Three weeks ago, I finished teaching my fall quarter class at the University of California Los Angeles on the history of social protest. As usual, it was especially enjoyable to spend a few moments chatting with many students about their plans for finals, winter break, and their longer-term plans. As the other students left after class, a young woman waited patiently in the hall to see me. As I approached her, it seemed obvious that she was overwhelmed.
Many students feel stressed during this time of year, for a variety of reasons, and I always make time to talk with them—but this particular student’s distress stuck with me. She described a terrible set of circumstances facing her family, including serious medical and financial problems, and how she was supporting her entire family while trying to finish her studies. She told me that while she was a citizen, her parents were undocumented. Neither the circumstances themselves nor the fact that recounting them brought her to tears surprised me; I’ve seen both much too often, for far too long.
We chatted for a few more minutes, and I assured her that I would do the best I could to help her in every way possible, including connecting her to immigrant rights organizations and lawyers in the face of the draconian deportation threats that are imminent following former President Donald Trump’s return to office on January 20. But since our brief conversation, I’ve been unable to get it out of my mind for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s a stark, horrific reminder of what it means, in profoundly human terms, to be alive in the fast-approaching era of Trump’s deportation threats.
This student’s family came to America for a better life, like millions of others—including my maternal grandparents, who fled Russia more than a century ago and trekked across Europe, joining the great wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. They came to America to build decent lives for themselves and their future families. In doing so, they faced extreme economic and social challenges, frequent physical threats, and even overt racist violence once they arrived.
I don’t know how my student’s parents arrived here. I’ve heard too many heartbreaking stories about harrowing journeys from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and many other countries south of our border. Many of these families live in constant fear that any wrong step will bring down the dreaded threat of deportation, breaking up their family and destroying their dreams. Even before the first Trump regime, this was a daily reality. The Obama Administration conducted massive deportations before Trump assumed office the first time. And it has continued, distressingly, during the Biden era.
There are millions of people in this situation living among us, working hard in jobs that others look down upon and are unwilling to do themselves. They pay taxes and commit no crimes. They raise children like my young student and go about their affairs like the rest of us. They suffer in silence when they encounter racist glances, rude comments, and shrill, xenophobic public announcements from the likes of Stephen Miller and Tom Homan. Those men are monsters; more benign terminology would be inappropriate and inaccurate.
It’s about to get worse—possibly much worse. Everyone has seen the vicious rhetoric emerging since the beginning of Trump’s 2024 campaign. “Mass Deportation Now!” banners abounded at the Republican National Convention, and were ubiquitous at Trump campaign rallies. Disturbingly, this rhetoric has also been embraced by those whose own recent ancestors went through the immigration process themselves. Hate is a powerful weapon in American life and politics and, once again, the weakest and most vulnerable among us are the targets. Donald Trump has a unique capacity to exploit that strain of American life and history, and to surround himself with dangerous and malevolent sycophants.
Across the country, resistance is forming to counteract the coming xenophobic enforcement firestorm. Municipalities like Los Angeles have declared themselves “sanctuary cities,” meaning they do not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many blue-state Attorneys General have mobilized resources to fight Trump on every legal front they can, including legal resistance against ICE. These efforts will likely slow down the process of mass deportation, but given the reactionary leaning of the federal judiciary, they are not a comprehensive solution—as others have pointed out, community solidarity efforts must also be supported with as much vigor as possible to defend immigrants against the coming onslaught.
My present concern is with the agonizing emotional suffering of my students, their families, and the other millions of people living in the shadows. Early in the first Trump Administration, I published an article in Tikkun on “Trump Trauma,” based on scores of lengthy conversations with immigrant UCLA students, including Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients from Mexico, Belize, and Bolivia. They were terrified. I recall in particular a student who came to the United States from Bolivia as an infant, who knew almost nothing about Bolivia and was horrified at the prospect of being deported there. Like other students I’ve spoken to, she was almost paralyzed with fear about her undocumented family waiting for the knock on the door from ICE.
Now, she and the other DACA recipients, along with their families, are in extreme danger. Their anguish is palpable, and it won’t go away even if deportation threats are mitigated, delayed, or ultimately unsuccessful because of community and legal resistance efforts. My students, like thousands across the country, will be distracted from their studies, and their families will be afraid to venture into the public—to shop, to go to medical appointments, to get together with friends, or even to seek help from support agencies and groups. The specter of ICE will hover over everything they do.
This is deeply personal to me. My paternal grandparents lived in Nazi Germany. For many years, they waited in their Berlin residence, fearing the knock on the door from the Gestapo. When they came, the entire family was arrested, placed on a train, transported to Auschwitz, and all four—my grandmother, grandfather, aunt, and uncle—were gassed to death on arrival.
This has left an indelible mark on me for my entire life. Likewise, it has done so on the victims of Trump’s cruel and inhumane deportation threats and policies. It’s logistically and financially impossible to deport upwards of eleven million people, as Trump has repeatedly promised to do. But it’s not impossible to generate unspeakable human tragedy and cause millions of people to suffer lifelong emotional harm. I see it in my students almost daily.
This is fascism, American style. We need to be precise about that and then be clear about our resistance strategies. And, above all, we must be mindful of and committed to the emotional, physical, and spiritual needs of the real human beings affected by the fascist policies being implemented in our name.