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When Linda went to bed on Nov. 5, she tried, just for a moment, not to think about the presidential election. “I was like, let me just go to sleep,” the South Philly resident recalled.
The next morning she woke up feeling nervous. Then she turned on the TV and heard that Donald Trump had won.
“It was kind of like a shock,” she said. “It was like my whole body went into stress. And scared!”
An undocumented immigrant from Mexico, Linda has lived in Philadelphia for more than two decades and has a company that cleans houses. As a victim of domestic violence, she may be able to get a visa and work permit, but her application is still pending.
Now she’s newly worried about being deported, and “not just because of me,” she said.
“I have three girls here. They’ve been raised here,” she said. “It’s just, like, very hard to think about them.”
Linda, who asked that her last name be withheld, is among the tens of thousands of Philadelphians who are undocumented or have some type of temporary legal status. Many of them have been stressing out or even panicking since Trump won the election.
Their main feeling, expressed in conversation after conversation, is uncertainty: Will he or won’t he?
Will Trump really succeed in launching a wave of mass sweeps, detentions, and deportations immediately after he takes office January 20, as he has vowed to do? Will he really be able to end temporary protected status for Haitians, Venezuelans, Ukrainians and others, and strip citizenship from some naturalized immigrants?
“At this point, it’s the not knowing what’s going to happen,” Linda said. “I do know a lot of people who got deported in past years.”
Some are steeling themselves for a new onslaught of racist harassment, or preparing for the possibility of being returned to home countries that are in turmoil or which they haven’t visited in decades. Others are making hurried plans to move to Canada or trying to revive stalled applications for legal status.
“It’s becoming a wave of sorts,” immigration lawyer David Kaplan, whose office is in Old City, said last month. “December usually is a very quiet time, and we’re going crazy. My business, in terms of clients that come in, has increased easily between 30% and 50%.”
“That doesn’t mean they have solutions, but it means that people are scared,” he said.
“It’s about ‘you alien people’ ”
It’s unclear exactly how many Philadelphians might be directly affected by Trump’s tougher immigration policies. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, estimated in 2019 that the city was home to 47,000 undocumented immigrants.
More than one-quarter (28%) of them, about 13,000, were from Mexico and Central America, with another 13,000 from Asia. Other top areas of origin were South America (15%), the Caribbean (13%), and Africa ( 9%).
A few thousand city residents also have Temporary Protected Status (TPS), DACA, humanitarian parole or other legal status, which are authorized by presidential action and could expire or possibly be revoked. They include thousands of Haitians with TPS, many who came here after the country’s president was assassinated in 2021 and violent gangs took control of much of the capital.
“We didn’t come here because we don’t like Haiti,” said L.H., who asked to be identified by his initials. “No, we came here because the situation there is complicated.”
An entrepreneur who used to work in foreign embassies and the travel industry in Haiti, L.H. has visited the U.S. many times and decided to move permanently last year. He picked the U.S. rather than Canada because he believes “in the opportunity that this country offers to people like me,” he said. “The American Dream is for everyone. Wherever you come from, whoever you are, if you work hard, you can succeed.”
In June, the federal government extended TPS for Haitians for 18 months, through February 2026, and L.H. got a work permit. He works as a recruiter specialist, helping immigrant aid organizations place people in jobs.
As a student of diplomacy and political affairs, L.H. saw Trump and J.D. Vance’s dehumanizing falsehoods about Haitians eating pets as just a campaign tactic, an effort to turn out their base. But then the language continued after Nov. 6.
“After you win, and you keep talking like that, you keep saying those kind of things, it’s another thing,” L.H. said.
“It’s not about the election, it’s about ‘you guys, you alien people, you immigrant people.’ That’s what creates the fear in the Haitian community, because people don’t know what he can do,” he said. “Today he can say something, and tomorrow he says another thing. So we don’t know where we are, and nobody knows where we are, actually.”
