‘We know what’s on the line’: Philly and Pa. immigration leaders, organizers gear up for a second Trump presidency

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Jasmine Rivera said she felt disappointment, anger and grief when Donald Trump emerged as the winner of the 2024 presidential election. But the director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition wasn’t surprised.

“We all knew this was a very real possibility. This is why we’ve been scenario planning for months, why we have a plan for exactly this situation,” she said. “But it still hurts. It hurts because we know what’s on the line.”

During his first term, Trump implemented the so-called “Muslim” travel ban, separated families at the border and cut back on a number of legal protections for noncitizens, including DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] “Dreamers” and people who had Temporary Protected Status. Immigration organizers in the region are preparing for what will likely be an onslaught of similar anti-immigrant rhetoric, policies and enforcement.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly called for mass deportations of undocumented residents and an end to birthright citizenship. He and his running mate, JD Vance, also launched a racist, false diatribe against Haitian immigrants and incessantly talked about “migrant crime,” despite studies linking immigration to lower crime rates.

Rachel Rutter, an immigration lawyer and director of nonprofit Project Libertad, said her phone has been “blowing up,” with calls from immigrant youth wondering how Trump’s victory will impact their cases and statuses. Teachers are also reaching out to her for advice on how best to support their immigrant students.

Rutter said although the infrastructure to carry out mass deportations would require time to build, “that doesn’t mean that he won’t still amp up doing raids and detain and deport a lot more people.”

“I don’t know that it’s necessarily going to happen in the exact numbers that he’s saying from a practical, financial standpoint of how much it would actually cost the government to do that,” she said. “But I definitely think that we will see an increase in enforcement, an increase in who’s a priority, an increase in fear in the community, and all that just has a devastating impact.”

Rutter said beyond mass deportations, there are a lot of ways that the administration implemented anti-immigration policies in the first Trump term that they could use again — including expediting cases while gutting existing asylum law to deport people faster, or even rejecting applications due to small bureaucratic technicalities. Rutter said in the last Trump administration, not writing “N/A” and instead simply leaving a space blank was used as a reason by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to reject applications.

‘An economic price’

In Pennsylvania, close to 1 million residents are immigrants, the vast majority of whom are either naturalized citizens or legal residents. Researchers estimate there are approximately 155,000 undocumented immigrants in the commonwealth, who pay more than $1 billion in annual taxes. Undocumented immigrants make up less than 16% of the state’s total immigrant population, and less than 2% of the workforce.

In Philadelphia, immigrants make up around 20% of the workforce, according to a recent report from Pew Charitable Trusts.

Leaders of immigrant-serving organizations said if Trump fulfills his promise to conduct mass deportations, it will negatively impact the state and the city.

“There is no scenario in which you can both close the doors to this country, begin deporting en masse people who, in many cases, have been here for years, working, paying taxes, and not have an economic price to pay for that,” Anuj Gupta, CEO of The Welcoming Center, said. “We don’t have a labor force in this country. We don’t have enough native-born talent alone to support the economic needs of our employers today, never mind what they need tomorrow.”

Gupta said even if Trump doesn’t carry out mass deportations, “people are going to be scared.”

“People that are here, whether they’re documented or undocumented, are going to go into the shadows,” he said. “That not only compromises their own economic potential and aspiration, it again has a collective impact.”

Gupta said the food service sector is an example of what that impact could look like, noting that commercial corridors throughout the city have been fueled by an immigrant workforce.

“If those men and women start going into the shadows, if they are deported en masse, if it is more difficult than it already is to find legal pathways to get in this country, what happens to that economy, and then, consequently, what happens to the corridors that it’s helped rejuvenate?” he said. “So I think there is a disconnect between what kind of economy people want to have and what kind of immigration policy they want to support.”

According to data from the American Immigration Council, immigrants paid more than $13 billion in taxes in 2022, and wield a spending power of more than $34 billion. A recent PIC report highlighted how Pennsylvania’s growing immigrant communities have fueled economic growth across the state.

“We are interdependent with each other,” Rivera, of PIC, said. “And so to round up human beings is not only wrong and immoral, and we’ve seen this in our human history before, it is also just so shortsighted.”

‘We are going to need everyone to fight back’

Rivera said PIC is currently working with 60 coalition members to strategize how to counter Trump policies at multiple levels.

“We’re going to have to address urgent needs while simultaneously doing the long-term organizing work right to achieve structural change,” she said. “We have to provide care as well as political education services right alongside leadership development, right? We have so many amazing immigrant leaders in our community, and we need more. We have so many wonderful allies in the state, and we need more. We are going to need everyone to fight back against this.”

Philadelphia is a certified welcoming city, and it ended the PARS agreement in 2018, which allowed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to access police databases.

Claire Nguyen, community defense and communications senior coordinator at VietLead, a grassroots nonprofit working with Vietnamese and Southeast Asian refugee communities in Philadelphia and South Jersey, said sanctuary city policies are important, but aren’t everything.

“It is only as strong as the people who are willing to come around and support immigrants and refugees who are under attack by ICE,” they said. “Being a sanctuary city also requires that people are willing to show up and support folks, because those policies alone will not protect our people, because we also know they’re limited in the scope of how ICE is a federal agency that can undermine those things.”

Rivera said more needs to be done to end local law enforcement collaboration with ICE in Philadelphia and throughout the state by strengthening existing laws and creating new immigrant-friendly policies to protect these communities. Even institutions such as the School District of Philadelphia, which has implemented welcoming policies, can improve and strengthen their mandates, she said.

‘Caring for one another’

Immigrants and organizers said experiencing the first Trump administration, as well as what Rivera called “the deportation machine” reinforced during both the Obama administration and the current Biden administration, has helped prepare them for what’s to come.

Nguyen said VietLead is focusing on Southeast Asian refugees’ historic resilience as next year marks the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, or the end of the wars in Southeast Asia, and Vietnamese and Southeast Asian refugees’ resettlement in Philadelphia.

“We know that there have been many, many times our different governments have abandoned our communities, and we’ve leaned on each other through all of it,” she said. “And that’s why our communities are still here and are still fighting to live a life beyond survival.”

Nguyen said mutual aid efforts — such as community money pots that refugees pooled together to help one another start small businesses and begin a life in the U.S. — are the backbone of their strategy in the years ahead.

“We know that the thing that has kept our community together these past 50 years and the 50 years to come, including the next four years of a Trump presidency, will be that deep ancestral wisdom of caring for one another,” they said.

Rivera urged Philadelphians and Pennsylvanians who aren’t immigrants and want to support immigrant communities to look up the local leaders and organizations that have been doing advocacy work for years.

She also wants to see the Biden-Harris administration dismantle “the deportation machine” before Trump takes office in January.

“I cannot implore President Biden and Vice President Harris enough, you have to start dismantling the deportation machine now,” Rivera said. “It’s no longer a loaded gun. It’s an Uzi.”