🤺 engarde!

President Donald Trump’s plans to deport vastly more people living in our communities — whose children attend school alongside the children of US citizens, people who work alongside US citizen employees, who shop in the same stores — might leave us feeling as if there's little the average person can do to keep this from happening.

But many people do not want the immigrants they know to be deported. When Scripps News/Ipsos pollsters asked about the specific potential consequences of mass deportations after the November election, support for deportation plans fell off. Sometimes reliable information is all that’s needed to help immigrants avoid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and anyone can help reduce the unnecessary panic that arrest announcements can generate.

Many Americans, including me, live in states like North Carolina, where sanctuary cities limit local law enforcement collaboration with immigration agents. Our state legislature in North Carolina recently passed a law requiring sheriffs to cooperate with ICE officers by honoring the agency’s request to hold anyone who ends up in jail for two days to give ICE time to decide whether to detain them. Since taking office on January 20, Trump has signed an executive order encouraging the expansion of a program known as 287(g), which allows local law enforcement to take on some ICE functions, and his Department of Homeland Security has said ICE agents can make make arrests without supervisor approval at “sensitive locations” that were previously off-limits, like schools, churches and public demonstrations. Under these conditions, rumors are likely to spread; some of the families our organization, Siembra NC, works with are already keeping their kids home from school.

In 2017, following a previous set of Trump executive orders, immigrant families in North Carolina were inundated by misinformation and rumors about ICE agents hidden in grocery store parking lots and supposed substations near after-school facilities, leading some people to avoid leaving home. There was no Spanish-language rumor verification hotline here in Greensboro, so our organization — which was just a handful of volunteers at the time — created one, giving more people the ability to talk to a live human and ask whether an undated Facebook post they'd seen shared by someone else was real. We also trained hundreds of volunteers with driver’s licenses to participate in an ICE Watch neighborhood watch program, giving immigrant parents a way to verify the rumors people forwarded them in WhatsApp.

Sometimes the hotline reports we received were not paranoid suspicions. After we began offering trainings in immigrant neighborhood parking lots and circulating Spanish-language videos with tips for how to spot ICE agents, our volunteers came into contact with federal agents. After a volunteer confirmed an officer’s identity, they would alert neighbors to the agent’s presence, and our dispatch team would send a text message to our contacts in the area. ICE agents almost never carry judicial warrants giving them the authority to enter private homes or businesses without permission, so they often wait to make an arrest when the person they’re looking for leaves their home or car. And in every case we worked on, when the agents realized they were being watched, they abandoned their stakeout.

When ICE did make arrests, the majority of people detained whose families we supported were the family’s primary wage earner; the detention created an economic crisis as much as an attack on the family’s psychological and emotional stability. Additionally, there was often little public assistance, beyond food banks, for which the remaining family members qualified. So we started an emergency cash-assistance fund to provide small grants, usually between $300 and $2,000, to help the family stave off eviction and afford the first payment to an immigration attorney. The fund also became a way for local immigrants who were not targeted by ICE to provide support.

Dozens of women stepped up to make and sell tamales and pupusas after church mass or in school parking lots at community fundraisers, and the funds were often sent to someone whose family had experienced detention that same week. Over and over, we heard the phrase “Hoy por ellos, mañana por nosotros,” meaning "Today for them, tomorrow for us.” Local elected officials often pledged contributions as well. But the financial need may be much greater this time. We have listed some tips for anyone who wants to start a hotline, neighborhood watch, or cash-assistance program in our organizing playbook.

When construction foremen, line cooks, and seamstresses were detained, hardship often followed for their employers — many of them in counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. When we visited local businesses after a detention as part of our effort to teach workers and employers how to defend their rights, often they did not know ICE agents had to present a judicial warrant in order to interview one of their employees in any area off-limits to the general public. These informal education programs are relatively simple to begin, starting with a few photocopies of fact sheets and an interest in building relationships with business owners who might be more reliant on immigrant labor.

Sometimes this kind of education turned into advocacy. For example, when a Republican sheriff proposed stationing ICE agents at the Alamance County Detention Center, by entering what’s known as a 287(g) agreement with the federal government. Fifty-nine business owners signed an open letter and testified at a county commission meeting to oppose the proposal; they were worried about the loss of revenue that had accompanied a previous surge in local immigration enforcement. (The Trump administration has since signaled its plans to expand use of those agreements.)

These concerns business owners have highlight a broader truth: Immigration enforcement doesn't happen in isolation. When ICE agents stake out our neighborhoods, it affects everyone — the families living in fear, the businesses struggling to retain workers, the schools wondering why children are missing class, and the communities watching their social fabric fray. The grassroots response we saw in the first Trump administration shows that communities have the power to respond with humanity and practical solutions. As deportations ramp up again, we have a choice: We can watch as our neighbors disappear or we can build on these proven strategies to protect the diverse communities we've built together.