“The day we all feared has arrived,” and… “we are staying in the struggle.” Members of the immigrant-led social movement Movimiento Cosecha (Indiana chapter) held an Inauguration Day video conference live-streamed on Facebook. They were distressed by the promises and pronouncements made on the day of the false messiah’s second coming.
Yet in the words of Carlos Castañeda, “many of us have lived in countries where governments try to overwhelm so that [resisting] seems like a lost cause. Then we feel helpless and hopeless and cease to organize.” Organizing immigrant communities resist the “spirit-crushing” calculated, overwhelm-inducing nature of the Executive orders directly impacting them. Relational acts defy fear, protect, and prepare for the worst: mass detention and deportation tearing families apart. Directly impacted immigrants are staying engaged and providing leadership through struggle at a time when Democrats in public office are flailing and many US citizens are in crisis, disengaged, and resigned.
Executive orders and their impact
During the Inauguration Day Facebook live and the following days, we discussed the cruel orders affecting the community, movement, the body. Trump is ordering the aggressive pursuit of maximally criminalizing measures that build on his first administration’s use of criminal prosecutions for immigration-related offenses to split families apart and populate prisons that enrich private prison companies.[1] In the past 20 years, during Republican and Democratic administrations alike, the GEO Group, CoreCivic, LaSalle Corrections, and the Management Training Corporation have earned billions of dollars from ICE detention contracts.[2] Trump is now ordering immigration officials to detain people “to the maximum extent” possible, according to one Executive order. According to the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), this will dramatically heighten the amount of people in ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities, the conditions of which are so horrible they sometimes even violate the US Constitution.[3]
Here are five points from the Executive orders directly impacting Cosecha. Trump ordered an escalation of federal prosecutions for immigration-related offenses, such as entering or staying in the US without authorizing paperwork. The threat is concrete. Cosecha families, including Oscar Bermudes’s family, have experienced this kind of prosecution applied along racial lines. Relevant sections of US Code trace back to a law passed in 1929 during the Christian supported eugenics movement to advance racist and white supremacist dominance. In 2024, Other Cosecha members vulnerable to such prosecution themselves worked with the family to organize a public deportation defense campaign. They struggled to hold the family and extended community networks together and prevented deportation. Cosecha now worries that he will soon be deported.
Second, Trump ordered the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and US Attorney General to charge immigrants who do not register as being undocumented with criminal and civil penalties.[4] People are at risk of detention and deportation if unable to show paperwork. He also ordered ICE to restore from his first term the Victim of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE). NIJC writes that the office encouraged people to accuse immigrants of crimes and perpetuated falsehoods. (This did not surprise many Cosecha members because of the analogous initiatives in Latin America, like the network of informants under the Uribe administration in Colombia in which neighbors were ordered to report on each other.) (See Executive orders: “Protecting the American People Against Invasion; “Securing our Borders”; “Restoring the Death Penalty and Restoring Public Safety.”) Additionally, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sanctioned ICE to target schools, churches, and courthouses. In compliance, the DHS reversed a policy prohibiting arrests in such “sensitive areas.”
Also on Inauguration Day, Trump ordered the evaluation of federal contracts and financial support for nongovernmental organizations that serve immigrants, ostensibly to assess whether these organizations “promote or facilitate violations of…immigration laws.” (See Executive order: “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”)
Another Executive order prescribes additional policies on “vetting and screening…to the maximum degree possible.” (See Executive order: “Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.”) According to NIJC, this order provides a pretext to portray all immigrants as risks to national security.
Writing the words “risks to national security” calls to mind a Cosecha member’s words: “I have a target on my back” for being poor. Many Cosecha members have been cast as threats to national security for decades—in countries of origin and the United States—because many (not all) are from the margins. Enrique Dussel points out that the periphery is in relation to the center, which is endlessly concerned with fortification and security.[5] The periphery is a place of abandonment and exploitation that is governed, in Achille Mbembe’s terms, through a logic of confinement, containment, limited mobility, and incarceration.[6]
A final Cosecha-impacting order proclaims that children could be denied protection and support. Trump brazenly violated the Fourteenth Amendment by ordering federal agencies not to recognize the citizenship of children born in the US to parents without permanent legal status in the country. (See Executive order: “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”.)
