Donald Trump’s victory puts all eyes back on the border

This story is republished from Searchlight NM, a nonprofit news outlet, as a part of our commitment to bringing you the best in independent news coverage that matters to Albuquerque.

By Molly Montgomery, Searchlight NM

On October 31, Donald Trump landed in Albuquerque at a private aviation hangar, a location he chose for a rally in part because he owes the city half a million dollars from a 2019 event at the Santa Ana Star Center, and he wasn’t welcome at the downtown convention center. He stepped off the plane, took the stage, and almost immediately began calling immigrants criminals. 

“They all said, ‘Don’t come,’” he said of his advisers. 

“I said, ‘Why?’

“‘You can’t win New Mexico.’

“I said, ‘Look, your votes are rigged. We can win New Mexico. We can win New Mexico.’ And I said, ‘Why? They don’t want to stop the people pouring across the border that are murderers? They’re killers, they’re drug addicts, they’re drug dealers, they’re gang members. Why? New Mexico wants to keep it going like it is?’”

Then he said he believed he’d won New Mexico twice before, and that if God could come down as “the vote counter,” he would win New Mexico, California and “a lot of states.”

Though Trump’s god didn’t descend on New Mexico — which went 52 percent for Vice-President Kamala Harris, 46 percent for Trump — he won more than enough states to take back the presidency.

This victory will have a historic impact on the border regions of New Mexico, Texas, Arizona and California. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump threatened to violate the human rights of immigrants and enact a series of racist and authoritarian changes to the country’s immigration system. He has promised to deport millions of people by deploying the military and National Guard to find, detain and remove anyone living in the U.S. without documentation — measures that would deny them due process. He’s said he will deport students on foreign visas who have protested in favor of Palestinian liberation and screen out immigrants based on ideology. And he has pledged to end birthright citizenship for the children of people without documentation.

These policies would significantly intensify President Joe Biden’s already restrictive immigration positions. Despite the sharp differences in rhetoric between Democrats and Republicans, a fixation on crime has pervaded conversations around immigration in both parties in recent years. Data repeatedly shows that noncitizens in the U.S. do not commit crimes at higher rates than U.S. citizens. But even “relatively progressive” communities “support finding paths to be able to identify criminals that are undocumented,” says Gabriel Sanchez, executive director of the University of New Mexico Center for Social Policy and a nationally recognized expert on New Mexico and Latino politics.

The association of “immigrant” and “criminal” has shaped immigration policy on both sides of the political aisle. Contrary to right-wing portrayals of Biden opening the border, over the course of his term he continued building the border wall, made expedited removals more frequent, and ultimately made it more difficult to obtain asylum.

“I think that the atmosphere around immigration currently is probably the worst it’s ever been in the time that I’ve paid attention to it,” says Molly Molloy, a professor emeritus at New Mexico State University who’s studied the border since the 1980s. “There’s hostility towards immigration even from people who previously would have been quite supportive.”

Sanchez describes the attention to border security as a “consequence” of this election cycle. “Clearly,” he says, “voters are indicating in poll after poll that there’s more saliency towards border enforcement than when Biden was elected in 2020.”

The violence of border security 

Trump’s policies from the past shaped central pieces of what became Biden’s immigration policy. In June, the president signed an executive order implementing severe limits on asylum claims — limits that resemble Trump’s first-term restrictions. Since the June order went into effect, there has been a marked decline in the presence of migrants in southern New Mexico, in contrast to repeated claims that the border is wide open. 

“There’s the rhetoric about the border being flooded with people, and there’s the reality, which is that the numbers are minimal,” says Morgan Smith, a retired attorney who has spent the past 13 years observing border conditions and participating in humanitarian efforts. By the end of the summer, Smith — a Santa Fe resident who drives down to various border regions roughly once a month — noticed far fewer migrants in shelters throughout El Paso, Texas; Juarez, Mexico; Palomas, Mexico; and Deming, New Mexico.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics support Smith’s observations. From December of fiscal year 2024 to September of fiscal year 2024, the number of migrants encountered by Border Patrol fell from around 250,000 to around 54,000, a decrease of almost 80 percent. That decline can be traced to the June executive order and the government of Mexico making it harder for migrants to reach the border.

Trump has proposed raising the number of Border Patrol agents during his first term and will likely encourage officials to harm or even kill people they encounter trying to cross. The ACLU has reported that a former senior Trump administration official is predicting “the regular use of tear gas to repel migrants, the deployment of heat-ray technology to make asylum-seekers feel like their skin is on fire, or shoot-to-kill orders for anyone who rushes the U.S. border.”

