Undocumented woman reacts to Trump’s mass deportation plans

By Adam Klepp

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    PHOENIX, Arizona (KNXV) — Speaking at his recent Glendale rally, Former President Donald Trump doubled down on his mass deportation plan.

“We will carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” he said.

The plan drew big cheers from his supporters, but also big fears from plenty of others.

“I think my biggest fear would be getting separated from my family,” Karen Velazquez said. “And we’re always at risk, but under that administration, it is ten times worse.”

Velazquez has lived almost her whole life in Phoenix and says her parents brought her here when she was just six months old.

“I am a dreamer. I am undocumented,” she said.

Velazquez is one of over 200,000 undocumented people who are estimated to be living in Arizona.

She says sharing her story publicly is a risk and living with the fear of deportation has become a daily reality.

“It’s something I’ve been scared of my whole life. But as I got older, it’s something I have decided I’m not going to let push me back.”

Mass deportations are not just a plan supported by Republicans. An Axios poll from this spring of over 2,000 people showed nearly half of Democrats and Independents also support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

“Put yourself in these families’ shoes,” Jose Patino said.

Patino is the Vice President of Aliento, an Arizona organization that advocates for people like Velazquez.

He believes mass deportations would hurt Arizona’s economy by kicking out people who work hard and pay taxes even if they don’t have legal status.

“It would have devastating consequences for the Phoenix area. We would see tens of thousands of kids not show up for school. We would see a major decrease in economic activity,” Patino said.

The renewed calls for mass deportations come as record numbers of people have come here illegally over the past four years. Velazquez argues that people wouldn’t feel the need to cross the border illegally to get to the U.S. if the immigration system didn’t make people wait years, sometimes decades, to come to the U.S. legally.

“When they’re referring to people who came here illegally, a lot of people don’t have years and years to wait in line to come to the U.S.,” Velazquez said, adding she believes politicians on both sides of the aisle keep making families like hers into the scapegoats instead of fixing a broken system.

“We would like to have a pathway to legal status, but unfortunately there has not been an agreement from both sides to get us there,” Velazquez said.

Vice President Kamala Harris has supported the border security bill which failed in the Senate this winter, and her campaign signaled she would continue President Biden’s executive order limiting asylum if she wins in November, but has yet to roll out an official platform on immigration on her campaign website.

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