The president-elect’s mass deportation plans — along with the vicious anti-immigrant hysteria he has provoked — will no doubt destroy countless lives, but according to trans activist and civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo, it won’t stop people’s dogged pursuit of a better life across the border.
“There’s almost no depth of cruelty that will deter immigration,” Caraballo, who has worked extensively with LGBTQ+ immigrants and asylum seekers, told LGBTQ Nation. “The conditions in a lot of countries are so dire… It’s life or death for them, and a life of fear and tolerating cruelty is still one where you have a life.”
Trump’s “fundamental miscalculation,” she said, is ignoring that drive to survive. She pointed to the Darién Gap, an extremely inhospitable and remote region connecting North and South America that many immigrants must cross on their journey to the United States.
“It is hundreds of miles of the most remote, densely forested rainforest with no civilization anywhere nearby. And people are trekking through this, constantly dying. To put yourself through that and then travel thousands of miles more, oftentimes on foot, to get to the border just to have a hope that you might get in… The level of precarity in the countries they are coming from has to be so dire.”
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Caraballo is currently a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, but she spent much of Trump’s first term as an attorney at the LGBTQ Law Project at the New York Legal Assistance Group. There, she mainly worked with undocumented Trans Latina women, assisting with asylum applications, T Visas for survivors of human trafficking, and U Visas for victims of crime.
While there were significant challenges to doing this work under an administration overtly hostile to both immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, Caraballo predicts the second time will be “far worse.”
“The guardrails are completely off,” she said. “We now have many more judicial decisions from the Supreme Court that basically give Trump a carte blanche to do whatever he wants in terms of immigration. The so-called adults in the room are gone…. The explicitly cruel policies are a feature, not a bug.”
Normalizing the unthinkable
Migrants living on the north embankment of the Rio Grande hold hands during a prayer as they await to be processed by Customs and Border Protection in El Paso, Texas. Photo: Omar Ornelas/ El Paso Times / USA Today Network.
Caraballo predicts the second Trump administration will commit a slew of atrocities, from the building of actual camps to house migrants to immigration raids in classrooms, churches, and other sensitive areas that are typically off-limits.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to carry out immigration raids during a class like… hauling students out in front of their classmates. Because the goal is to instill fear, to instill a sense of, you are not safe anywher, and we are coming to get you…. also to kind of shock the public consciousness and normalize the once unthinkable.”
Whatever Trump and his cronies inflict, it will certainly be harsher for LGBTQ+ people, especially trans folks. LGBTQ+ people already face outsized risks of abuse and harassment in immigration detention, and they are also more likely to be denied critical medical care.
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A recent report from Immigration Equality found significant medical neglect for detainees with HIV, and Caraballo said many of the clients she worked with who were detained by ICE were denied essential HIV medication. LGBTQ+ detainees also reported rampant verbal abuse and threats of violence.
The Center for American Progress found that in 2017 (while Trump was president), LGBTQ+ people in ICE custody were 97 times more likely to endure sexual abuse than non-LGBTQ+ people. The organization described the numbers as “staggering” and far greater than the already high rates of abuse against LGBTQ+ inmates.
The report also detailed how ICE disproportionately placed trans women either in solitary confinement or men’s facilities, as well as the agency’s pension for detaining trans people significantly longer than other immigrants, concluding that the Trump administration rejected “policies meant to protect vulnerable populations from abuse in detention.”
In some especially tragic cases, like that of transgender Honduran Roxsana Hernandez, detained LGBTQ+ migrants have died in ICE custody. Hernandez came to the U.S. seeking asylum and died of an AIDS-related illness after she was denied antiretroviral medication — despite the fact that Customs and Border Control knew she was HIV positive.
Conditions for detained LGBTQ+ immigrants have remained dire under the Biden administration. Last year, a group of trans and nonbinary people detained at Colorado’s Aurora Contract Detention Facility filed a civil rights complaint alleging medical neglect and dehumanizing treatment. “I think it is intentionally bad here,” said one complainant, Victoria. “It is a way to get people to give up on themselves.”
