Undocumented immigrant women desperate to avoid ICE agents are forgoing the security of hospitals and instead giving birth to their U.S. citizen children at home:
It was a moment of great joy, and then fear. Ammi Arevalo found out she was pregnant in early February, not long after President Donald Trump signed two executive orders ramping up enforcement of immigration law and deportations. Her first reaction was happiness, mixed with some low-level financial anxiety, but almost immediately a dark foreboding took over her thoughts. As an undocumented immigrant, Arevalo already dreads an early morning knock on her door from immigration agents. That’s why she’s now researching midwives and plans to give birth in her apartment, just like a friend who recently had her baby boy at home for the same reason. “I’m just trying to hide from ICE, because the moment I go to the hospital they are going to ask for my name,” Arevalo says, crying softly into her green tea on the patio of a Starbucks in West Houston. “With the new laws that Trump signed, I’m afraid I’m going to get arrested.”
Ammi has lived in the U.S. since she was 16, when she fled an abuser in El Salvador and crossed the Rio Grande with the help of a smuggler to join her mother and brother in Texas. Today she is 30, married to a U.S. citizen, and runs her own small business alongside three employees (undocumented immigrants contribute nearly $12 billion in taxes annually—so much for being moochers).
But because she skipped an order to appear in immigration court when she crossed the border as a teen, she assumes she has a deportation order. As a result, Ammi lives in constant fear of the community she contributes to, and she and her child could be deprived of immediate medical care because of a deportation force. Her marriage provides no protection, because “undocumented immigrants don’t magically become legal when they marry a U.S. citizen.”
She shops online, uses Uber when she has to deliver food to white neighborhoods and never opens her blinds at home so she can more easily hide if immigration agents come looking for her. The day before we spoke, she was scrolling through Facebook when she saw a news story about the deportation of an undocumented El Salvadoran man who had lived in Houston for 16 years. “He came here when he was 15 or 16,” she says. “It’s almost my case.”
His deportation scared her so much that she nervously ate a large bag of spicy Cheetos that day. “I’m hopeful that this is a bad moment we are going through, and the president will open his eyes and see that we are not criminals,” she says, looking down at the Coach purse she bought at an outlet mall. “I would say, ‘Mr. Trump, My name is Ammi. I’m not a criminal. I’m just a young woman who’s looking for an opportunity.’”
In Texas, elected Republicans and sheriffs, feeling newly-emboldened by the Trump administration, are again pushing lies that undocumented immigrants are violent and suck up resources from others, despite the fact “that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born citizens” and they “aren’t eligible for federal benefits like Social Security or food stamps.”
Fear reverberating through immigrant communities could have a devastating public health effect, including children being forced to skip necessary vaccinations because their undocumented parents are too afraid to go out and seek follow-up medical care.
“Immigrants feel attacked in a way we haven’t before,” said Natalia Aristizabal, an organizer with immigrant rights group Make The Road New York—but the groups are also readying to fight back for undocumented immigrants like Ammi:
Organizers at the immigrant rights group United We Dream, which works with Make the Road and has 55 affiliates in 26 states and over 100,000 members, are teaching undocumented people to prepare for detention or deportation by notarizing a document that gives some parental rights to a family member or friend so that person can care for their children, pick them up from school and get them medical care. “If you have a child in your hands, they don’t care,” says UWD organizer Adonias Arevalo of ICE agents, speaking in the group’s Houston offices. Wearing braces and a stylish H&M T-shirt, Arevalo says the number of parents clamoring for help preparing such documents has spiked since Trump’s election.
The group expanded its “Deportation Defense” education and tactics, which includes orange “Know Your Rights” cards printed in Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and English, across Texas since November. Undocumented people, mostly women, are also banding together in groups of about 10 to pool money in a local credit union so they have a reserve fund—if members are detained or deported, the group can pay their bond, help their family weather the loss in income or help them return to the U.S.
“We need to continue these trainings because we don’t know what’s going to happen next,” said another organizer with Make The Road New York. “It’s very clear that we need to be ready and be militant.”