Three months ago, U.S. Border Patrol officers parked in front of Ana Calles’ house in New Orleans. That morning Calles, 34, left home early to operate her food truck, selling popular dishes from her home country, El Salvador. Her two brothers – one older, one younger – her partner and her nephew all piled into a truck also heading to work. Shortly thereafter the CBP officers pulled the four men over and arrested them. They called Calles to tell her they were in federal immigration custody.
“I felt like my world was falling apart in just seconds,” Calles said, speaking through an interpreter.
Calles said federal immigration authorities sought her brother after he was arrested by New Orleans Police Department on a drunk driving charge.
PHOTOS: Activists march through Central Business District to protest Trump after he wins second term
She said he went to court, paid a fine and committed to community service, for which he got a letter of recommendation from the church whose food pantry where he volunteered. She said he started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
“I feel like he’s been treated like the worst of criminals, even when he’s done everything to make right by what he did,” Calles said.
Calles’ older brother was deported to El Salvador. Her younger brother, her nephew and her partner were released on bond as their immigration cases make their way through the courts, according to their attorney, Jeremy Jong.
With the election of Donald Trump — who has repeatedly characterized Latin American and other non-European immigrants as violent criminals and vowed to conduct mass deportation once he takes office in January — Calles fears that many other families may soon face similar ordeals.
And it’s not only newly emboldened federal immigration agencies, such as Customs & Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that concern her.
She’s also worried about local law enforcement, especially in a state like Louisiana, where Trump-aligned Gov. Jeff Landry has vowed to take a harder stance on immigration, including by encouraging local law enforcement agencies to aid in federal immigration enforcement.
Earlier this year, Landry signed a bill that bans police departments and sheriff’s offices from adopting so-called “sanctuary policies,” which limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The New Orleans Police Department has such a policy, adopted at the urging of the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the NOPD’s long-running federal consent decree.
If that policy is abandoned or modified to comply with the state law, Calles said she fears immigrants will be fearful of dealing with the police at all, seeing them only as agents of Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“I think the immigrant community won’t want to call the police even when they’re victims,” Calles said. “I think they’ll be further victimized if police and ICE collaborate, because who’s going to call the police only to end up deported or arrested?”
‘It keeps me up at night’
Jong, an attorney with Al Otro Lado, a national nonprofit offering legal support to immigrants, said Louisiana’s new law is an “attempt to force local law enforcement to do ICE’s job.”
He imagined a scenario in which the federal government under Trump, the state government and local law enforcement agencies are all working together to arrest, detain and deport immigrants.
“It keeps me up at night.” Jong said. “When all these forces are cooperating together, all putting their boots on the necks of immigrants, bad stuff is going to happen.”
Jong remembered Trump’s first term, when, in 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement – with support from the DOJ – conducted raids on poultry processing plants in Mississippi, arresting nearly 700 people. He said those operations had “devastating effects” on immigrant communities that are “still not recovered” from them, and he’s concerned that raids will ramp up again once Trump is back in the White House.
On January 25, 2017, four days into his presidency, Trump signed an executive order that rescinded Obama-era policies to prioritize immigrants convicted of serious violent crimes for deportation in favor of expanding arrests of all undocumented immigrants.
According to a report released by libertarian think tank the Cato Institute last week, the first Trump administration targeted noncriminal immigrants far more than those with violent criminal records.
According to the report, under Trump, immigration authorities released thousands of immigrants with convictions for violent crimes, instead prioritizing people who’d crossed the U.S. border to seek asylum in the United States or who violated civil immigration law by entering the country without documentation.
‘Undocumented people don’t have a voice’
At a rally in Lafayette Square on Wednesday, Martha Alguera, an activist with Union Migrante, an immigrants’ rights organization in New Orleans, said she’s worried that a second Trump term will mean greater expansion of Louisiana’s immigrant detention capacity, which grew significantly under the first Trump administration. Louisiana has consistently held the second largest detained immigrant population in the country in recent years.
“I’m just scared that more people are going to be sent here from the border to the detention centers, and that’s going to be taxing on the small group of activists that are spread throughout the whole state,” Alguera said in an interview at the rally.
At the rally, Alguera’s daughter, Lola Bolivar, 12, recited a poem that she wrote in class following the news of Trump’s win.
“To what is a Latinx girl in a world full of racists?” she said. “Illegal, criminal, dirty.”
For Bolivar, who’s grown up watching her immigrant mother support the immigrants’ rights movement, the election signaled a backsliding. She sees the treatment of undocumented people in the United States as “unfair.”
“You always see them doing construction, you always see them rebuilding the country,” Bolivar said in an interview. “But undocumented people don’t have a voice.”
Another speaker at the protest, Ramon Peralta, 63, from Nicaragua, arrived in New Orleans in 2005 to help rebuild the city after Hurricane Katrina. In an interview after he spoke he said the work was grueling.
“It was a massive, monumental lift, because houses were just rotten.” Peralta said through an interpreter.
He remembered when in 2005, then-Mayor Ray Nagin said he wanted to ensure New Orleans was not “overrun by Mexican workers” during the rebuilding process. (In fact, the largest group of Latin American immigrants in the city came from Honduras, not Mexico.)
“It could have been a moment of xenophobia,” Peralta said. “Later on, they saw the importance and the contribution of immigrants and how hard we worked. … Thanks to our presence, they came back to their homes. A lot of people cried when they saw their houses.”
He now works for a construction and landscaping company building pools and detailing lawns in Louisiana and other states, including Kansas. He said he’s recently worked in houses with Trump signs.
“A lot of people we work for don’t know who we are. They just follow what people have told them about us – that we’re criminals here to assault people and rape and kill. It’s not true.” Peralta said. “We have to keep organizing. We have to keep fighting to raise consciousness among the general people of who we really are as immigrants.”
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