Meanwhile, on Jan 22, Congress passed a bill that eliminates due process protections for many immigrants, including members of Cosecha who have been living and working in the United States for years. Under the Laken Riley Act, immigration officers are required to “indefinitely detain and deport” non-citizens who are accused—not found guilty—of minor crimes like shoplifting, according to Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council.[7]Migrants who represent no public safety risk and end up acquitted of any criminal violation could remain detained by ICE under the law. Forty-six Democrats supported the Laken Riley Act. In these and other Trump administration measures released in recent days, the historical injustices that forced Cosecha members and other Latin American migrants to leave their homes (including expropriation of land and labor as well as violations of human dignity) are not rectified but buried in claims of victimhood and lies and Democratic party’s fumbling cowardice.
Responding to the Trump administration with relational actions
Under duress, the mixed status immigrant-led movement continues the struggle.[8] On the Inauguration Day Facebook live, members led an abbreviated “know your rights” workshop and linked to ACLU materials for circulation to “so we can support each other.” Others reported on participation in a Jan 18 “festival of resistance” in Gary, Indiana, to protest deportations carried out from the Gary/Chicago airport. The march expressed interreligious, labor movement, and neighborly family support for the immigrant community in the face of uncertainty and terror. For Cosecha, coming together across differences builds community, a movement, a body of diverse members. Also on the Facebook live, members invited listeners to join an upcoming gathering at a local immigrant-led community organization, La Casa de Amistad, to feast, analyze together, and provide mutual support. Much movement building focuses on bringing together scattered people and fragments of legacies to become stronger and more fully alive. This is solidarity as re-membering. Cosecha re-members, drawing together what has been torn apart and separated through relational and intersubjective actions. It seeks to protect and hold members of expansive kinship communities together.
The final action from the Inauguration Day call speaks with heart wrenching clarity to members’ realism about what the Trump administration may do to tear apart families and fragment relational networks they prize and have nurtured through movement building.[9] Members are working with families to draft legal documents to provide for springing guardianships to ensure a trusted adult can legally care for their children in case of immigration detention or deportation. This excruciating scenario is plausible. The Trump administration’s family separation policy to systematically separate children from their parents started at the southern border in 2017 and expanded under the “zero-tolerance” policy in 2018. The American Academy of Pediatrics described the resulting family separations as “government-sanctioned child abuse.”[10] They are doing everything they can to diminish the pain and trauma for their children. As Cosecha member Dominga Cortes implored on the Facebook Live: “With whom will we leave our children if we are deported? What are the temporary guardians’ names, phone numbers and addresses? Write out their routines; what time do they go to bed? What programs do they like to watch? What are the foods they like? We should leave all of this written in a notebook so that our children, those most affected, suffer as little as possible. …Let’s do what we can to navigate this nightmare together, pueblo. With much love.”
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[1] “Leading with Cruelty: Eight Impacts of Trump’s First Day Executive Orders,” National Immigrant Justice Center, accessed January 23, 2025, https://immigrantjustice.org/staff/blog/leading-cruelty-eight-impacts-trumps-first-day-executive-orders.
[2] Eunice Hyunhye Cho, “Unchecked Growth: Private Prison Corporations and Immigration Detention, Three Years Into the Biden Administration | ACLU,” American Civil Liberties Union (blog), August 7, 2023, https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/unchecked-growth-private-prison-corporations-and-immigration-detention-three-years-into-the-biden-administration.
[3] “Challenging Unconstitutional Conditions in CBP Detention Facilities,” American Immigration Council, June 8, 2015, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/litigation/challenging-unconstitutional-conditions-cbp-detention-facilities.
[4] “Leading with Cruelty.”
[5] Enrique Dussel, “Theologies of the ´Periphery´ and the ´Centre¨: Encounter or Confrontation?,” Concilium 171 (1984), 171 (1984): 87–97.
[6] Achille Mbembe, “Bodies as Borders,” From the European South 4 (n.d.): 5–18.
[7] “Misguided Laken Riley Act Does Nothing to Fix the Problems That Plague Our Immigration System,” American Immigration Council, January 22, 2025, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/news/misguided-laken-riley-act-fails-to-fix-broken-immigration-system.
[8] See Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Justice as Reconciliatory Praxis: A Decolonial Mujerista Move,” International Journal of Public Theology 4 (2010): 37–50, at 37 and En La Lucha/ In the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology (10th Anniversary Edition)(Fortress Press, 2003) for the meaning of struggle stitched into this engaged research.
[9] For a discussion of responsibility to expansive kindship networks, see Nichole M. Flores, “Latina/o Families: Solidarity and the Common Good,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 33, no. 2 (2013): 57–72, 61.
[10] Kathryn Hampton et al., “The Psychological Effects of Forced Family Separation on Asylum-Seeking Children and Parents at the US-Mexico Border: A Qualitative Analysis of Medico-Legal Documents,” PLoS ONE 16, no. 11 (November 24, 2021): e0259576, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259576.