In mid-July, Luz Gallegos held multiple presentations in Southern California to inform people about their rights in the presence of immigration officials. Gallegos, the programs director at the TODEC Legal Center, which serves immigrant communities in the area, said she was surprised by the turnout: her meetings were packed. Even children showed up; at a gathering in Riverside, some asked what they should do if their parents are deported.
After weeks of tweets from President Donald Trump promising to deport thousands in nationwide raids, and the breathless media coverage that followed, Gallegos said fear was palpable in the towns where TODEC works. While Operation Border Resolve, as it was called, yielded the arrest of just 18 targeted individuals, it nonetheless upended immigrant communities around the West. Gallegos’ meetings show how Trump’s threats, regardless of whether they are realized, impact life for immigrants and their neighbors.
On the weekend of July 14, when the operation was to be carried out, businesses in Riverside reported many customers staying home. And TODEC was inundated with false alarms of activity from immigration officials.
“We worked all week, Saturday and Sunday, and we’d get calls that people see a van,” Gallegos said. “This administration is really causing terror in our communities that shouldn’t be there. … People are carrying their passports. There’s just so much fear right now. We feel like everybody’s being targeted.”
The same was true elsewhere in the West. Immigration activists reported quiet streets in San Francisco’s usually bustling Mission district that weekend. In Idaho, organizers called off a Latin music festival amid rumors of further immigration raids a week later. Earlier, in Boulder, the annual Colorado Latino Festival was rescheduled for the same reason.
While U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers made some arrests, the anticipated operation focusing on families netted only 18 of its reported 2,000 targets. Speaking to reporters after the operation, acting ICE Director Matthew Albence blamed the low arrest numbers on migrants taking shelter and community resistance. But it’s not clear how many ICE had to go out and arrest in the first place — at least one family brought to a Texas detention center during the operation was picked up at an immigration office.
In reality, the operation was likely overhyped from the beginning. ICE conducts what it calls targeted enforcement operations regularly, and deporting asylum-seeking families isn’t easy. But the intense media coverage leading up to the July sweep achieved what appears to be this administration’s primary goal: sending a message that no one is safe from deportation.
Many of Trump’s efforts at reducing immigration have been mired in court challenges. The ban on travel from Muslim-majority nations went into effect only after much legal wrangling led to a watered-down version. His attempt to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy is before the Supreme Court. A judge in California last year ordered the government to reunite families separated under the controversial “zero tolerance” policy, and a Seattle judge this month halted a policy that would have denied bail hearings to asylum-seekers.
One area where the president has succeeded, however, is in messaging. Activists say he’s adept at sowing fear and undermining any sense of security undocumented immigrants have about their future in the U.S. In that vein, Trump tweeted in mid-June that ICE was about to “begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States.” That was followed by ICE’s acting director at the time, Mark Morgan, telling reporters to expect the upcoming operation to include families. Trump later backed off, tweeting that he was delaying deportations to give Democrats in Congress time to “work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.”
Then, on July 11, The New York Times reported that ICE would begin arresting families on a 2,000-person target list the following Sunday. The raids were to take place in 10 cities that, for the last few months, had been named in a regular report on the immigration court system’s website. A day later, speaking to reporters, Trump said the operation would focus on criminals.
While Trump’s tweets were generating tremendous attention, ICE was conducting business as usual. On June 20, ICE officials in Texas wrapped up what the agency called an “enforcement surge,” arresting more than 125 people across the state. The day The New York Times story ran, ICE officers in southern California finished a weeklong operation that resulted in 20 arrests. None of those appeared to target families.
The fact that ICE did not sweep up thousands, or even hundreds, in one weekend is not surprising. Deportation proceedings are far more complex than just rounding people up, especially when it comes to families. When officers arrest single adults with deportation orders, particularly those who can’t afford lawyers, they’re taken to massive detention centers such as those in Tacoma, Washington, and San Diego, where they are held until they can be put on a deportation flight. Families, however, are usually taken to the 2,400-bed South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Unlike most detention centers, this one houses a pro-bono legal team.
In 2016, the Obama administration made a similar attempt to deport families. ICE detained 121 people at the Dilley detention center and tried to quickly fly the families out of the country. But many of those cases were reopened because those detained were denied due process, and those families eventually were released. Some mothers and children were pulled off planes just minutes before leaving for Central America.
Those targeted in Operation Border Resolve had been ordered deported by immigration judges, but Laura Lichter, an immigration attorney in Denver who represented some of the families arrested in 2016, said that issues with due process in the court system are even worse today. Bad legal advice, notices being sent to the wrong address, a lack of legal representation — all of these result in families being ordered deported even when they have strong asylum claims, she said.
Administration officials “really used this talking point a lot: ‘These people got all the process that was due to them. They had their day in court. They lost fair and square. It’s time to leave,'” Lichter said. “What we’ve seen is, these people never really got a fair day in court.”
While the huge raids Trump promises aren’t materializing — only two families detained in the most recent sweep were taken to Dilley, according to the pro bono group — the mere thought of such operations can keep migrant families in the shadows.
Hamid Yazdan Panah, advocacy director at the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, said ICE’s surge operations create hectic circumstances that harm due process and tend to result in the arrest of what ICE calls “collaterals” — people suspected of being undocumented but who aren’t an enforcement operation’s specific target (about half of those detained in the mid-July sweep fall under this category).
And while targeted enforcement operations like Border Resolve are common, Trump’s marketing of them is unusual. “They aren’t often coupled with preemptive warnings that are designed to invoke panic and fear nationwide,” Panah said.
He cited the wave of announcements from the Trump administration after the operation: On July 15, it announced a new rule that would severely curtail who can request asylum (a federal judge blocked the rule July 24). That news was eclipsed on Monday, when the administration announced plans to implement “expedited removal” for undocumented immigrants who can’t prove they’ve been living in the country for at least two years.
“Overall, I think Trump understands very well how to manipulate the headlines to promote his political purpose,” Panah said. “You had immigrant communities living in complete fear. You had areas that are usually packed on a weekend completely empty.”
In addition to startling immigrants, Panah said this communication tactic makes it difficult for the public to keep up with immigration and deportation proceedings taking place outside the president’s Twitter feed.
“Ultimately, the discourse on immigration enforcement gets reduced to a sound bite, and it becomes just about raids,” said Panah. “And it’s very difficult to talk about … the legal process that leads up to a removal order in a 10-second sound bite.”
This story was updated to correct Hamid Yazdan Panah’s title.