Even when Border Patrol agents don’t try to harm migrants, immigrants’ rights advocates fear that an increase in their ranks will drive migrants into dangerous positions, making it more likely that they’ll try to cross remote, harsh areas of desert in an attempt to evade capture. Struggling to find their way through the unfamiliar landscape with little water, in temperatures that regularly rise above 100 degrees, people die of dehydration and heat exposure.

In addition, migrants may turn more frequently to human smugglers, who sometimes jam people into spaces so tight that they overheat and suffocate, or strand them in the desert with no water. Ironically, greater policing may well empower the Mexican drug cartels, which carry out many of the human smuggling operations.

“An increase in border enforcement drives people into the shadows, into riskier situations that jeopardize their well-being,” says Sophia Genovese, an immigration attorney who spoke to Searchlight New Mexico in her personal capacity as an expert in asylum and detention law, and not on behalf of any organization. Genovese is one of only six immigration lawyers in New Mexico who regularly take on pro bono cases for detained immigrants.

“These smugglers, as we’ve seen, pack people into boxes, essentially, and people overheat and die,” she says.

In 2023 and 2024, ten times more people who likely were trying to cross the border of New Mexico were found dead than in 2019 and 2020, according to the New Mexico Office of the Medical Examiner: in 2024, 108 people were found dead; in 2023, 113; in 2020, 9; and in 2019, 10. Experts suspect this dramatic rise could stem from smugglers exposing the travelers to dangerous conditions in the desert.

Punished for seeking asylum

Trump has also talked about extending and expanding Biden’s restrictions on asylum, which have resulted in Kafkaesque situations. One man — who will remain anonymous here because his case is still pending — has been trapped in federal detention facilities for the past couple of years, hoping to be released as judges go back and forth on whether his criminal record should disqualify him from staying in the country. 

Molly Molloy is working as a translator for this man’s lawyer. She says that when he was 24 and living in El Salvador, police arrested him and accused him of participating in a gang and trafficking drugs. He maintains that he’s innocent on both counts and that police planted drugs on him after his arrest. But for two-and-a-half years he was held in prison, where he was raped and beaten. His family hired a lawyer who was able to get his criminal charge reduced to simple possession of marijuana, and he was released. Because of his alleged criminal background, however, police regularly harassed him and no one would hire him, so he fled to the U.S.

Border Patrol agents caught him at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2022. They discovered his criminal record and sent him to a federal detention facility in the border region. A judge denied his petition for asylum, citing his criminal charges. The judge argued that rapes and beatings occur in U.S. prisons and were a consequence of the man’s criminal activity.

The man appealed the decision, and at his second trial an expert testified that the Bukele government in El Salvador, known for its extreme crackdowns on gangs, would likely reimprison him and he would again suffer rape and beatings that amount to torture. The second judge granted him relief under the Convention Against Torture — meaning that he could stay in the U.S. without facing deportation. But the Biden administration appealed that decision because of the man’s criminal record, and he is now awaiting the outcome of this appeal at a detention facility.

He is “the kind of person that these government programs are designed to catch and keep out of the United States at all costs,” Molloy says. She believes he’s innocent. If he were deported, she says, he would almost certainly be arrested immediately at the airport in El Salvador and returned to a gang prison.

His situation is not uncommon, Genovese says. Under the Biden administration, people throughout the immigration system are being profiled and punished for crimes they haven’t committed. A judge in New Mexico denied one man asylum because he had tattoos, Genovese says, and without citing any evidence said that the tattoos might be related to gang activity.

Under the Trump administration, the U.S. will probably punish people and deny them asylum more frequently because of the politically motivated convictions they are trying to escape.

Abysmal conditions at detention centers

Even when migrants follow the procedures for requesting asylum laid out in the June executive order, they face harsh consequences. In a CBP Holding Facility in El Paso, Genovese says, one migrant — who will remain anonymous to protect their safety — requested asylum, following guidelines stipulated in the executive order. CBP officials in the facility reacted by forcing everyone detained in the migrant’s unit — more than 20 people — to kneel with their hands above their heads for an hour. The New Mexico Immigrant Law Center has submitted a complaint to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security about the incident.

Others who have tried to seek asylum while detained have been punished by being locked in cold rooms for hours without food and sometimes without clothing, or by being forced to sit outside with their faces angled up to the scorching sun.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has proposed increasing the capacity of New Mexico’s detention centers. Trump will likely expand capacity and has promised to build huge new detention camps along the southern border. The current detention facilities, in Torrance, Cibola and Otero Counties, have come under scrutiny for multiple abuses and safety issues, including cells being flooded with raw sewage. 

