Sunday, Dec. 15, 2024 | 2 a.m.
A month away from retaking office, President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to deport millions of immigrants calls on using military forces to deport migrants and potentially create detention camps to hold them, he told Time magazine last week.
In Las Vegas, where 33% of the population is Latino, advocates are urging residents to be part of the resistance in protecting their neighbors. Activists told the Sun that action from Nevada lawmakers and residents is required to prevent potentially disastrous consequences for the state.
“If you happen to know (an immigrant family), now is the time to step up and offer (help),” said Las Vegas immigration attorney Hardeep Sull, who stressed that people can intervene and ask immigration officials why someone is being apprehended.
“Nevadans typically are good neighbors,” Sull added. “We mind our business, but we step up, as we have over and over in crises, to help a neighbor.”
Athar Haseebullah, executive director of the Nevada ACLU, bluntly said, “The moment of truth has arrived” for Nevada’s elected officials.
“There is no time to be wishy-washy,” Haseebullah said. “This is the time for the people who stand for these types of issues to rise and to show what they’re capable of and how they plan on protecting the people of this state.”
The role of Nevada’s lawmakers became more apparent last week with Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo — who had been largely quiet on mass deportations as recently as Monday — signing onto a joint statement with 25 other Republican governors endorsing Trump’s immigration plan.
The letter released Wednesday focused on deporting “dangerous criminals, gang members and terrorists.”
“We stand ready to utilize every tool at our disposal — whether through state law enforcement or the National Guard — to support President Trump in this vital mission,” the group of governors wrote. “The time for action is now. Together, we will make America safe again.”
Lombardo’s office did not respond to multiple requests from the Sun for comment.
Combating deportation “involves the entire community, much broader than just the community organizations,” said Alissa Cooley, managing attorney at the UNLV Immigration Clinic. “We’re all neighbors. We all live in the same community and we all want the same thing: We just want to be happy and live our lives.”
What’s being done
Nevada’s 184,000 undocumented immigrants make up 9% of the state’s workforce, according to the American Immigration Council, providing over $400 million in state and local taxes. Around one-tenth of the state’s households have at least one undocumented person, Pew Research Center found this year.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., has been pushing outgoing President Joe Biden to protect “Dreamers,” or people who immigrated to the United States at a young age now protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and immigrants living with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) before Trump takes office.
Biden has the power to extend TPS protections for immigrants from Nicaragua and El Salvador while creating new protections for immigrants originating from Ecuador, according to Cortez Masto. She also asked Biden to expedite DACA renewals.
“Many of these immigrants, along with so many of our Dreamers, have been living and working in our communities for years,” Cortez Masto said Wednesday at a news conference. “President Biden should act now to protect these immigrant communities and keep families together.”
Haseebullah said the ACLU would be prepared for Trump’s proposed “mass sweeps.”
The Trump White House is planning to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to raid churches, schools and hospitals, reversing a 13-year-old policy, NBC News reported last week.
Last month, Tom Homan, the incoming “border czar” and Trump’s former head of ICE, said “worksite operations have to happen.”
“There’s still Fourth Amendment and 14th Amendment protections that apply for those businesses,” Haseebullah said, referring to constitutional protections for birthright citizenship and against unreasonable searches and seizures.
“There’s broad discretion when people get caught up in the immigration system for removals,” he said. “The process is not quick; it’s not easy. It’s very expensive, and the notion that we’re somehow going to devote public resources to this within the state of Nevada is just shocking.”
Haseebullah said the ACLU will also be ready to litigate constitutional violations brought on by local law enforcement aiding deportation efforts, something endorsed in the letter signed by Lombardo and the other Republican governors.
In 2019, while Lombardo was Clark County sheriff, Metro Police ended its partnership with ICE’s 287(g) program that allowed state and local agencies to act as immigration enforcement. Lombardo, however, changed his tune to appeal to voters during his gubernatorial campaign. He boasted at a campaign event that 10,000 undocumented persons had been deported under his leadership.
Sull said most business owners she interacts with as an immigration attorney don’t want to see their workers deported either. Time and again, she’s seen managers and co-workers appear in immigration court to testify to her clients’ character.
“Businesses are not really keen on this. This is going to be a huge disruption in what is everyday business,” Sull said. Employers are “already taking steps now. If they can find a way to help them proactively, they will.”
