What you need to know about Ohio Politics and Policy
Toolkit: Protect Immigrant Communities
Summary: Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan will rip families apart, leave children without parents, and shatter communities across the country. Millions of American families, many with U.S. citizen children, face the threat of separation, while local economies and workplaces will suffer irreparable harm. His attack on birthright citizenship strips citizenship from 5M Americans and seeks to erase 150 years of progress.
This communications document will provide messaging and resources to support those affected, amplify their stories, and equip advocates to fight for compassionate and just solutions.
Trump’s Executive Orders
- Attempting to repeal birthright citizenship
- Invoking emergency declarations to weaponize the military against immigrants
- Forecasting possible invocation of the Insurrection Act and Alien Enemies Act
- Recommitting to the harmful detention of immigrants
- Seeking expansion of expedited removal
- Expanding harmful local law enforcement entanglement with federal immigration enforcement
- Seeking to punish sanctuary jurisdictions
- Threatening to penalize individuals and defund organizations that help immigrant communities
- Possible restoration or expansion of country-based travel bans
- Separating families and endangering lives by ending parole programs
- Scrutinizing Temporary Protected Status designations
- Continuing to conflate immigrants with criminality
- Complete and total border closure to asylum under racist “invasion” rhetoric
- Systemic jailing of asylum seekers
- Reinstatement of the “Remain in Mexico” program
- Ending the CBP One App, leaving asylum seekers stranded
- Suspending refugee admissions and resettlement
- Designating gangs as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) to undermine asylum and legal migration
Messaging Guidance
- The scope of what was announced and on display is more about division and scapegoating than advancing immigration and border solutions. In fact, as we saw during the first Trump term, these policies will fuel more fear, chaos, and cruelty.
- Mass deportations will affect American families and communities. There are millions of mixed status families in America, including more than 5 million US citizens children who have an undocumented parent. Dreamers, and other long established immigrants and workers are at risk of deportation. Deportations will increase labor shortages, increase costs, and slow economic growth.
- The attack on the 14th Amendment isn’t about reforming our immigration policy – they’re pushing to gut 150 years of settled law and hard-won progress by attacking birthright citizenship.
- Trump’s immigration policies are bad for the American people and do not help kitchen table issues like energy costs and groceries – in fact, it will raise those costs.
- By targeting millions of hardworking and long-settled immigrants, Donald Trump threatens to undermine the local communities where they live and destabilize the economies they contribute to across the country.
- Trump’s push to gut 150 years of settled law by attacking birthright citizenship seeks to reshape America’s future by moving this nation backwards.
- America is stronger and better than the bleak and dystopian picture Trump paints for our future. Just as it always has been in this nation, America’s future is strengthened by immigrants.
- We know immigrants and their families add tremendous value to our communities, and they deserve to thrive and live with dignity. We know that standing together across race, income, and national origin makes us all stronger.
- We will protect immigrant communities. Immigrants built America. Immigrants are welcome here.
- Every immigrant deserves to be treated as a human being. Give dreamers a path to citizenship.
- Immigrants deserve to thrive and live with dignity. Remove barriers for non-citizens.
Key message:
Instead of finding real solutions, Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan rips families apart, leaves children without parents, and is shattering our local economy by removing people who have lived and worked here for decades.
General messaging:
Donald Trump’s immigration policies fuel division, scapegoating, and cruelty instead of addressing real solutions.
Attacks on immigrant communities, including mass deportations and undermining birthright citizenship, destabilize families, harm local economies, and raise costs for everyone. Immigrants are an integral part of America’s strength and future.
We must stand united to protect immigrant families, uphold dignity, and push for real reforms that strengthen communities and ensure opportunity for all. America thrives when we embrace the diversity and contributions of immigrants, not when we turn back the clock on progress.
Resources
- ACLU Know Your Rights
- Know Your Rights: What to Do if You Are Arrested or Detained by Immigration
- A Toolkit for Organizations Responding to Mass Worksite Immigration Raids
- Immigrant Legal Resource Center
- Immigrants’ Rights: What To Do If Stopped
- Know Your Rights Handouts: If ICE Visits a Home, Employer, or Public Space
Content: Protect Immigrant Communities