The federal government often contracts with local jails to detain migrants. Searchlight reported in November 2022 that the government was paying the billion-dollar corporation CoreCivic almost $2 million a month to detain 15 migrants in the Torrance County Detention Facility — enough to buy each migrant a $1.28 million house. A federal inspection of the facility found a serious lack of sanitation. One inmate was drinking water from a mop sink, a ceiling and sink were moldy, a toilet was overflowing with excrement, and the medical unit was understaffed. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General urged ICE to relocate every migrant held in the facility, an alert that ICE ignored.

In the summer of 2024, Jhon Javier Benavides-Quintana, a 32-year-old man from Ecuador who was immediately caught after crossing the border into El Paso, died while under ICE custody in Otero. The ACLU is demanding that ICE investigate his death. In 2022, a Brazilian asylum seeker, Kesley Vial, died at 23 in Torrance, and the ACLU has filed a wrongful death suit against CoreCivic, demanding damages pursuant to the New Mexico Wrongful Death Act. 

Genovese worked with a client who had a stroke while detained in Torrance. The prison guards prevented her from talking to him in the hospital, she says. They transferred him across three different facilities and eventually deported him to Mexico, leaving him on the streets with a walker and without any of the documents he’d brought to the U.S., including his passport.

Mass Deportation

Trump has said he plans to deport millions of people and hold them in camps.

Experts are divided on how effective he’ll be at fulfilling these promises, for a few reasons. First, it’s not clear yet whether he will really try to follow through. 

There’s “the potential that some of what he says isn’t actually going to be a priority,” says Sanchez. “But if he’s consistently campaigning on it, you just have to take what he says at face value, that he will try to at least increase the number of deportations utilizing federal resources.” 

In addition, some of what Trump is proposing may not hold up in court. Many of the anti-immigrant policies he tried to enact during his first term were struck down. Over the course of his presidency, however, he shifted the judicial landscape, and he often seems unmoved by issues of legality.

“My concern is that we don’t have the judicial makeup we once did to fight back against these policies,” Genovese says. She points out that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who served during Trump’s first term, unilaterally made case law that severely restricted asylum for LGBTQ+ individuals and survivors of domestic and gang violence, a decision that Biden reversed.

A third reason Trump’s deportations may not go as far as many fear: the U.S. immigration system may not be able to process deportations at the rate he’s guaranteeing.

“Trump ended up being less effective at deporting people than Obama was,” Genovese says. “By targeting everyone, Trump clogged the system, and the system moved slower. The rhetoric is incredibly dangerous, but the reality is you can’t target everyone for mass deportation. It’s just not going to work.”

She notes that expedited removals would hasten the deportation process, and that people subject to it might face prolonged detention.

Regardless of how fast and effective Trump is at carrying out his mass deportation agenda, his rhetoric will stoke fear in immigrant communities. Immigrants who are victims of crime may be less likely to report what they’ve suffered to law enforcement, for fear of being deported. They may be reluctant to seek out necessary healthcare or ask social services for help. During the first Trump presidency, children of undocumented immigrants were stranded at school after ICE raided their parents’ workplaces in the middle of the day, and some stopped going to school at all because of the threat of deportation and family separation.

People held in the camps that Trump describes could experience additional human rights abuses at the hands of guards, along with medical complications from inhumane conditions.

“I don’t think we have to imagine it, because we’ve seen what he did before,” Molloy says. “We’ve seen what amounted to concentration camps at the border.”

She recalls hearing a recording that journalist Ginger Thompson obtained of children screaming for their parents while a Border Patrol agent joked that they sounded like an orchestra missing its conductor. In 2018, she personally saw the Tornillo camp in Tornillo, Texas, where Border Patrol was detaining thousands of children.

“They just put up a big tent camp, these giant white tents, and there’s nothing else for miles around except the border fence,” she says. “With good binoculars you could see the kids walking around in the camp.” It would be easy enough for Trump to find land for the camps in New Mexico, given how much land is public in the state, Molloy says.

Trump’s attempt to round up millions of undocumented immigrants could also lead to wide racial profiling of Latinos.

“In a state like New Mexico, where half our population is Latino, that’s going to be huge,” says Sanchez. “We have democratic state leadership at the governor’s level, and every statewide office in our state is held by a Democrat, so I don’t anticipate our state government participating collaboratively with the Trump administration to enforce his federal immigration policy. That’s going to make for a really interesting aspect of federalism — state government versus federal government — and I would anticipate our state government doing everything they can to not abide by whatever he tries to pass.”