He said the election results suddenly changed the assumptions Haitian immigrants had made about their adopted country and their futures here. “It’s very uncomfortable, this kind of situation,” he said.
Rampant misinformation and rumors
The first Trump administration tried to end TPS for Haitians in 2017, but the effort got tied up in legal challenges and the Biden administration canceled the move. The president-elect has said he will try again, spurring panic among immigrants who dread being returned to the violence in Haiti.
“They don’t know, if their work permit expires, what they are going to do,” L.H. said. “They are planning to flee the country. They are planning to go to Canada.” (Immigration experts note that moving to Canada is not a good solution for everyone, or even possible for many.)
The lack of clarity about what will happen after Trump takes office on Jan. 20 has spawned rampant misinformation and rumors, L.H. and others said. His mother, in Haiti, told him she watched a video in which a man claimed the U.S. government keeps a list of TPS holders and their job status. He said the government plans to deport those who are unemployed while allowing those who are working to remain.
There’s no evidence that’s the case, but desperate people may act on such stories, L.H. said.
“When you hear those kind of information, what will you do to yourself? ‘Oh, my God, I don’t work. So what am I going to do, what am I going to do? I have to find something to do,’ ” he said. “It’s the fear, the big problem, the environment of fear. Rumors go faster than true information, and it hurts the community.”
Misinformation is widespread, said Eric Edi, chief operating officer of Africom, a West Philly organization that serves African and Caribbean immigrants.
In mid-November he spoke to a man with a pending asylum application who told him that, since the election, “a lot of changes have already taken place” with regard to application processing. “I asked, what are the changes? And the person was not able to forward me whatever document that they said they read,” Edi said.
“This is very symptomatic of a thing that happens in the African immigrant communities. Sometimes what is stipulated as rumor can be presented as a fact, or some other times, real information can be passed on in a very wrong way that will keep people very alarmed,” he said.
Edi recalled that the first Trump administration tried to expand the “public charge” rule. Officials wanted to bar people who receive certain welfare benefits, like Medicare and SNAP food benefits, from getting Green Cards or permanent resident status.
The change was only in effect for a short time. But despite outreach efforts by his organization and others, that history continues to discourage immigrants from applying for Medicaid and food benefits.
“Fear is the number one obstacle,” Edi said. “People have to feed their family, people have to fend for themselves, people have to go to work. Fear is something that they don’t want to happen, because if we raise the stress level, it can jeopardize wellness, well-being, and all of those things.”
Preparing for the worst
Linda, the longtime South Philly resident, said she was haunted by memories of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers during the first Trump administration “stopping at places, work, restaurants, and just taking whatever [people], no questions asked, and putting them in detention centers and then finding out later they were in a [asylum] process or something, or they were even citizens.”
Her worries focus on being separated from her daughters. “That’s the worst thing that you think,” she said. When Trump was president before, she signed documents that would make another adult her children’s guardian if she were deported.
“If you got arrested or something happens to you, or you don’t [arrive] to pick them up at school, someone has to take care of those kids,” she said.
She said she planned to attend a meeting of the local immigration rights organization Juntos to plan next steps for people in her position — “probably signing those [same] papers as before and not freaking out, because that’s not going to help.”
Some immigrants are less concerned about potential deportation. They have lived in Philadelphia for decades, have families, jobs and homes here, and have survived past waves of intensified immigration enforcement.
“Every time a president comes in, the idea that there will be deportations never goes away,” said Ivonne, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who came to the U.S. in 2005. “There are always deportations.”
“I only think that if I am a good person every day and my family is good, we will always be calm,” she added, speaking through a translator. “I have sometimes thought that if for some circumstance I was deported, I would leave with my head held high, because I never did anything bad to anyone, and what I did was always be like a true citizen.”
Juntos executive director Erika Núñez said she’s been hearing a lot about the idea of “good versus bad immigrants” from her community.
Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” has said the next administration will prioritize deporting undocumented immigrants who pose a public safety risk. But she cautioned against believing what she described as divisive and misleading anti-immigrant comments.
“That’s not real. That’s rhetoric,” said Núñez, who has led protests supporting undocumented immigrants in recent weeks. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t pay taxes. It doesn’t matter if you’re a straight-A student. At the end of the day, Trump exists and his people exist to mark all of us as disposable.”
A fear of emboldened racists
Ivonne, like Linda, works cleaning houses and has a teenage daughter. She says she’s never looked into whether she could get legal status.
“I like Philadelphia, I like that my daughter was born here, but for some reason I have never felt like saying, ‘Oh, I want to [have residency papers],’ ” she said. “Furthermore, it’s very expensive. Either I pay rent or I pay a lawyer.”
More than deportation, she’s concerned about a potential increase in racist hostility inspired by Trump’s rhetoric.
Several months ago, she was outside a building where she had just cleaned a home, chatting with a friend, when another woman suddenly approached them, she recalled. “She said, ‘Mexicans, get out of here,’ and started insulting us. My legs were shaking. I thought she was going to throw something,” she said.
She fears that those kinds of incidents and a broader disrespect toward immigrants will become more common as some people are emboldened by the election results.
“It’s like this gives them the power to insult you, to say, ‘You are not going to park here because my spot is mine and because my president supports me,’ or ‘I am going to pay you less because my president supports me,’ ” she said.
That’s also a major concern for Chinese immigrants, said Wei Chen, civic engagement director at Asian Americans United. They may not yet understand how federal policy changes are going to affect them, but they’re acutely aware of the threat of a surge of racist violence, he said.
“That’s because of the experience from 2017 to 2020 under the Trump administration. A lot of terrible things happened to the immigrant community,” he said.
“In social media or in the media, the leader of our country will start using racial slurs more. That will lead to young people feeling like that’s OK to do that — people getting harassed and people being called racial slurs,” Chen said.
Facing the prospect of a less tolerant immigration system
Kaplan, the immigration lawyer, said he’s seen a wide range of responses to Trump’s election win. Some of his clients are scared, while some are “almost happy” because they think Trump will boost the economy.
“I had a client coming in that has a potentially very complicated case. He came with a MAGA hat and fatigues,” he said. “He has significant exposure to being deported, even though he has a Green Card, and he knows it.” That can be the case for people who have been charged with a crime, for example.
Kaplan, who is himself an immigrant from Colombia and a naturalized citizen, said he has other clients who are making tentative plans to return to their native countries voluntarily.
“Some people have been here, let’s say, for 20 years, in whatever status, and they have taken some of their earnings over the years, and maybe they have a home back home,” he said. “So they’re saying, you know, instead of getting deported, I’ll go back home.”
Some of his clients whose legal status is particularly tenuous now have even more reason to fear being suddenly detained and removed from the country, he said.
He cited the example of a longtime client, an immigrant from a Muslim country, who has struggled to gain asylum. For years the man regularly checked in with ICE, as required, but stopped after being told he was finally going to be deported. A heart attack has left him barely able to work, and the only thing he cares about is staying with his adult child, who’s a U.S. citizen.
“He has been in the twilight zone for a long time,” the attorney said. “Have you ever seen the comic books with a cloud, really, really dark, on top of somebody? That’s him. It’s horrible.”
The immigration system works in sometimes mysterious ways, Kaplan said. Judges allow some undocumented people to stay for years, while others are abruptly apprehended and removed.
In the coming year, he said, the system may become less tolerant toward those with complex cases, or who have been relying on temporary administrative or judicial reprieves.
“Under Trump, as far as I know, unless he declares martial law, legally nothing changes. It’s a question of discretion. Sometimes they say, ‘OK, we’ll keep you on a list, but we won’t throw you out if you don’t commit crimes,’ ” Kaplan said. “Those people are going to get deported.”
