Scrolling through post after post on Instagram of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raiding workplaces, homes, and schools, anonymous senior Jordan sighed and powered off her phone, turning back to her English homework. She had no idea that the fear she was feeling from seeing videos of families being torn apart was about to be magnified tenfold.
Minutes later, Jordan’s mother, a birthright American citizen, would break the news to her and her sister that their father, an immigrant, had been deported.
“The news that he was gone just got blurted out, no big announcement or anything. My mom told me my dad was in Mexico, and that we probably wouldn’t see him for a while,” Jordan said. “I knew he had gotten into it with an ex-girlfriend and was in jail for a minor assault charge, but I had no idea he’d been deported. Even though he’d never really been a part of my life, hearing that he’d been taken away was still devastating.”
The struggles of life as an immigrant
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 53.3 million immigrants living in the United States as of January 2025. Kelsey, a sophomore granted anonymity for fear of safety, is one of them, having moved to the U.S. from Russia when she was just 9 years old.
“My mom got married to a new man and told me that we were going to move to America to be with him,” Kelsey said. “We left behind our entire family, and since I didn’t really know English, I had to wait until the second semester to join school with everyone else. It was a very lonely start.”
Kelsey was too young to remember much of the legal process her family took to obtain an immigrant visa. However, the struggle to obtain permission to leave the country is something that “made an impact” on her childhood, she said, as it took nearly two years before she could legally visit Russia.
“Getting here was actually surprisingly easy,” Kelsey said. “But getting a visa from [the U.S. embassy in Russia] was awful. We couldn’t visit our family, and it felt like we were trapped in America.”
Student coordinator for her college’s Immigrant Justice Center and journalism major Ally, who also chose to remain anonymous, has a more complicated immigration story. After coming to the U.S. from Belize at the age of five without documentation, Ally was rejected three times when applying for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Because she failed to receive DACA protection, Ally has been living at risk of deportation for most of her childhood and adult life.
“I’ve had some pretty difficult discussions about ICE with my partner, who is a legal citizen. He told me that if I was to get deported, he would go with me,” Ally said. “Having his reassurance that he’d be there for me, even though he doesn’t have to, makes me feel resilient, even when I’m fearing for the future.”
Heightened fears under a new administration
Making good on his campaign promises, on Jan. 20, newly elected President Donald Trump signed 34 executive orders, 10 of them related to immigration. These orders included the slashing of programs like CBP One, a mobile app developed by Customs and Border Protection to help asylum seekers, designating the border as a military priority, and suspending refugee admissions. Though these actions were justified as necessary to remove “violent transnational criminals,” government data obtained by ProPublica showed that less than half of the immigrants detained from Jan. 20 to Feb. 2 had criminal convictions, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by politically active students like Jordan.
“Seeing these deportations of innocent people is horrible and heartbreaking. There’s no reason that we should be kicking out our farmers, our contractors, and our construction workers,” Jordan said. “These people have built this country, and we’re treating them like animals.”
According to National Public Radio (NPR), an American public broadcasting organization, 5,500 children were separated from their parents during Trump’s first term, from 2017 to 2020. The “zero tolerance” border policies aren’t just cause for concern for undocumented immigrants—the American Immigration Council reports that 4.4 million children who are U.S. citizens have undocumented parents and are at risk for separation.
“I’ve seen people being round up everywhere. It doesn’t matter if they’re at a family event, with their kids or at work,” Jordan said. “Because the arrests have been so violent and publicized, it’s impossible for any immigrant to feel safe. I know my friends with immigrant parents are feeling the stress.”
Ally said that she has seen “a visible increase” in anti-immigrant sentiment on social media since the 2024 election. These hate campaigns have led to false rhetoric about certain immigrant groups becoming widespread, such as the 2024 hoax that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets. This rumor was propagated by public figures such as J.D. Vance and Elon Musk on the social media platform X, and eventually led to dozens of reported bomb threats being called in across Springfield, real consequences for the spreading of false narratives.
“After I graduate, I want to use my training as a journalist to tell the real stories of the undocumented community. I’m tired of going into the comments of a YouTube video and seeing people repeating the same tired narratives,” Ally said. “We are a very diverse community. Not all immigrants fit into one box […] even if the media sometimes makes it seem that way.”
When thinking about what deportation would mean for her life, Kelsey has to consider the raging Russo-Ukrainian war she would be returning to. Despite her legal status, every new deportation raid still “causes some worry.”
“I’m not even that scared for myself, though if something did happen to me, I would be devastated,” Kelsey said. “I have a friend who immigrated here from Ukraine. She’s already been stressed lately, and I can’t imagine what would happen if she was deported to [such a war-torn country].”
What can we do to protect our immigrant communities?
With threats of deportation comes a lot of fear and anxiety for immigrant communities, especially for student immigrants who must reside in the U.S. for an extended period of time to complete their degrees. A study done by the Public Policy Institute of California reports that foreign-born students comprise 18 percent of undergraduate and 27 percent of graduate and professional school students in the state. This demographic includes Ally herself, who recently took to her school newspaper to express her concerns with the administration’s handling of ICE on campus.
“To be honest, I was a little bit nervous about writing a critique of our admin. But when the story came out, I actually got an email from our Division of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice asking what they could do to help,” Ally said. “They were interested in doing a workshop, but I told them that it couldn’t just be a one-time thing. We need long-lasting protections for our students so they can feel safe coming to class again.”
Jordan emphasizes protest as a means of vocalizing her support for the immigrants in her life. Even though she considers certain events like the anti-immigration crackdowns protest that occurred on Feb. 11, which blocked the 405 highway, as “going overboard,” she still believes the First Amendment is the most important tool pro-immigrant activists have.
“I taught some friends about the history of colonization in Mexico, and the concept of nobody being illegal on stolen land,” Jordan said. “And yeah, at protests it can be really scary when there’s a bunch of big men and riot shields trying to hunt you down after you’ve built a life here. But you need to remember that you have a constitutional right to freedom of speech, and that your voice has power.”