Attempts by the governor and other state leaders to protect New Mexico’s immigrant communities could result in an “arm-wrestling match” over how much money the federal government awards the state, Sanchez says.

Even in situations where people living undocumented in the U.S. have broken the law, harsh policy stances can have extreme consequences, particularly for mixed-status families — who Trump’s former director of ICE, Tom Homan, suggested could be deported together, without regard for any family member’s citizenship status. 

Genovese’s stepfather, who was brought to the U.S. as a child and was undocumented, was detained and ultimately deported because of substance use in 2009. Her family had to travel from Los Angeles to Tijuana every other week to see him. The financial and emotional toll his absence took on the family was severe. He still hasn’t been able to return to the U.S.

“Deportation affects everyone, citizens and immigrants alike, and that’s something I wish the public knew more about,” Genovese says.

A more just immigration policy, she argues, would involve eliminating the immigrant visa quotas that exist for certain nationalities, making work permits immediately accessible, and legalizing the presence of millions of people who have been living and working in the United States for years.

“People have been migrating since people existed,” she says. “It’s a very normal part of the human experience to migrate from one place to the other, but increasingly also in modern times, it’s a necessary thing to happen.”

Economic justice

Immigrants make up more than one-tenth of New Mexico’s entire workforce, holding a range of positions: statewide, more than one-eighth of personal care aides, almost one-fifth of local business owners, more than one-fifth of cooks, construction and oil and gas workers, and more than one-third of college professors and of those working in farming, fishing and forestry are immigrants.

Trump’s mass deportation plan would be “devastating to New Mexico’s economy, primarily because segments of our workforce rely pretty heavily on immigrant labor,” Sanchez says. “If you were successful at deporting a lot of this workforce, the prices of all of those products would increase and be put to the consumers.”

Immigrants in New Mexico also pay millions of dollars in federal, state, and local taxes. In 2022, for instance, undocumented immigrants paid $153,800,000 in New Mexico state and local taxes, according to a study from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Immigrant-based organizations have fought for many of the economic justice initiatives that low-wage workers throughout the state depend on, says Marcela Díaz, executive director of the statewide workers’ rights organization Somos Un Pueblo Unido. Those initiatives include raising city and state minimum wages and pushing for paid sick leave.

In addition to Trump’s draconian border policy, his economic and healthcare proposals will likely harm immigrant communities throughout the state, Díaz says.

“We aren’t just social security, lack of social security, where we’re born, what documents we carry,” says Díaz. “We’re also workers. We’re people of color. We live in rural communities. In many cases we live paycheck to paycheck.”

During the first Trump administration, Díaz watched as the processing of citizenship applications among Somos Un Pueblo Unido members slowed down. She saw workers experience major disruptions to their jobs when immigration authorities threatened to conduct I-9 audits of dozens of companies in Santa Fe, Albuquerque and Las Cruces to find out whether all workers had work authorization.

When employers warned workers about the audits, many quit, afraid of deportation. Some employers stopped telling their workers about the audits, and then ICE raided the business and deported workers, Díaz says. Workers were also terrified that ICE would learn their home addresses through the audits.

Díaz notes that amid the talk about immigrants being criminals, the crimes that employers commit against undocumented and low-wage workers can go unnoticed. A 2021 report from the Economic Policy Institute found that a company called HCL Technologies was underpaying employees on work visas by $95 million a year. A 2013 report compiled in New Mexico found that almost a third of the immigrants participating in the study had experienced wage theft, that only a tenth of those who experienced such theft reported it, and that undocumented immigrants were twice as likely to experience workplace abuse as immigrants with documentation.

In order to encourage undocumented workers to come forward about workplace abuses, the Biden administration implemented a program allowing noncitizens to request deferred action while reporting labor violations. The program is designed to make workplaces safer for all workers by assuaging undocumented workers’ fear that they could face deportation as a form of employer retaliation. Members of Somos Un Pueblo Unido are participating in the program, Díaz says, but it almost certainly will not continue under Trump.

Immigrants’ advocates are hopeful that New Mexico residents will protest Trump’s policies if and when he tries to enact them. Díaz recalls how quickly Somos Un Pueblo Unido was able to mobilize after the first Trump presidency to push for crucial protections at the state level.

“At the end of the day, we are human beings, and we are families, and we are raising kids in this country and in this community,” Díaz says. “We are an essential part not just of the economy, but of the cultural and civic fabric of our state.”