As next Trump presidency looms, Chicago groups serving immigrants are bracing for the unexpected
Some clinics serving migrants are seeing bigger crowds as people seek help, try to understand their options and prepare for changes to immigration policy and an increase in deportation orders.
By: Elvia Malagón Dec 7, 2024, 5:30am CST
After Donald Trump was elected, Vannessa Olivera’s oldest son asked her if it was true that all immigrants would be removed from the country.
It’s what he heard at school.
Olivera, whose family fled Venezuela and was sent to Chicago in 2022, tried to reassure him that it would be impossible to push out so many people in a country made up of immigrants.
“I’m not scared of Trump,” Olivera said in Spanish. “Politics is a game. My dad would say politics is a dirty game where everyone uses the best strategies that they have. I don’t fear him because, really, I’m not doing anything wrong.”
Chicago-area organizations that serve immigrants like Olivera are bracing for changes to immigration policy and an increase in deportation orders, which could come immediately through executive orders and later by shifting whom federal immigration officials detain, they say.
Many organizations are spending the weeks leading up to Inauguration Day next month passing out “know your rights” information to immigrants and urging them to consult with a trusted attorney or organization to evaluate their immigration status.
Mary Meg McCarthy, the executive director of the Chicago-based National Immigrant Justice Center, said they are bracing for a “tsunami of need for legal services” in the coming years. Also, many expect the backlog of cases in immigration court to grow.
Plus, groups anticipate longer wait times and costlier fees to obtain work permits or green cards through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
“We know many people will still have cases pending for quite some time, and we are hoping that our pro bono attorneys will join us in providing full legal representation,” McCarthy said. “That’s going to be critical to protect people’s basic due process rights.”
Chicago’s immigration court already has more than 270,000 pending cases, according to an analysis from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. About 25% of those cases involve people from Venezuela followed by about 18% involving Mexican nationals.
USCIS received more than three times the number of asylum cases in the first half of 2024 than during the same period in 2022, WBEZ reported.
Olivera’s asylum petition is among those applications, with no end in sight. The family had not yet received a date for when they will appear in front of an immigration judge to hear their case.
The family has started to have a sense of stability on the Northwest Side, with Olivera working at a day care and her husband at a hotel after the government approved their work permits. She will begin community college classes next year to earn an associate’s degree in early childhood education.
They celebrated Thanksgiving for the first time this year, and her older children are speaking English with ease.
The family got a small dog, Snow, after a friend suggested it could help Olivera when she felt anxiety.
Olivera says what she fears is life in her native country. She’s heard from relatives about the increasing cost of medications in Venezuela. One of her relatives was arrested after being involved in a protest, she said.
It’s one of the reasons why she doesn’t think Trump’s policies will stop immigration.
She worries about what will happen to those at the southern border waiting to petition for asylum. Three of her relatives were trying to make the journey to Texas, she said.
“We know we can’t return,” Olivera said. “Because the moment we return, (the government) can kill us, kill one of my children, my husband could be detained (or) they could take away our citizenship.”
Demand for legal services
In the weeks since the presidential election, the Syrian Community Network has seen so many people show up twice a week for their two-hour immigration clinic that they’ve had to turn people away, said Al Peters, the organization’s director of immigration.
“We’re having multiple people coming that are in removal proceedings,” Peters said. “They have a court date, they don’t have legal representation, quite often they don’t really understand what’s happening in terms of their legal process. At least we are able to explain that to them, and refer them to some of our partner organizations.”
The Syrian Community Network became part of the Department of Justice’s accreditation program in 2019, which allows non-attorney employees and volunteers of certain nonprofit organizations to practice immigration law on the federal level. They started to do immigration-related work because there weren’t many immigration organizations that provided services for Arabic-speaking immigrants.
They initially helped refugees obtain a green card or apply for citizenship. Then in 2021, their work shifted as they saw people who had fled Afghanistan needing help filing asylum cases. And now they’re anticipating more people in deportation proceedings, Peters said.
“Organizations like ours ... don’t historically have a great deal of removals experience,” Peters said. But because that work is needed, “we’re having to retrain, to refocus and pivot.”
As Trump has talked about implementing mass deportations, McCarthy said the National Immigrant Justice Center has been trying to think about how it will reach people detained in remote jails or in large-scale facilities outside of Illinois.
“All people have rights, regardless of their immigration status,” she said. “And we need to make sure those individuals in these remote jails have access to lawyers to ensure that these rights are upheld. So, that’s going to be really critical.”
Educating immigrant communities
The North Suburban Legal Aid Clinic, based in Highland Park, has also seen an increase in phone calls and in-person visits about potential mass deportations, said Lia Kim-Yi, the clinic’s director of immigration law.
“There’s a fine line between educating the population and creating fear, and we don’t want to create fear,” Kim-Yi said. “So we believe that education is empowering, so that’s why we’re doing so many ‘know your rights’ presentations.”
The clinic is creating a safety planning checklist to gather important documents for clients, she said. They are also helping undocumented parents learn how to establish short-term guardianship in case they are detained. Attorneys are also filing Freedom of Information Act requests for clients to verify their full immigration history.
“We’re just preparing my staff to know that we are going to be extra cautious with the filings we submit to immigration, make sure the clients are safe, they’re fully informed of their legal rights and any possible consequences that could happen if their cases are denied for whatever reason,” Kim-Yi said.
Those serving immigrants say they are using the next couple of weeks to file immigrant applications if the person is eligible for relief before changes are implemented. Kathleen Vannucci, a Chicago immigration attorney, said she recently filed two cases for people who were eligible for relief but who hadn’t sought to adjust their status because of how much it cost. In those cases, a donor covered the attorney and government fees to file the cases.
“It’s so emotional to see people that want to do something and feel like they’re helping their family friends,” she said. “It’s like, OK, we’re going to be able to do this.”
But for other clients, including some who have been in the country since the 1970s, there’s no avenue to adjust their immigration status, she said. Vannucci said she talks to clients about possible defenses if the person is ever picked up by immigration authorities.
For now, Vannucci said she is bracing herself for the emotional toll her work will take responding to the unexpected changes to immigration laws and policies.
“I was at the airport right after the Muslim ban announcement. And did I ever think that was going to happen and that they weren’t going to let permanent residents in at the airport?” Vannucci said. “Absolutely not. ... Expect the unexpected and be ready for the fight.”
Resources
Experts recommend reviewing an immigration case with a licensed attorney or accredited nonprofit to avoid falling for scams. The American Immigration Lawyers Association can be reached at 1-800-954-0254, and a list of organizations across the state can be found at ilaccesstojustice.com/get-help.
The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights operates an emergency support hot line, 1-855-435-7693
Family members can locate where a person is detained by federal immigration officials by searching at locator.ice.gov/odls/#/search.