Immigrant Solidarity in Post-Sanctuary America

On Jan. 23, a few days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, a rumor was posted on Facebook warning that an immigration raid was imminent at Compare Foods, a grocery store that serves the Latino community of Durham, North Carolina.

The sourcing of the rumor was thin: Someone had glimpsed a truck that they thought looked like a Border Patrol vehicle in the supermarket’s parking lot. According to the post, the truck did not stay long, and no photo evidence was provided. Nonetheless, the news quickly went viral throughout Durham’s Latino community, and panicked phone calls began pouring into the volunteer-manned Immigration and Customs Enforcement hotline of Siembra, a local immigrants-rights organization. Within a few hours, further sightings proved the rumor to be a false alarm. Some cruel prankster dressed in a Border Patrol costume was driving around in a white truck with an insignia that read “Thot Patrol.” 

The response illuminated how fear of deportation has altered everyday life for undocumented immigrants across the country. “People see a vehicle outside and think [ICE] is going to storm the grocery store,” said Marlene Martinez, an organizer with Siembra.

North Carolina’s Latino community is relatively new, rising from a population of 77,000 in 1990 to more than 1 million in 2020. The fastest-growing demographic group in the state, they have been central to the regional economic boom, especially in the construction industry where many undocumented workers find employment. This has made North Carolina a natural target for the Trump administration, whose deportation priorities have shifted from the border to the interior, in particular migrants with pending asylum hearings or parole status. 

“The second Trump administration came in with a focus on the undocumented population, but also on those recently arrived migrants who had what we call a liminal status,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. “They weren’t entirely undocumented, but didn’t necessarily have a permanent status.”

For decades, Durham has been known as a reliable sanctuary city, where the local police have not always cooperated with ICE. However, a number of state-level laws passed in recent years have targeted that reputation by mandating collaboration with federal immigration authorities. House Bill 10, for example, approved last December, requires local sheriffs to check the immigration status of anyone arrested. If someone is undocumented, the sheriff must notify ICE and hold them for 48 hours. Democratic Gov. Ray Cooper had vetoed similar bills proposed by Republican legislators in 2019 and 2021, but this time they got through.

The bills are part of a national trend of state-level immigration legislation that seeks to bolster local cooperation with the Trump agenda, said Putzel-Kavanaugh. “Some states are taking more actions to protect immigrant communities and make sure that ICE can’t just go anywhere without a judicial warrant,” she explained, “and then we’ve seen other places go the opposite direction, where there’s a lot more willingness to cooperate with federal authorities.”

In the midst of this turmoil, undocumented immigrants are seeking ways to protect their families and communities.

The new fear is palpable in the most intimate aspects of everyday life. In the weeks since Jan. 20, Marcela, a young woman from Honduras, stopped taking her two young daughters to the park. On a Saturday morning in February, she was expecting her neighbors for breakfast when she heard a knock on her apartment door. When she opened the door, she froze, mute in the hallway, when confronted with the face of a strange woman. With rumors of ICE raids circling on social media and videos of arrests looping on Telemundo’s news reports, the sight of a stranger at her home’s entrance was paralyzing. Then her neighbor Manuel poked his head from around the door and laughed: the unknown intruder was a friend of his, visiting from out of town.

Marcela ushered in the guests to join her, her husband and three young children. Over coffee and baleadas, she pulled out the passport photos they had made for her 2-year-old son. While the curly-haired toddler is a U.S. citizen, the rest of the family was born in Honduras and has deportation orders pending. With the passport, the toddler can travel with his parents in case of a possible deportation.

On a Saturday morning in February, dozens of immigrant families waited in line in a Raleigh post office to file passport applications for their children. Among them was Luisa, who came to apply for a passport for her 2-year-old, who was born in the U.S. (The names of all undocumented immigrants in this story have been changed for their protection.) Luisa came to the country nine years ago; today half her family lives in the U.S. and the other half in El Salvador. She faces the threat of not only deportation and family separation, but also of her child losing their citizenship.

“We need to have the kids’ documents ready just in case, to have someone who can take care of them, because you don’t know what could happen tomorrow,” she said. If deported, she plans to take her children with her.

A few steps behind Luisa was Pablo, who arrived in Durham from El Salvador more than a decade ago. He met his wife, a refugee from Ethiopia, in English classes before the pandemic. Pablo said he was not standing in line out of fear, but out of due diligence. He attributes the community’s anxiety to social media. “They make it seem like we’re being hunted like animals,” he said. But he’s confident that he won’t fall under the purview of Trump’s immigration raids, and tells his friends that as long as they respect the country’s laws, they have nothing to worry about.

But even this optimism is tempered. Pablo concedes he has changed his weekend routine since Trump took office. He used to take his family out to eat after a long week of 12-hour construction shifts. Now, they lay low and order their food to go, avoiding restaurants where they expect to find other Hispanic people. They’ve also stopped going to the pulga, the Sunday Latino flea market that serves as an informal hub for the Latino community.

