PHOENIX — The Trump administration’s plan to strictly require anyone illegally in the U.S. to register with the government and carry documentation is stirring up fears of heightened racial profiling even among legal residents, immigrants’ rights advocates say.
For some, it’s a return to a climate from the recent past in which police departments and other law enforcement agencies’ insistence on documentation drove immigrants underground and increased public safety concerns.
“It happens already to an extent. … I think this would make it even worse because how would you know somebody is undocumented?” said Jose Patiño, vice president of education and external affairs for Aliento, an Arizona-based advocacy organization that supports immigrants without documents. “It creates ambiguity of how you’re going to enforce and identify people who are not in the country (legally).”
A federal judge sided with President Donald Trump earlier this month in a lawsuit brought by immigrants’ rights groups over the policy and the mandate took effect April 11. Trump officials say they are simply enforcing a requirement that has been law for decades.
“The Trump administration will enforce all our immigration laws — we will not pick and choose which laws we will enforce,” U.S. Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem said in the statement after the ruling. “We must know who is in our country for the safety and security of our homeland and all Americans.”
Under federal law, everyone 14 and older without legal status must self-register and give fingerprints and an address. Parents and guardians of anyone younger must ensure they are registered. Not doing so is considered a crime and a lack of documents risks prison time and fines.
The mandate has rarely been enforced under previous administrations. To complicate matters, there have been recent instances of authorities detaining even people born in the U.S. as confusion also sweeps through other federal and state immigration policies.
An online appointment app used by temporary residents has sent work permit cancellations since late March, including to U.S. citizens. A growing number of Republican-led states also are refusing to recognize state driver’s licenses specially issued for immigrants without documents.
Guerline Jozef, executive director of the nonprofit Haitian Bridge Alliance, says racial profiling already happens at a disproportionate rate to Black migrants. The sudden pivot has aggravated things and people with Temporary Protected Status or who had regular Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-ins have been detained during travel, she said.
She decried the whole ordeal as a form of “psychological warfare.” Migrants who were allowed temporary legal residence are not sure if they need to protectively carry documents at all times.
“It is very hard to even communicate with the community members on what to do, telling them they need to know their rights, but they trample on their rights anyway,” Jozef said. “We are back in the ‘show me your papers’ era.”
The new mandate evokes previous instances of certain groups having to carry documentation. During the time of enslavement in the U.S., freed Black people had to have “freedom papers” or risk being re-enslaved. During World War II, Japanese Americans were required to register and keep identification cards but were put in incarceration camps.
“The statutes that are on the books about registration have been dormant” for 85 years, said Lynn Marcus, director of immigration law clinics at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. “There weren’t forms to comply with this requirement. It was created in wartime originally.”
The renewed strict registration requirement forces U.S. citizens to carry birth certificates or other proof of citizenship at all times, “especially if they have a ‘foreign appearance,'” Marcus said.
People who are valid residents or visa holders could potentially be profiled based on factors other than physical characteristics.
“Let’s say law enforcement encounters someone in another circumstance — maybe they’re reporting a crime,” Marcus said. “They might not be satisfied with answers if they aren’t able to communicate because not all U.S. citizens speak fluent English.”
Eileen Diaz McConnell, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Transborder Studies, pointed to the effects of a 2010 Arizona law requiring all immigrants to obtain or carry immigration registration papers.
In 2012, the Justice Department sued the state over the law and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the papers requirement, but those two years when the requirement was in place were a traumatic time for Latino families in the state, McConnell said.
“Parents wouldn’t ride together in a car. They were always separated because they were worried they would be stopped,” Diaz McConnell said. “People don’t leave their house.”
She has done extensive research on how immigration policies can impact the mental health of mixed households of family members who are American-born and don’t have documents.
“In previous years, children report, even if they’re U.S.-born, real harm — impacts on their own sleep, worry, not eating, depression,” Diaz McConnell said. “There will be people who will say things like, ‘Well, if you’re not undocumented, what do you have to worry about?’”
Patiño, whose undocumented parents brought him to the U.S. when he was 6, is accustomed to keeping papers as a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient. He knows others without special status are now panicked. The single mother of one of his U.S.-born former interns has stopped going to the grocery store, church and other places since she lacks documents.
“It’s like she’s afraid of her shadow or, like, even to go out and throw out the trash,” he said.
People who crossed the border without documents are especially unsure whether to register in the wake of international students and others being detained or deported even though they had visas or pending court hearings.
“You’re asking people to come out of the shadows and enroll us in a system that most of them probably have not heard of,” Patiño said. “It seems the administration is trying to go catch-22 with folks. You are in trouble if you do, you’re in trouble if you don’t.”