With Trump’s threat to somehow deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants currently residing in the United States, checks on the system are likely to deteriorate even more. Combine that with the unmitigated anti-trans hatred the Trump campaign injected into the American psyche, and the more than one million queer and trans immigrants and asylum seekers become one of the most vulnerable populations in the country.
Method over madness
The ties between Donald Trump and tech giants like Elon Musk could further threaten LGBTQ+ rights. Photo: Jasper Colt/USA Today.
Trump’s first term also included a base level of incompetence that allowed Caraballo to maneuver through the system and still help several of her clients. This time, she predicts the administration will ditch the chaos and become “much more methodical.”
“They’ve had four years to plan this stuff out. They’ve been methodically planning out their executive orders, the rules, how they’re going to go about this, whereas previously, in the first Trump administration, they didn’t necessarily have that apparatus in place.”
But these tactics will no doubt meet resistance.
“At a certain point, people are not going to tolerate immigration raids on elementary schools, like hauling seven-year-olds out of class …This is the era of the smartphone. You can’t hide this stuff.”
Alejandra Caraballo, trans activist and civil rights attorney
“At a certain point, people are not going to tolerate immigration raids on elementary schools, like hauling seven-year-olds out of class to put in detention and put into a camp,” she said. “This is the era of the smartphone. You can’t hide this stuff as easily.”
Technology, however, is a double-edged sword. Now that Trump is returning to the Oval Office, social media giants X and Meta have eliminated the last vestiges of protections for marginalized groups on their platforms. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have given a free pass to hate speech and misinformation, both of which can cause extremely dire consequences in the real world.
All it takes is a single viral rumor that a trans person or immigrant committed a crime to incite a violent mob,
Caraballo points to the violent anti-immigrant riots that broke out in the U.K. over the summer after the spread of online misinformation.
“That’s what’s going to be in store in the next four years. We’ve already seen kind of isolated lone wolf attacks, but this kind of stuff metastasizes on social media.” The genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar, she added, “was very much catalyzed by content spread on Facebook and WhatsApp in 2016.”
“We’ve already seen armed Proud Boys showing up to library events and drag shows. I really worry in this kind of atmosphere where people are emboldened, and there is no societal accountability or check on them, that it’s going to lead to more violence.”
Jan 6, 2024; Columbus, OH, United States; Members of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group clash with groups who had gathered to speak out against them outside of the Ohio Statehouse, January 6, 2024. Photo: Brooke LaValley/Columbus Dispatch/USA Today Network.
She continued, “Ultimately, that’s the fundamental evil at play here… Even when they’re not always fully enforced, policies can serve as a deterrence, and by removing that deterrence and the friction of it, they’re going to accelerate this stuff.”
With a slew of tech giants, including Meta, announcing $1 million donations to Trump’s inaugural fund, it’s clear that their interest is solely in protecting their bottom lines.
“They’re supposed to have beyond f**k you money,” Caraballo said, “and the point of that kind of money is you’re not beholden to anyone, and they’re just cowards. They are spineless, immoral cowards.”
The increasingly hostile social media climate will not only incite hate against LGBTQ+ people but will also cut them off from their own communities.
Caraballo lamented the “incalculable” amount of community lost on these platforms. She worries about the isolation many will feel if they choose to leave social media platforms that have become too hostile to them. “They’ve built up communities on those platforms over decades… and you can’t replicate that. Bluesky is promising, but it’s not the same, and it’ll never be.”
The next four years won’t be pretty, but Caraballo does believe there may be some light on the other side.
“I fundamentally believe our society is at an impasse. I don’t think this kind of far-right populist authoritarianism is durable.” In the meantime, Caraballo suggests finding community and holding it tightly.
“Community and each other is how we’re going to get through all of this, and having empathy and loving other people is the most important value in the face of fascism.”
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