Fear, anguish and determination in Mississippi’s immigrant communities

But that funding was only 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 organizing community health workers to 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 [Trump] 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, a community organizer in central Mississippi, 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.

That fear has even begun to inform the work of those like L. Patricia Ice, and other attorneys, who have worked in immigration advocacy and legal services for decades. 

Because a majority of her clients reside in central or southern Mississippi, Ice has worked most often through the New Orleans office of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, which handles applications for both temporary and permanent immigration benefits and programs. 

Of the growing number of deportations and detentions that have raised questions of due process and other legal guarantees, the most recent involving that office was the deportation of a two year old girl, her 11 year old sister and their mother to Honduras in late April. Only days before, the girls’ father filed a federal complaint asserting that the youngest daughter was actually a United States citizen, born in Baton Rouge, and thus ineligible for deportation.   

All three were detained while attending a routine check-in at the New Orleans ICE field office, located in a towering building at 1250 Poydras Street, only floors below the USCIS office in the same building.

Instances such as these, labeled by advocates as ‘ruse’ tactics, have substantially increased in metropolitan areas across the country since Trump began his second term. 

L. Patricia Ice says that while attending a hearing at the same building in March, both she and her client, a Salvadoran man living under Temporary Protected Status, worried he may be detained by ICE on his way out of the hearing. 

The swift deportation of the two year old and her relatives, as well as hundreds across the country, has only solidified that fear for Ice, and even came as a surprise for an immigrants rights attorney with decades of practice across multiple states and presidential administrations. 

“I was very shocked because I just didn't think that those officers would do that, but now I know they will. It’s shocking and very hurtful, so much so that I feel like I have to give it up -- give up the work. If I were younger, I think I could stand it better.” she told MPB News. 

“There's so much uncertainty, which is another reason why I feel a lot like I want to stop doing this. But then on the other hand, I feel like it's hard for me to stop doing it because I do have the knowledge of the systems. There are other immigration lawyers here in Mississippi, but most of them have not practiced as long as I have, so they haven't seen the different trends.” 

“They're younger and they're very good, but I've been doing it for a long time, and I really feel like I know what I'm doing. And so to give up the work when I feel like I'm one of the few who understands the work is hard.” 

Particularly alarming to Ice has been the revoking of TPS and other protections for some of the hemisphere’s largest, and most vulnerable, migrant populations – particularly those who have arrived or are arriving from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. 

Others who fall outside of the TPS program, and particularly those who arrived undocumented and were granted parole under urgent humanitarian considerations, have virtually disappeared into a dark and uncertain future since Trump took office on Jan. 20. 

“Some of the ones that I helped with [parole] started calling me last year; it was before we even knew who was running [for president]. They were calling me to ask how to renew their parole -- well, they never came out with a rule to renew their parole. And I kept telling them, ‘right now, we can't renew it.’ Now, it's definite that they can't renew it, and so that's a bit upsetting. I don't get those calls anymore – they were mainly from Nicaraguans.”

'It's been very hard' 
 

Like many who arrive in the United States from Latin America, Nina’s family spent the first several years of her life following the sun and the seasons across the country in search of itinerant farm work, typically for low wages and flimsy, if any, legal protections. 

When they arrived in Central Mississippi, several generations shared the same home without a car or many resources between them. Along with her siblings and cousins, the children of the family spent their first weeks of school in Pelahatchie with dirty shoes and holes in their clothes, barely speaking English, and seemingly out of sight of school administrators who they looked to for help. 

As the youngest, Nina soon became the family’s de facto interpreter, whether at school or in countless immigration check-ins. 

It was at some point in high school, when she planned to join her peers in getting a driver's license, that she discovered she was undocumented and forbidden by state law to have a license at all. 

From that point, the fear of being pulled over and the myriad scenarios that presented was pervasive, as it is for many in central Mississippi, where construction companies and other employers now contract with drivers to transport their workers from point to point. 

Undeterred, Nina still graduated high school, soon after earning her paralegal degree to better help the countless families in situations that remind her of her own.  

“But right now, organizing the community isn't very organized; it’s been very hard. A lot of people just like to call you individually instead of a whole group meetup at a town hall, which I completely understand, because you never know who might come and try to scare people,” she told MPB News. 

“Everyone's very cautious about how they're moving. But one thing I've been trying to really, really get out is know your rights. A lot of people do not know their rights once they're arrested or in custody of ICE. They don't know that you can say, 'no, I don't want to speak until I have a lawyer.' That's my biggest concern right now.” 

But as decades of U.S. immigration policy – and particularly that of enforcement – have unraveled under Trump’s second term, those like Nina have found an already precarious concept of a future even more uncertain, particularly as programs like TPS and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, have faced substantial challenges from the executive branch. 

Many have used the abrupt changes under this administration as an impetus to ‘self-deport’ and avoid the taxing and often dehumanizing process of formal deportation entirely. 

But Nina, now in her 20’s, says despite her own fear, or rather in spite of it, that she intends to continue organizing in these communities as she has for years. 

“It's scary not knowing your future, not being able to say 'yeah, I'm going to buy this home because I've been here so long,' when you never know. That it can just be gone and it's just very uncertain and it doesn't help me prepare for the future, which I would like to,” she said. 

“It's a very scary time for me, but I also want to show the community that there's still hope, and if you speak up, something could happen. I want to give them hope that we can still stand up and we can be here, even though I myself am scared too.”