A typical Sunday at the pulga finds the rows of stands packed with families. They drive long distances to buy goods from their home countries: medicinal herbs from Honduras or El Salvador, chayote and chicharrón to cook during the week, woven sandals and leather cowboy boots. But on Feb. 10, picnic tables at the entrance were nearly deserted, and a food truck vendor noted that the flow of customers had dropped two weeks prior.

Although many in Durham’s Latino community have, like Pablo, grown more cautious, the community is refusing to capitulate to a culture of fear. Continuing to visit places like the pulga takes on a special significance. Although Valeria is cautious to avoid vehicle checkpoints, and works in a factory where rumors have circulated about ICE arrests at a neighboring plant, she makes an exception for regular trips to the pulga. On a Sunday a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration, she drove 40 minutes from the town of Burlington to shop there with her family. “As a community, we feel the obligation to help each other out,” she said. 

But the crowds, she noted, were noticeably smaller than usual.

On a Sunday in February, dozens of people turned out to march against ICE in downtown Durham. Among them was local business owner and California native Sharon Larios-Badillo, whose mother had been deported years ago when she was eight months pregnant with Sharon, but managed to cross back into the U.S. to give birth a month later. While North Carolina’s Latino community lacks the tradition of political activism of its deeper-rooted southern California counterpart, little by little, Larios-Badillo has seen the new Trump offensive spur people to action. “In the South, there’s a lot more fear and not knowing what to do, so it has been a little bit slower, there’s been a lot of questions. But at the same time there’s a lot more strength and unity coming from people, like this, that we can create something like this and stand together,” she said. “Durham has been very beautiful and welcoming when it comes to building community and trying to create networks of care for ourselves.”

The organization Siembra NC was founded in 2017 to verify — and debunk — reports of raids in the community. Crucial to its work is a hotline for reporting ICE activity and rumors like the Facebook post about Compare Foods. After receiving a firsthand report, the hotline volunteers send someone out to verify the event, then make a social media post confirming or denying the incident. As of mid-February, volunteers staffing Siembra’s ICE hotline found that less than 5% of calls since Jan. 21 were actual operations; the rest were social media rumors, strange vehicles or sightings of ICE officers on their lunch breaks. A month into the Trump administration, they noticed callers were growing more savvy about reports.

“The first few weeks, it was a lot of people calling to report everything that they were seeing on social media or that a family member was sending,” Martinez said. “Now they’re calling and saying, ‘I wanted to let you know that my family member who saw this is going to go ahead and call you,’ or ‘I already sent the person who posted this a message to go ahead and call you so we can get it verified.’”

Siembra also leads know-your-rights trainings, the educational sessions that “border czar” Tom Homan recently disparaged for sabotaging a planned operation in Colorado. At a recent session, over pupusas and Pepsi (per calls for Latinos to boycott Coca-Cola due to alleged collaboration with ICE), organizers led participants in a know-your-rights jeopardy game. What to do if ICE knocks? Do not open up; ask them if they have a signed warrant for a judge, then ask them to slip it under the door. Two men simulated a traffic stop, with a third participant playing the role of an ICE agent tapping on the driver’s window. One of the men pulled a red card out of his wallet and handed it over. The red cards, distributed by immigration defense organizations, list rights on one side; on the other, it states the cardholder’s noncompliance. The trainers reminded attendees to talk to their neighbors: gossip is a form of self-defense. “We have to be chismosos,” a young woman urged them.

Amidst the stress of potential deportation, those community ties have proven to have health benefits for recent immigrants. At El Futuro, a Durham-based mental health organization for Latinos, practitioners have seen up close how community ties can buffer recent immigrants against mental illness and addiction.

“Our normal treatments, like psychotherapy and psychiatry, are pretty good but not sufficient,” said El Futuro director Luke Smith. “What you really need to do is buffer people and form resilience [by going] deep into community and family connections and making sure that people are linked to cultural traditions.”

Beyond institutions, far from the meetings and marches of traditional political organizing, people resist by taking care of each other. Over a week at Manuel and Valentina’s home, a constant rotation of neighbors, family members and co-workers came to keep each other company. Marcela called Valentina to warn of a strange truck outside (which turned out to be city workers repairing pipes) and, later, another confirmed ICE sighting nearby. As Siembra later explained in a press conference, the agents spotted by a neighbor arrested two Bangladeshi men in their homes. 

That weekend, Valentina celebrated her birthday. The preparations were a community affair: on Friday night, the couple drove to a nearby apartment complex, where a young woman, recently arrived from Venezuela, turned the living room of her shared apartment into a beauty salon to supplement her factory income. The next day, Manuel drove 40 minutes to pick up a vat of pozole from an older woman who made it in her kitchen. That evening, a dozen adults crowded into the family’s living room. Some were awaiting asylum hearings. Others had active deportation orders. All were now living under the cloud of a possible arrest and deportation. One guest brought homemade ceviche, another one Mexican-style shrimp cocktail, just like they serve on the beaches. The children watched television and played with stuffed animals. At each knock on the door, someone invariably exclaimed, “La migra!”

It was after midnight when the guests said goodbye, except for one young man. Normally, he would drive home to an apartment he shares with his father. This time, to avoid the risk of after-hours police checkpoints, he decided to spend the night.