NM Searchlight on Trump's immigration impacts....
Molly Molloy
Donald Trump’s victory puts all eyes back on the border
On October 31, Donald Trump landed in Albuquerque at a private aviation hangar, a location he chose for a rally in part because he owes the city half a million dollars from a 2019 event at the Santa Ana Star Center, and he wasn’t welcome at the downtown convention center. He stepped off the plane, took the stage, and almost immediately began calling immigrants criminals.
“They all said, ‘Don’t come,’” he said of his advisers.
“I said, ‘Why?’
“‘You can’t win New Mexico.’
“I said, ‘Look, your votes are rigged. We can win New Mexico. We can win New Mexico.’ And I said, ‘Why? They don’t want to stop the people pouring across the border that are murderers? They’re killers, they’re drug addicts, they’re drug dealers, they’re gang members. Why? New Mexico wants to keep it going like it is?’”
Then he said he believed he’d won New Mexico twice before, and that if God could come down as “the vote counter,” he would win New Mexico, California and “a lot of states.”
Regardless of how fast and effective Trump is at carrying out his mass deportation agenda, his rhetoric will stoke fear in immigrant communities. Immigrants who are victims of crime may be less likely to report what they’ve suffered to law enforcement, for fear of being deported. They may be reluctant to seek out necessary healthcare or ask social services for help. During the first Trump presidency, children of undocumented immigrants were stranded at school after ICE raided their parents’ workplaces in the middle of the day, and some stopped going to school at all because of the threat of deportation and family separation.
Though Trump’s god didn’t descend on New Mexico — which went 52 percent for Vice-President Kamala Harris, 46 percent for Trump — he won more than enough states to take back the presidency.
This victory will have a historic impact on the border regions of New Mexico, Texas, Arizona and California. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump threatened to violate the human rights of immigrants and enact a series of racist and authoritarian changes to the country’s immigration system. He has promised to deport millions of people by deploying the military and National Guard to find, detain and remove anyone living in the U.S. without documentation — measures that would deny them due process. He’s said he will deport students on foreign visas who have protested in favor of Palestinian liberation and screen out immigrants based on ideology. And he has pledged to end birthright citizenship for the children of people without documentation.
These policies would significantly intensify President Joe Biden’s already restrictive immigration positions. Despite the sharp differences in rhetoric between Democrats and Republicans, a fixation on crime has pervaded conversations around immigration in both parties in recent years. Data repeatedly shows that noncitizens in the U.S. do not commit crimes at higher rates than U.S. citizens. But even “relatively progressive” communities “support finding paths to be able to identify criminals that are undocumented,” says Gabriel Sanchez, executive director of the University of New Mexico Center for Social Policy and a nationally recognized expert on New Mexico and Latino politics.
The association of “immigrant” and “criminal” has shaped immigration policy on both sides of the political aisle. Contrary to right-wing portrayals of Biden opening the border, over the course of his term he continued building the border wall, made expedited removals more frequent, and ultimately made it more difficult to obtain asylum.