President-elect Trump has announced that Tom Homan, who ran the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency from January 2017 to June 2018, will return as “border czar” in his administration.
Homan, who has promised to run the “biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” presided over ICE as the federal government implemented large-scale immigration worksite raids in 2018. These raids resulted in community-wide family separations, the creation of single-parent households, declining mental and physical health, absences from school and the avoidance of healthcare and social services in immigrant communities.
Homan says that he will implement Trump’s immigration plan in a “humane manner.” But my work with immigrant communities throughout the country — along with much research, advocacy and congressional testimony — demonstrates that worksite raids are anything but humane. While these raids were overshadowed by Trump’s policy of family separation at the border, they are devastating in their own right, and the public should understand them for the humanitarian catastrophes that they are.
Homan was the acting director of ICE when the Trump administration returned to large-scale worksite raids in summer 2018, when the agency conducted worksite raids throughout the U.S., including towns in Tennessee, Iowa, Ohio, Nebraska and Texas. Each raid resulted in between 32 and 159 workers being detained, with that number of detainees usually reaching over 100. The following summer, ICE conducted the largest workplace raid in a decade in Allen, Texas, arresting 284 people, and followed up with the largest statewide operation in U.S. history, arresting 680 workers in six cities in Mississippi. (Homan was acting director of ICE during the first four raids listed above).
Working with community epidemiologist Nicole Novak and a team of public health students, we visited the six communities hit by the worksite raids in summer 2018 and interviewed a wide range of those affected, including detainees and their families, pastors, lawyers, teachers and immigrant advocates.
It was clear that worksite raids are chaotic and destabilizing to the communities where they occur. Families scramble as they see helicopters, buses and ICE vehicles piling up outside worksites. When we asked people to explain what raids were like, they often compared them to natural disasters, school shootings or war.
When a facility is raided, it is never clear who is taken, when the raid is over or if the enforcement actions will spill over into nearby neighborhoods. This causes community members to shutter their windows and close their doors, or flee their homes to sleep on the pews in churches or on gym floors out of the reach of ICE. Physical and mental health declines as individuals worry about their own deportation or that of someone they know, or how they will cope with the loss of income that comes with the removal of a breadwinner.
Research has also started to show the harmful spillover effects of worksite raids on the education of Latino students. When a meat-processing plant was raided in Bean Station, Tennessee, 500 students were absent from area schools in the days that followed. The raids in Mississippi happened on the first day of school, resulting in 25 percent of Latino students being absent the day after the raid. Sofia Avila, a sociology graduate student at Princeton University, found decreased passing rates among Latino students after an electronics manufacturing plant was raided in Allen, Texas. Similar results were found after the raid on the Load Trail manufacturing plant in Sumner, Texas.
As disastrous as these raids were, they were overshadowed by the family separation crisis that took place on the border at the same time in summer 2018. The Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy,” also referred to as the “family separation policy,” sparked a huge public backlash. Journalists, health and social service organizations — including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association and the American Public Health Association — and many Hollywood actors applied public pressure to the administration to halt the policy. As a result, Trump ended what the ACLU called “one of the darkest chapters of the Trump administration” through executive action.
The terrible effects of the family separation crisis apply to the aftermath of worksite raids as well. Family separation — as captured in the new documentary “Separated,” produced by Jacob Soboroff and Errol Morris — is a fundamental aspect of all types of deportation. Yet because these raids are not as visible and do not fit into the narrative of immigrants streaming across the southern border, they often lack public visibility, so the type of organizing and anger that leads to changes in policy and enforcement does not occur.
As a public health researcher who observed, documented and studied the fallout of worksite raids, it is clear that they will result in community-wide harm beyond the undocumented workers who are arrested. Health professionals, teachers, pastors, lawyers and the general public must prepare for this fallout, as well as prepare to protest these raids with the fervor with which we opposed family separation — especially as Homan, who promoted and oversaw both types of enforcement, takes his place in the second Trump administration.
William D. Lopez is a clinical associate professor at the School of Public Health, faculty associate in the Latina/o Studies program and senior advisor at Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan. He is the author of “Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid.”
