign has relied on lies and fear-mongering immigrants to divide and weaken our nation. … We … will not sit by as their rights and dignity are under attack,” Murrieta said in a partial statement.
Michael Kagan, director of the UNLV Immigration Clinic—which provides pro bono legal services for immigrants facing deportation—says Trump’s promised mass deportation would be “an attack on the family and the social and economic fabric of our community.”
“That is where we will see family separations in large numbers, because undocumented immigrants do not live separately from citizens and other immigrants. Undocumented immigrants in Las Vegas mostly live in mixed families, where under one roof you have people of all different statuses—citizens, undocumented, lawful residents—all living together, all in one family … going to work and school and coming home to the same house every day,” Kagan says.
According to a study by Pew Research Center released this summer, Nevada is the state with the highest share of households that include an unauthorized immigrant—9% of Nevada households are mixed status.
Across the U.S. about 4.4 million U.S.-born children under 18 live with an unauthorized immigrant parent, accounting for 84% of all minor children living with an unauthorized immigrant parent. What Trump has promised is to separate these families.
To do it, the incoming president has said he will employ the National Guard or military and local law enforcement, pointing to the Eisenhower administration’s deadly “Operation Wetback” in 1954—in which Border Patrol used military-style tactics to round up hundreds of thousands of Mexicans suspected of being in the country illegally, including legal citizens—as a model for the mass deportation he has promised to initiate “on day one.”
“I worry about the involvement of the National Guard … because that could be part of a true reign of terror in our community. I don’t think people, when they hear the phrase ‘mass deportation,’ really understand what this could mean, because almost no one alive today has experienced anything like it,” Kagan says.
It is still unclear how Trump will deliver on his mass deportation promises amid many operational, legal and political challenges. For one, it would be expensive. According to estimates from the American Immigration Council, an immigrant advocacy group, deporting 13 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally would cost an estimated $968 billion over a little more than a decade.
As for specific policies, Kagan says it’s likely Trump will resort to using what is called expedited removal, a procedure created in 1996 by Congress that allows Border Patrol officers to rapidly deport undocumented immigrants without a hearing. Congress in 2004 required that the process only apply to noncitizens that have been picked up within 14 days of arrival in the U.S. and within 100 miles of a U.S. land border. But Trump in 2019 expanded expedited removal, allowing it to be applied to individuals anywhere in the United States who had been in the country for up to two years. Various approaches to expedited removal feature prominently in Trump world’s Project 2025 and Trump alluded to those plans on the campaign trail.
“[It] would allow ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to pick up people and deport them without taking them to a judge. And that is something that they already took steps to do during the first Trump administration in 2019. We [just] didn’t really see the full scale of it, because COVID interrupted its implementation,” Kagan says.
Trump also is likely to revisit his attempt to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the 2012 law that prevents people who came to the U.S. at a young age from being deported. The Supreme Court in 2020 decided that Trump’s attempt to end the program, which covers more than 11,000 Nevadans, was flawed, but said that he could try it again if certain administrative flaws were remedied.
DACA is “before the firing squad,” Kagan says, as Trump is likely to attempt to rescind the program again, spurring possible legal challenges that would end up with a Supreme Court that, since the 2020 DACA decision, gained one Trump appointee and a conservative majority.
Thousands in Nevada with Temporary Protected Status, another form of legal immigration, are also “in the cross hairs” of Trump’s immigration policy changes, Kagan says. Project 2025 has called for the repeal of the program, which allows the Department of Homeland Security to offer temporary deportation protections and work permits to migrants who come from countries where it is difficult or unsafe for them to return.
“One of the things we know from the first Trump administration is that they didn’t just attack people who were in the country without legal authorization. They also blocked and slowed down all legal pathways that included the processing of legal applications for people trying to do it through the existing laws,” Kagan says. “There’s a very significant population of people with temporary protected status who work in Las Vegas, many with good union jobs and raising families and paying mortgages. And I’ve met people in this situation, really anchors of communities [for whom] this threat is definitely very real.”
Trump has said “there is no price tag” for his mass deportation plan. But experts and scholars would disagree. The economic impacts of mass deportation would be massive, says John Tuman, professor of political science at UNLV. It would devastate the workforce in Vegas’ hospitality and leisure industry and lead to worker shortages that could drive housing prices up.
“More than two-thirds of the foreign-born population here in Nevada and in Southern Nevada are people who were born in Mexico … and they make very important contributions in hospitality and leisure. Overall, about 30% of Latinos who are employed are employed in leisure and hospitality,” Tuman says.
Undocumented immigrants also make up 23% of the U.S. construction laborers workforce, according to a 2021 report from the Center for American Progress.
“If you make it more difficult to hire immigrant workers, you’re going to see labor shortages there—which against the backdrop of other ongoing issues, sometimes with supply chains, is not going to help to bring prices down. Quite the opposite,” Tuman says.
President Joe Biden could help curb the potential impacts of Trump’s mass deportation by expediting applications of people who are entitled to legal status but are just waiting for applications to be read, Kagan says.
“There’s a constant backlog, and … one of the things Biden can do in his remaining months is make sure they move as fast as possible for anyone who has an application for a green card or citizenship or an employment authorization.”
As for guidance for immigrants and their allies, Kagan says the UNLV Immigration Clinic is working with community partners on crafting messaging to release to the community.
“I think it’s important for everyone in the community to know that this is a very real threat to people that we all know and interact with every day. … And I think as this transpires, people need to have their eyes open about what’s happening and be ready to speak up and to stand by their neighbors,” Kagan says.
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