NEW YORK (Sputnik) – Young people who are in the United States without proper immigration documents will be the chief target if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on a campaign promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants, New York Immigration Coalition spokeswoman Thanu Yakupitiyage told Sputnik on Monday.
"There's a lot of undocumented youth among the undocumented population. The government has a database of 800,000 names," Yakupitiyage said. "These people are at immediate risk of deportation."
The group’s senior communications manager asserted that there is a strong possibility the Trump administration will rescind an executive order by President Barack Obama, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), that grants temporary work and residency privileges to the young-adult children of people who as children crossed the US border illegally with their parents.
Regarding the potential impact on other US immigrant communities, Yakupitiyage addressed the possible restoration and expansion of the National Security Exit-Entry Registration System (NSEERS), established to register and track people from Arab and other predominantly Muslim nations a year after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
In 2011, nine years after NSEERS was implemented, Obama removed all 25 countries targeted in the system but left its structure intact – an oversight that immigration-rights advocates have urged the president to correct before he leaves office in January.
She added that along with mass deportations, which the Obama administration is already carrying out albeit with certain exceptions under DACA and other programs, undocumented immigrants are likely to be at greater risk of incarceration during Trump’s presidency.
Yakupitiyage cited Trump’s campaign rhetoric favoring imprisonment as a way to deal with undocumented immigrants, and she pointed to a correlation between results of the November 8 presidential election and the rise in stock of private companies that run some jails and prisons as contractors of government agencies in the United States.
"All of the work that we have done to get rid of detention centers and private prisons is now basically teetering because now they are like, 'Oh great, now we have a president who supports mass incarceration, so let's expand our prisons,’” Yakupitiyage said.
Throughout the campaign, Trump pledged to deport as many as three million undocumented immigrants, alleging that they pose a major national-security risk and asserting that many of them are criminals.
Pushing back against those claims, cities across the country including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco have reaffirmed their "sanctuary" status – a loose legal definition that basically means local authorities will refuse to assist federal immigration agents in raids and investigations those jurisdictions consider improper.
Trump has responded by pledging to block all federal government funds to any locality that fails to cooperate with US immigration authorities.
