But that funding, both for the car seats and their distribution, was part of an abrupt, more than 230 million dollar cut to the state's health department in early April.
State health officer Dr. Daniel Edney told MPB News shortly after the cuts were announced that the return of the funding would especially hinder the department’s ongoing development of a statewide community health worker program.
Founded in the early 2000’s as Mississippi’s foremost immigrant advocacy and legal services organization, MIRA was one of several community partners already utilizing MSDH grant funds to support a broad approach to public health, particularly in the diverse and growing Latino communities of central Mississippi.
Of that nearly $240 million the state lost for a variety of public health initiatives, MIRA lost about $120,000, and campaigns to distribute the car seats, provide free vaccinations and organize ‘know your rights’ meetings were stopped in their tracks.
Bill Chandler, a longtime activist, labor organizer and co-founder of MIRA, says he’s always been skeptical of nonprofits relying on federal funds for that reason, and that they intend to continue their work as planned.
“We still have money, and we're trying now to raise money through foundations, individual donors and so on so we can keep going. Rather than shutting down, we decided let's do our best to raise more money and keep going on. We've been in existence for 22 years, why the hell would we shut down because of Trump?”
But both Chandler and his wife, immigration attorney and MIRA co-founder L. Patricia Ice, also admit that the current climate of immigration enforcement in the United States is much harsher than any they’ve seen in their decades of prior experience.
“I am a bit surprised that it's been so harsh. Not a lot surprised, because we knew that he was going to be bad. We just didn't know that he was going to be this bad,” Ice told MPB News.
Running on what he said was a mandate to ‘close’ the southern U.S. border and deport undocumented immigrants en masse, Trump has in less than four months upended the country’s immigration system, primarily through sweeping executive orders and open defiance of federal court orders.
Under the direction of border czar Tom Homan, who previously served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, the new regime of immigration enforcement in the United States has placed much greater emphasis on raids, detentions and deportations, particularly in the country’s interior, as well as a lack of due process for many who are detained.
And in just over 100 days, the number of 287(g) agreements – which allows state and local law enforcement to partner with ICE in immigration enforcement – have more than tripled across the country.
So far in Mississippi, only the office of Attorney General Lynn Fitch has entered into such an agreement, but immigration raids on workplaces and community gatherings across central Mississippi and the coast have increased.
Others have found themselves detained and swiftly deported after being stopped while driving, or even when leaving their own hearing in an immigration court.
The Trump administration has also revoked long-standing policies and guidance within the federal immigration apparatus, such as scrapping a ban on targeting schools, hospitals or places of worship for immigration enforcement.
Nina, an organizer in central Mississippi who asked to use a pseudonym because of her own immigration status, says she’s witnessed several families separated already.
“Just last week, in one day, I found out about three families being separated. It was all unexpected -- either they were deported, or they were arrested and now they're in jail, and they send them directly to the detention center,” she told MPB News. “I've encountered many problems trying to find out information about immigrants that are being arrested. They don't let you know if they're going to court, they don't let you know anything unless you're going up there yourself and looking for this.”
“I've been with kids myself – they're like, 'where's my dad? I don't want my dad to leave, or my mom.' How do you tell a seven-year-old you're not going to see your parents again, while they're crying, but you don't want to add that type of pressure on a child? It's very disheartening.”
Originally from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, Nina and her relatives still speak the indigenous Mixtec dialect of their rural hometown, in addition to English and Spanish, in a lingua franca of a slight Mississippi twang and Nahuatl roots that has become increasingly common in the state’s central region.
Beginning especially in the 1990’s, when migrants from throughout Latin America were recruited to the region to work, primarily, in the vast network of poultry production and agriculture, the population of towns like Morton, Forest, Pelahatchie and others grew exponentially.
But those same communities that developed around those workers were rocked in August, 2019 by the largest single-day workplace immigration raid in U.S. history.
On the first day of school for many that year, ICE agents swept into multiple chicken plants between Carthage and Forest in the early morning, detaining nearly 700 workers and leaving hundreds of children to return home without any idea where their parents might be. Neighbors and local catholic churches stepped up to house and feed many children, and a majority of those detained were later released.
But Nina says the wounds of that sudden and painful day are still fresh for many, making the reality of increased family separation and targeted enforcement all the more harrowing today.
She also thinks fomenting that culture of fear, even of seemingly mundane tasks like driving to the grocery store or a relative’s home, may be the point.
“They're trying to make a living for their kids, trying to give them a life they never had. It's a real bad system when they're pitting people against law enforcement, and there's more fear when it comes to that, because no one wants to stand up to them, but we know that's wrong at the same time,” she said.
“But they know their consequences are going to be being separated from their families by speaking up as well. So it's a very hard time for the immigrant community, and it's hard to try and explain to someone that they need to know their rights and to stand up for themselves, because they're more afraid of law enforcement than their own rights. It's like they kind of take away the fact that they even have rights at all,” she told MPB News.
