In the days after the Nov. 5 presidential election, Michael Oropeza answered a flurry of phone calls at her office in Forest, Miss. Oropeza is executive director of El Pueblo, a group offering humanitarian and legal aid to vulnerable immigrants across the state, and the outcome of the election had sent shock waves through the communities she serves.
“It’s a very anxious time,” Oropeza said. “We started receiving calls … with people having questions: Should they quit their job? Should they move? It’s just a heightened sense of fear.”
Many immigrants in Mississippi have good reason to be fearful. Throughout his campaign to return to the White House, President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to round up and remove people living in the U.S. without authorization. Trump doubled down on those promises after his victory in November, reiterating his intent to launch “the largest deportation program in American history.”
Trump’s proposed crackdown would extend beyond migrants with criminal records, targeting gainfully employed, tax-paying households and community members and even families with mixed immigration statuses. The former president and his associates have suggested a range of harsh, legally contentious approaches for carrying out mass deportations, including conducting immigration raids at worksites and other public spaces and deploying the U.S. military to assist with arrests and removals. Trump has also called for ending birthright citizenship in the U.S., effectively stripping children born to undocumented parents of rights guaranteed in the Constitution.
The threat of workplace raids and related enforcement actions is all too familiar for Mississippi immigrants. In 2019, under the previous Trump administration, federal officials arrested more than 680 workers at Mississippi poultry plants in a single day, leading to detainments, deportations and family separations. The operation was the largest of its kind in recent U.S. history and left scars in local communities that have not yet healed, as the Mississippi Free Press reported in August.
Trump’s planned deportation program is likely to face significant challenges, from lawsuits and other resistance in Democrat-led cities to inadequate funding and infrastructure. The expected economic downturn and potential human-rights abuses from such a campaign could also incite political backlash.
Nevertheless, immigrant-advocacy groups in Mississippi and elsewhere say they are bracing for a worst-case scenario under the incoming administration.
“We are preparing for disaster,” Oropeza said, noting that many residents of Forest and nearby municipalities have been living in fear since the 2019 raids. “The reality is, it happened here. So people know … it can happen again.”
Vanquishing the ‘Threat from Within’
While disparaging migrants and restricting immigration have long been cornerstones of Donald Trump’s political agenda, the former and upcoming president’s rhetoric and policy proposals have grown more incendiary leading up to his second term.
On his first day in office, the president-elect plans to take immediate action to curb legal and illegal immigration and to kickstart mass deportations across the country, members of his transition team have told various media outlets. Potential measures include deploying the U.S. National Guard to help round up undocumented migrants and reshuffling federal law-enforcement personnel to swell the ranks of Immigration Customs Enforcement. Trump could also declare a national emergency as he did during his previous term, unlocking federal funds to expand the country’s detention system and to create temporary holding sites, or camps, for migrants waiting to be processed.
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said about immigrants at a 2023 campaign rally, echoing remarks made by fascist dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”
Trump has signaled that he aims to follow through on his mass-deportation plans by filling his new administration with immigration hard-liners. The president-elect has tapped South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a staunch supporter of Trump’s past immigration policies, to lead the Department of Homeland Security, pending Senate confirmation. Longtime adviser Stephen Miller will build on his role in the previous Trump White House as deputy chief of staff for policy, and former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan will serve as his “border czar.”
Miller and Homan have generated controversy during and after their stints in the first Trump administration. Both played prominent roles in crafting and enforcing the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy for migrants apprehended at the southern border, which led to thousands of children being separated from their parents and detained on their own.
Miller has since led an organization listed as a contributor to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next Republican White House. The document contains policies so extreme that the Trump campaign deemed it a political liability, even though dozens of Trump’s own allies drafted it and he once hinted that it would “lay the groundwork” for his next administration.
Homan, meanwhile, has recently suggested that families with mixed immigration status may be deported together during Trump’s second term—an idea that the president-elect has also floated and that civil-rights groups have blasted as illegal.
