I spoke to people worried they'll be targeted by ICE raids this weekend. They are terrified of Donald Trump

ICE raids aren't new, but announcing them is. Ask yourself why the president might be doing that

Trump reiterated this morning that there would be mass raids done by ICE over the weekend (Getty)

Starting this Sunday, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will resume immigration raids, targeting approximately 2,000 people who have been ordered deported or have missed a mandated court appearance. The operation will be carried out in 10 major cities across the US and will include “collateral” deportations, or deportations of undocumented migrants who weren’t specially targeted for deportation but were caught up in the raids.

It isn’t the first time these raids have taken place – the Obama administration stepped up family detention and deportation operations starting in 2014 — but announcing the raids is new.

In a phone conversation yesterday, Chicago-based civil rights and immigration attorney Christina Abraham told me, “The strategy of this administration has been to scare immigrant communities – that is why they announce these raids. In the past they [raids] were conducted more quietly. So, it’s either it’s a campaign tactic or an intimidation tactic, but it’s not a good law enforcement tactic.”

Across the country, immigrant rights organizations and advocates have been working to prepare for raids and ICE activity in their communities since Trump tweeted about them a month ago. The American Civil Liberties Union has an ICE preparedness video in seven languages on what to do if ICE agents come to your home and #ICEraids and #HereToStay have been trending heavily on social media since the New York Times announced the recommencement of the raids on Thursday.

I spoke with the wife of a Colorado-based man, originally from Mexico, who has been living in the US for nearly two decades without papers. She told me that as a family they felt a mixture of fear, resignation and intense anxiety – especially their 11-year-old daughter. She said that she and her husband worked with an immigration lawyer for years trying to regularize his status, but it didn’t work out. When I asked her whether they had a plan in place in case of a raid, she sighed heavily and told me that “now, under this administration, I don't know of anything we can do other than wait and see what happens day-to-day.”

Colorado Governer Jared Polis said, when I asked him about the raids: "These actions make our communities less safe and increase distrust of law enforcement."

If Trump’s approach to the humanitarian crisis on the border were some kind of Machiavellian scheme that effectively deterred people from risking the dangerous journey with toddlers in tow—then, albeit a suboptimal avenue for deterrence—it might on some level be justifiable because it saved lives. But these scare tactics aren’t deterring people. Not even the strategically inhumane conditions in the detention centers that have been compared to concentration camps are doing that.

Central American migrants keep arriving in record numbers because the violence they are fleeing is worse than the “hieleras”, or ice boxes in detention centers; it’s more terrifying than the thought of dying on the journey or being separated from one’s family once they reach the border. In other words, it’s not because migrants don’t know how bad things are at the border that they keep coming; rather, things are so bad back home that the risk is worth the return.

And the US is largely to blame for the spectacular violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador – where the majority of the current migrants come from. It is a monster of our own creation. The for-profit immigration detention centers we erected are now being fed with asylum seekers escaping the consequences of decades of US interventionist politics, especially US meddling in the eighties. Gangs like MS-13 were born and bred on the streets of Los Angeles, and deportations of those gang members created the gangs in Central America that people are now fleeing. Meanwhile, the multibillion-dollar private immigration detention industry is making record profits under the current government’s far-reaching detention policies.

The situation feels hopeless. But there are some things all of us can do to help. You can reach out to your local immigrants’ rights network to see where your donation, or volunteer services, could be of use. You can also organize or attend a march or protest in front of an immigration detention center. And lastly, get in touch with your state’s politicians: urge them to visit a Trump camp and stand up against this administration’s inhumane, un-American and arguably unconstitutional immigration policy. Remind them that it is your vote that keeps them in office.

It’s true that this country’s democracy was built on stolen land and on the broken, bloody backs of slaves. Yet, our Statute of Liberty reminds us, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Surely that message was also intended for Central Americans.

Until Americans vote in a new administration true to this country’s core values, however, it would appear that the golden door and all that she stands for has officially been closed.