Advocates in Coachella Valley preparing for Trump immigration crackdown

USA Today

06-02-2025

Advocates in Coachella Valley preparing for Trump immigration crackdown
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Trump removes immigration protections for schools, places of worship
Immigration authorities can now make arrests in schools, healthcare facilities, and places of worship under a new Department of Homeland Security policy.
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It's just over two weeks after President Donald Trump's second inauguration, and Luz Gallegos is struggling to speak.
'My voice is like gone right now because we've literally been working seven days a week, doing like multiple sessions, anywhere from five to seven sessions a day of 'Know Your Rights,'' she said.
Gallegos is the executive director of TODEC Legal Center, a nonprofit organization that works to advocate for and empower immigrants and people of color in the Inland Empire, including the Coachella Valley.
In recent days, that work has been focused on trying to educate as many undocumented people as possible about their rights when they encounter immigration agents — and how to make preparations for their kids in the event that they are taken into custody.
'We have staff and volunteers throughout the region day and night doing 'know your rights,' going to the fields, talking to the workers, making sure they know their constitutional rights and preparing (them),' she said.
Gallegos said the organization's campaign is called 'Get prepared, know your rights and resist' and is focused on reminding undocumented of rights like their ability to remain silent and not open doors to agents unless presented with a warrant.
The work also involves helping parents make a plan and file appropriate paperwork with schools to establish a caretaker who can pick up and take responsibility for the kids if the parents are picked up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is something Gallegos says often happens, regardless of who is president.
Most of those efforts, Gallegos says, are not new: Informing people of their rights has long been one of the organization's main jobs. What does feel new with Trump, however, is what she called his administration's 'negative narrative against our community in the messaging,' which she said is 'really impacting immigrants throughout the region.'
TODEC is not the only organization working to prepare for the impact of Trump's policies. Among others, local school districts and hospitals have worked to remind people, including their own employees, about the rights people have when immigration agents show up.
TODEC not seeing major ICE raids so far
Plans and promises to deport unauthorized immigrants have been central to Trump's electoral appeals and political image since he began his first presidential run back in 2015, with both Trump's website and the official 2024 Republican Party platform promising 'the largest deportation in American history.'
Trump's first days in office saw him sign a bevy of executive orders aimed at bolstering his ability to respond to what he has called an 'invasion' of immigrants, while the new Congress passed a law empowering federal immigration officers to detain undocumented immigrants who are charged with certain crimes, including assault of a law enforcement officer, theft and burglary.
But despite those moves and the heightened fear among undocumented people that has been spurred by Trump's rhetoric, Gallegos said her organization has so far seen neither large-scale immigration enforcement operations nor a discernible uptick in enforcement activity more generally.
TODEC operates a hotline where people can report apparent immigration enforcement activities and has trained volunteers who investigate the reports.
She said her team has been receiving high numbers of calls, but their investigations have not found any enforcement actions. Instead, sometimes volunteers have responded to find roadside smog checks or other non-immigration activities. But most of the time they have not found anything happening at all.
ICE has continued to make targeted arrests in the area, but Gallegos said that has long been the case and called the current pace of such arrests 'business as usual.'
Still, Gallegos said her organization remains concerned a major escalation in enforcement could be coming and has tried to make that clear to the undocumented people it serves.
"We don't want to create more fear,' she said. 'We have to be prepared for the worst, because it's happening (elsewhere). It might not be happening here yet, but it could potentially happen, you know?'
Trump promises action on immigration, but picture is complicated
While there has been much media attention paid to the subject of immigration in the wake of Trump's second inauguration, it remains somewhat difficult to get a clear picture of whether enforcement levels have changed nationally — and if so, by how much.
ICE began posting daily data about the number of people it had arrested and lodged formal "detainers" against after the inauguration, but stopped in recent days. The number of daily arrests ranged from 286 per day to 1,179. Each day, ICE also filed between 373 and 869 detainers, which are formal requests to other law enforcement agencies to keep undocumented immigrants facing criminal charges in custody so ICE has time to come get them.
ICE has arrested around 130,000 people per year — about 356 per day — over the past eight years, according to agency data published by The New York Times last week.
The agency has not so far been posting daily deportation figures. But if Trump's previous presidential term is any guide, it is not a foregone conclusion that his tough rhetoric will translate to a far greater number of deportations than other recent presidents.
A November CNN story cited data provided by a Migrant Policy Institute analyst who said that around 1.5 million people were deported under Trump compared with the roughly 4.8 million under President Barack Obama and 1.49 million under President Joe Biden (whose term still had just over two months remaining at the time of the article's publication). The analyst said those numbers do not include the large number of migrants turned away at the border in recent years.
In a recent speech to his supporters, Trump called immigration his 'number one issue' and the key to his election win. That victory — in which he became the first Republican in 20 years to win both the electoral college and popular vote has naturally been read by many as confirming Americans support Trump's approach to immigration, or at least preferred it to Kamala Harris'.
A set of recent Associated Press polls, however, found that Americans' views of deportations seem to be sensitive to how they are asked and what information they are presented.
For example, a majority of respondents said they would support "deporting all immigrants living in the United States illegally" but only about a third said they would support doing so if it meant separating children who are US citizens from their parents.
Trump has also sent different messages at different times about whether his administration will focus on on deporting undocumented violent criminals — which the AP poll suggests is widely popular — or take a more sweeping and indiscriminate approach to deporting anyone in the country illegally.
Local lawyer sees signs of increased enforcement
TODEC is also far from alone in attempting to prepare its staff and clients for a possible surge in immigration enforcement and the potential impacts it could have.
A spokesperson for Eisenhower Health said a memo was sent to staff and posted online explaining that the medical provider does not collect information on any patient's immigration status or report undocumented patients to federal immigration authorities.
The memo instructed that 'physicians and staff should neither confirm nor deny the presence of a patient to a law enforcement officer or federal immigration official without a signed court order.'
Anastacio De La Cruz, an Indio immigration and criminal defense attorney, said he is seeing signs of increasing enforcement activity locally, including anecdotal reports of more people getting arrested by ICE. He said clients have told him there now seem to be more ICE agents out on the streets.
'They're parked on the side of the freeways, down the street from schools,' he said.
He said ICE also seems to have broadened from a previous focus on arresting undocumented people with criminal convictions.
'ICE was dedicating their resources to finding those people and removing those people, they were much less concerned about the gardener, who's been here 20 years without status, who was working to provide for his kids. But that has definitely shifted.'
De La Cruz said he is expecting those changes to result in more arrests, saying he had represented 10 people who were detained by immigration officers in the last four years and expects that number to rise to around 100 over the next four.
However, he said he doubts the government has the resources to deport the millions of people that Trump has promised.
'It's just a numbers game,' he said, explaining that most undocumented people arrested by ICE in the US have a right to go through court proceedings that can take years.
As a result, De La Cruz advises that people should not necessarily live in fear but instead 'hope for the best but prepare for the worst.' He explained that means having a plan in place for getting apprehended and recommended that people consult an attorney to develop such a plan.
'Oftentimes, once they're picked up by ICE, if they haven't done anything to be proactive, there's not a lot that we can do at that point,' he said.
Paul Albani-Burgio covers growth, development and business in the Coachella Valley. Follow him on Twitter at @albaniburgiop and email him at [e-mail].