“It’s ludicrous,” League of United Latin American Citizens CEO Juan Proaño told the Mississippi Free Press on Dec. 9. “We’ve seen … reports that they’ll have about 400,000 U.S. citizens potentially caught up in these sweeps because they would be deported with their undocumented parents. So then you have the opposite situation, where you have undocumented Americans in Mexico.”
While mixed-status family removals and other eye-catching immigration proposals have dominated the news cycle since the election, Proaño says Trump can take easier steps to expedite deportations in the U.S.
“Probably the first thing that you’re going to see is … the administration stripping folks of (temporary protected status), refugee status and asylum status,” he explained, noting that these groups are likely to be most at risk when Trump takes office. Temporary Protected Status, a program that currently covers roughly 860,000 people, grants temporary residency and work authorization to citizens of certain countries experiencing armed conflicts or other disasters.
Ultimately, however, Proaño believes Trump will succeed in getting a bill through Congress that will put all undocumented migrants in jeopardy.
“I do think he will pass immigration reform legislation in his first two years,” he said. “And it will be some of the most restrictive legislation that we will potentially see, including going after birthright citizenship.”
The Cost to Mississippi
Five years after ICE rounded up hundreds of migrant workers in Mississippi, local immigrants and allies are bracing for another wave of arrests and family separations. While the state’s immigrant population is small relative to the rest of the country (less than 3% of residents were foreign-born in 2023), civil-rights attorneys warn that the incoming administration’s mass-deportation plans will have chilling consequences for all Mississippians.
“Our communities are going to become less culturally diverse and rich … and our children are going to lose dear friends and teammates and bandmates,” Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law, told the Mississippi Free Press on Dec. 11. “To the extent that people can’t focus on the extraordinary damage inflicted on immigrant families, they should at least consider the impact on local communities where they live.”
Independent experts project that the mass deportation of migrants would send the U.S economy into a tailspin, shrinking growth and the domestic labor force while causing prices to skyrocket. In Mississippi, Johnson stressed that an operation of such scale would affect whole industries down to individual landlords and store owners.
“The reality is that these are law-abiding members of our communities who are performing jobs that nobody else wants to do,” he said. “And if they are taken away, those jobs will likely go unfinished.”
Ahead of Trump’s inauguration in January, Johnson is supporting El Pueblo and other advocacy groups as they prepare local communities and institutions for the next administration. Under Oropeza’s leadership, El Pueblo has held statewide meetings to educate immigrants on their rights and created emergency preparedness plans to facilitate identity verification and document retrieval. The organization has also met with school-district leaders and law-enforcement officials who may be asked to participate in immigration crackdowns.
“We know what happened in the past,” Oropeza said, noting that students in Forest and nearby areas had no one to pick them up on the day of the ICE raids because their parents had been detained. “We’re trying to be more proactive so our communities are better prepared all the way around.”
Trump’s ability to deliver on his second-term immigration plans will largely depend on the support he receives outside of Washington. The mass deportation program he has promised could cost as much as $350 billion, immigration experts say, and his administration is expected to lean heavily on Republican-led states to assist with roundups and detainments. Already, Texas has offered up a 1,400-acre ranch as a possible detention site for migrants.
Johnson says he is interested to see whether law-enforcement officers in Mississippi and elsewhere will allow themselves to “be deputized by the Trump administration” over the next four years.
“I confess that I have grave concerns about overzealous local law enforcement attempting to promote and carry out the Trump administration’s policies,” he said. “My hope is that state officials, regardless of where they come down on the issue, will honor the historic practice of leaving immigration policy and enforcement to those in Congress and in the White House.”
How Mississippi responds to Trump’s immigration agenda will say a lot about the character of its residents, Johnson concluded.
“I think this may reveal a good bit about who we really are,” he said. “And the extent to which we vilify and criminalize these local members of our community who are not causing problems, who are not taking jobs that local Mississippians want, and who are doing everything they can to support their children.”
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