UNLV’s Immigration Clinic will be running community workshops on immigrants’ rights over the next month before Trump takes office. Cooley said the clinic was not trying to instill fear, but it was trying to relay the message that people should be paying attention and preparing instead of waiting “until it may be too late.”
For Nevada’s undocumented immigrants, she recommended making paperwork showing they’ve been in the United States for at least two years easily accessible.
Under expedited removal, which currently doesn’t apply to people apprehended in interior states like Nevada, someone who can’t prove that they’ve been in the U.S. for two years could be quickly deported without a hearing.
“A lot of times, those documents can’t be found, can’t be accessed or it takes too long to gather all of them and get them to the attorney to matter,” Cooley said.
She said files should be stored physically in a safe location and that people could create Google Drive accounts with the documents to share with someone “on the outside” if detained.
Internally, the clinic will be ratcheting down on the number of cases it works. Cooley said the clinic was making sure it could dedicate resources to whatever happens after Trump’s inauguration next month.
Still, with only four attorneys able to represent people in detention and a limited support staff, the clinic won’t be able to represent everyone.
“Having Lombardo permit the president to use (the) Nevada National Guard, it’s a danger. It basically brings the border to our community, and we’re not a border state,” Cooley said. “It mostly is going to instill a whole lot of fear in people, more fear than there already is.”
Laura Martin, the executive director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN), said she was trying to be realistic when discussing what Trump might bring after taking office Jan. 20.
“Trump is a liar too, just like Joe Lombardo, and so what he may say is hypothetical. He may just freaking do it, or it may even be worse,” Martin said. “We want people to make sure they have a plan for their family. … We don’t want people to sit and wait for anything bad to happen.”
For those wanting to fight against deportations, Cooley said volunteering for groups like PLAN, one of the clinic’s partner organizations, was a good start.
Lombardo’s metamorphose
Haseebullah said he wasn’t bothered by Lombardo’s earliest statements this week. At the Western Governors Association winter meeting Monday, the Republican governor said the “devil’s in the details” when it comes to using the National Guard to deport migrants.
“It’s too soon to opine on the nebulous or the unknown. A lot of things I know get promised during campaigns, and then the practicality of implementing those comes to bear,” he said at a news conference. “There’s still time to make those decisions on how the states individually will respond.”
Haseebullah said it was “probably an appropriate initial” message but the joint statement with the Republican Governors Association that came out two days later was “disgusting.”
The governors wrote they were united in supporting Trump’s “unwavering commitment to make America safe again” by deporting “illegal immigrants who pose a threat.”
Nevada’s immigration activists had a seemingly unanimous exasperated response to Lombardo joining the group, which included all but one Republican governor in the country.
The Nevada Immigrant Coalition — made up of local unions and organizations such as Make the Road Nevada, Planned Parenthood Votes and UNLV’s immigration clinic — said carrying out Trump’s plan would harm residents regardless of legal status.
“Nevadans will instead see an increase in racial profiling and targeting,” the coalition’s spokesperson wrote. “Lombardo aligning with the incoming administration on mass deportations will destroy Nevada’s communities and economy when he should instead be focusing on issues like the rising cost of rent.”
Tai Sims, a spokesperson for the Nevada Democratic Party, wrote in a statement to the Sun that Lombardo was ignoring bipartisan efforts to reform immigration to side with Trump.
“Lombardo is embracing Trump’s reckless push for mass deportation that will harm Nevada’s economy, increase costs for our working families, tear families and children apart and do nothing to actually make us safer,” Sims wrote.
Sull also pushed back on the narrative that migrants are causing heightened levels of crime while at the same time getting a free ride.
Many studies have found that undocumented immigrants are associated with less crime compared with Americans, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. And while the Republican Governors Association wrote that the Biden administration refused to uphold the “rule of law,” Sull said that’s happening already.
“I’ve represented a lot of individuals in court that their only offense was a DUI, so I don’t need to hear it. Americans get to post a bond and then they come out,” she said. “But that’s not even possible in immigration court. It’s almost impossible to get them out of jail until the entire proceeding has been resolved.”
Martin said Lombardo needed to “talk straight” to the Nevadans regarding what he sees as the state’s role in Trump’s deportation efforts.
“He needs to stop bluffing. … People are scared and they want assurance,” the PLAN executive director said. “Nevadans need affordable utilities. We need affordable rent. I haven’t heard him talk about any of that. All I’ve heard him do is wait for Trump to tell him what to do, and Nevadans deserve better than that.”