By Scott Brinton
Sergio Jimenez, of Amityville, an activist with an immigrant rights coalition that includes the Workplace Project in Hempstead, was recently approached by an acquaintance with an unusual proposition: The man asked whether Jimenez would take over his car payments.
The Honduran man had had enough of the Trump administration’s treatment of the immigrant community and planned to return to his home country. He needed someone to assume his car payments rather than abandon the vehicle.
“He’s going back to Honduras because he can’t stand all this suppression,” Jimenez said.
Jimenez spoke during a nearly two-hour conversation that The Advocate held last Wednesday at a restaurant down the street from Hempstead Town Hall, attended by 15 immigrants and advocates from the local community and beyond. They came to discuss President Trump’s immigration policy shift, with its increased focus on identifying and deporting undocumented immigrants.
The Advocate is not naming the restaurant to protect the privacy of its ownership.
Trump, Jimenez said, is ignoring the potential economic impact of tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of undocumented and documented immigrants returning to their home countries, either because they are forced or they choose to. If a growing number of immigrants leave, the economy will decline, he noted.
Immigrants comprise a third of Nassau County’s workforce and a third of its small business owners, and New York’s immigrants, documented and undocumented, pay more than $3.1 billion annually in state and local taxes, according to the New York Immigration Coalition.
Nadia Marin-Molina, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, with an office at the Freeport Workers Justice Center, said she believes the Trump administration aims to “make people’s lives miserable and to scare people, to terrorize people into leaving themselves, because they can’t deport everybody that they say they’re going to deport.”
As of Feb. 3, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported nearly 8,800 immigration arrests, with almost 5,700 deportations and removals under the Trump administration. Those arrested represented 121 countries. As of 2022, an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants lived in the U.S., 3% of the population, according to the American Immigration Council.
Many immigrants were already on edge and thinking of returning to their homelands before Trump’s increased enforcement, according to Deyanira Barrow, who immigrated to the U.S. 35 years ago following the Nicaraguan civil war from 1978 to 1990.
Theft is many times why “our people say, no, no, I’m going back to my country. They know some people spend a lot of money for nothing,” said Barrow, a Workplace Project activist from Baldwin Harbor who owns a cleaning business. An attorney might charge $3,000 to $5,000 to process an immigration claim and provide no services, she said.
“Our people say, no, no, I’m going back to my country. They know some people spend a lot of money for nothing.”
Deyanira Barrow, Immigrant Rights Activist from Baldwin Harbor
Local cooperation with ICE?
According to the National Immigration Law Center, on his first day in office, Jan. 20, Trump signed executive orders calling for, among other measures:
- A recommitment to mass detention of undocumented immigrants.
- Potential punishment of municipalities that act as “sanctuaries” for them.
- A DHS review and audit of federal grants and contracts with non-governmental agencies that aid them.
- Possible reinstatement of country-based immigration bans.
- An examination of Temporary Protected Status designations that allow immigrants fleeing violence and natural disaster to remain in the U.S.
- Expansion of the expedited removal policy that allows the federal government to deport undocumented immigrants without their day in court.
- Authorization for local municipalities to act as immigration enforcement agents.
This final point was most disconcerting for a number of the immigrants interviewed by The Advocate. They wonder whether local governments such as the villages of Freeport, Hempstead and Westbury and area school districts might cooperate with ICE.
Nassau Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican from Atlantic Beach, signed an agreement with the Trump administration Feb. 4 that deputized county police officers to carry out immigration enforcement in tandem with ICE.
Blakeman’s policy has received bipartisan support. Freshman U.S. Rep. Laura Gillen, a Democrat from Rockville Centre, issued a statement Feb. 6: “Violent criminals with no legal right to be here should be deported in accordance with the law. Nassau County [Police Department] detectives now being able to work directly with ICE agents on targeted enforcement against known noncitizen criminals will help keep Long Islanders safe.”
Meanwhile, Gillen’s Democratic counterpart on the North Shore, Rep. Tom Suozzi, of Glen Cove, had this to say: “I strongly support deporting undocumented criminals. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of concern that innocent families will be caught up in the zeal to deport criminals. The answer is to find a bipartisan solution to secure the border, fix the broken asylum system, and to try and protect Dreamers, Temporary Protective Status recipients, that we invited to America, as well as farm workers and other essential workers.”
Whether local governments and school districts will cooperate with ICE is an open question.
Hempstead Board of Education President Victor Pratt told Newsday in January, “We will continue to comply with federal mandates, and the law is the law, whether we agree with it or not.”
That prompted the immigrant rights organization LatinoJustice PRLDEF to respond. “Allowing ICE into our schools or working with this federal agency jeopardizes the safety, rights and well-being of the district’s student body,” said Lourdes Rosado, the group’s president and general counsel.
Hempstead Schools Acting Superintendent Susan Johnson posted a message on the district website last week to reassure concerned parents and students: “We understand that there are concerns circulating in our community regarding the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). During these times, it is important to know that our schools are safe spaces where all children are valued, protected and supported.”
No village or school district could be reached by phone for comment at press time.
‘The struggle continues’
“We are in a dire situation, as I see it,” Jimenez said. “Part of it is the lack of cohesion in the community. There’s no one representing, working with us, except organizations” like the Workplace Project.
The immigrant community was “very active” politically during the 1980s, “but then somehow the community fell asleep, and we remain sleeping,” said Emilio Alfaro Ruiz, national advertising director for La Tribuna Hispana, a Hempstead-based Spanish-language newspaper. “It’s a state of mind. We have to tell the people that the struggle continues.”
Elected leaders of both parties have disappointed the immigrant community, Ruiz said, remarking, “We always hope the Democrats will do more.” In particular, he said, the community had hoped President Obama, with a Democratically controlled Congress from 2009 to 2011, would push through comprehensive immigration reform, but that never happened.
Many immigrant activists have grown tired of the fight, Ruiz said. As they see it, the “politicians don’t give a damn about us,” he remarked, “and I’m going to do my own business — self-care.”
Miguel Alas Sevillano, a community organizer with the Workplace Project and Salvadoran immigrant, said the organization is holding a workshop series to help immigrants, undocumented and documented, to understand their rights under the law. “We prepare people in the community how to act in case ICE comes to our homes or our workplaces or any public area,” Sevillano said.
To learn more about the workshops, call (516) 565-5377.
Scott Brinton is a Hofstra University journalism professor.
Ava Dela Pena contributed to this story.
