One day a week, 70-year-old Javier Gastelum sits beneath a shade tree outside a bakery near his home to chat with old friends and sell a few pounds of fresh Mexican cheese.                        

For 30 years, Gastelum’s routine in Tucson, Arizona, was based on congeniality and familiarity. But when the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants without legal status in the United States hit close to home, nabbing an employee of the bakery near him, an unsettling uncertainty set in around his Southside neighborhood. 

“You don’t see as many people out and about,” he says. “Stores that used to be quite busy are now nearly empty.”

Some 7 miles north, at the nonprofit Keep Tucson Together, located near the city’s downtown, Xochitl Mercado and her colleagues field a daily flood of calls from worried undocumented people. The organization is among various advocacy groups offering resources to immigrants. “People are looking for guidance on what to do if they have an encounter with immigration agents or police officers,” Mercado says. The nonprofit is distributing packets with materials informing undocumented people of their rights and various means to access legal services and community support.

Just days after President Donald Trump took office for his second term on Jan. 20, 2025, his administration launched the large-scale immigration raids he repeatedly promised during his campaign. Border czar Tom Homan said immigration agents would first focus on undocumented people with criminal records, but made it clear that no one would be immune from deportation. And, despite news reports that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement isn’t reaching expected arrest numbers, the mere threat of mass deportations has had a chilling effect in immigrant communities.

“There’s definitely more uneasiness in our community now than during the last Trump administration,” Mercado says. “We’re hearing from many callers that they’re not sending their children to school, that they’re afraid to go to work.”

In response, a coalition of immigrant advocates quickly moved to quell concerns of undocumented immigrants. Many of them have mixed-status families that include U.S. citizens and permanent legal residents. At a recent community gathering, attendees received training on exercising their rights when confronted by immigration agents and learned of an available hotline for rapid assistance. Parents were also encouraged to make arrangements with a relative or trusted friend to care for their children if they are suddenly deported.

“We’re living in very difficult times, very aggressive times,” stemming from policies that justify racism, attorney Alba Jaramillo, a defender of immigrants’ rights, told the crowd. “But we are not going to allow them to separate our families,” she said, referring to immigration authorities. “We are not going to allow them to keep us terrorized. We will not allow them to enter our homes without judicial search warrants.”

Rafael Barceló Durazo, the Mexican consul in Tucson, encouraged those at the gathering to use a mobile app that Mexico’s government rolled out as an emergency communication tool through its 53 U.S. consulates to assist expatriates at risk of deportation. He also highlighted the Mexico Embraces You program, a government initiative that includes free transportation from border cities to the country’s interior for Mexicans who are deported, as well as those who choose to return on their own. 

At the consulate, there’s been an increase in the number of people seeking official documentation that could help ease a transition to rebuild a life in Mexico, Barceló Durazo says. “Many people are interested in having their Mexican nationality, probably because they feel that the political environment is different.”

Among those trying to secure documentation are fathers and mothers lacking legal status and whose children were born in the U.S., the consul says. Across the country, an estimated 4.4 million U.S.-born children under 18 live with an undocumented parent, according to the Pew Research Center.

In 2022, the U.S. undocumented immigrant population was estimated at around 11 million, or about 3% of the total population, according to the center data. But the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., puts it at 12.8 million, or 3.3% of the population. By mid-2023, according to the Institute, a record number of migrants arriving from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras helped swell the undocumented population to about 13.7 million (about 4% of the total population).

In Arizona, where some of the nation’s strictest immigration laws have consistently targeted undocumented residents, an estimated 250,000 people live in the state without legal authorization. 

Margo Cowan, an attorney who has practiced immigration law since the early 1970s, says in all those years she’s never seen the level of anti-immigrant sentiment now pervading many parts of the country. In Texas, an 11-year-old girl died by suicide in early February after being taunted in school about her family’s immigration status. “There are many layers of assault against the undocumented community: psychological, obviously physical, name calling, disparaging, no recognition of the contributions that folks make to our economy and to our communities in every aspect,” Cowan says.

She founded Keep Tucson Together in 2011, a year after the state’s Senate Bill 1070, commonly known as the “show me your papers” law, went into effect. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 found the measure to be largely unconstitutional, although it upheld a provision allowing police to ask the immigration status of people suspected of being in the country unlawfully.

Since those days, Cowan and a cadre of volunteers have held weekly legal workshops where people seeking permanent legal residency, citizenship, or some form of legal status can get help navigating the complex immigration system. The workshops also teach undocumented people about certain protections they have in this country, including the right to due process, the right against unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to legal counsel and the right to education.

“Many people think that because they have no status, they have no rights,” the attorney says. “And that’s not true.”

Meanwhile, educators reassure worried parents that student rights are still protected at school. Gabriel Trujillo, superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District, held a news conference to address community fear over Trump’s rollback of a federal policy prohibiting immigration authorities from making arrests at sensitive locations such as schools, churches, and hospitals. Immigration agents and police officers will be permitted to enter public school campuses only if they present a judicial warrant and valid identification, Trujillo said.

He emphasized that Plyler v. Doe, a 1982 landmark case ensuring equal access to education for undocumented children, remains in place. “We stand firmly behind the belief that the traditional public school is, and always will be, safe for children and young people, regardless of immigration status,” Trujillo said. 

That’s the message Mercado works to impart at Keep Tucson Together, both by phone and in person, to worried parents who want to keep their children at home. But, she says, the threat of life-changing deportation can weigh heavily on people’s minds.

Back on the Southside, home to many Latino residents, a woman stands quietly inside an unassuming food truck adorned with photos of tacos, burritos, and other Mexican specialties. Customers are hard to come by since immigration raids were announced, says the woman, who declined to give her name.  

Under the shade tree outside the bakery, Gastelum and his friends lament the anxiety undocumented people and their families are feeling these days. He empathizes; he was once in their shoes. To peacefully protest Trump’s mass deportations, Latino immigrant  communities—people with and without papers—should boycott all businesses for a day, he says. “That would show the impact that we have on the economy.”