Community Refugee & Immigration Services braces for the worst

Employees at Community Refugee & Immigration Services (CRIS) felt the impact of the recent election almost immediately, fielding concerned phone calls beginning the morning after both from clients currently settled in Columbus, as well as those still in the early stages of the immigration process.

“People who aren’t here yet were asking, ‘Will [the program] get shut down?’” said CRIS executive director Angela Plummer. “It’s hard to overstate the fear and the panic people are feeling.”

Similar concerns rippled through Plummer’s staff, driven in part by the memory of the first Donald Trump administration, which turned refugees into pariahs while cutting immigration funding to such extremes that it took organizations such as CRIS years from which to recover. With Trump having run for reelection on an even more openly anti-immigration platform, centered on plans to involve the U.S. military in mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, Plummer said the organization is under no delusion of just how grave the situation could become.

“I think they’re going to sweep up anybody presumed to be undocumented, which will perhaps include people who are undocumented but also others who aren’t,” she said. “And the thought of having local law enforcement be involved in this sounds like a disaster, because I think if you asked most police departments, they would want no part in enforcing immigration law. I know when we take people to the BMV, there can often be confusion about somebody’s ability to get a driver’s license, and that’s in the calm setting of an office. So, if you have law enforcement involved in a situation that is much more… heightened, are they really going to be able to determine if someone is here lawfully or not? Sometimes I can’t, and I’m an immigration attorney. It’s not that simple unless you’re profiling. And are we going back to that, where it’s okay to profile? Because if so, that’s really scary.”

While the election results have reignited fears and introduced a new sense of urgency, they weren’t a complete shock to members of the CRIS leadership team, who over the last couple of years have taken small steps where they could in order to steel against this outcome. This included delaying the purchase of new vehicles and refraining from signing leases on expanded office space in order to conserve funds, the majority of which come from the federal government. Plummer said the organization is also trying to establish guardrails where it can, working with the understanding that not everything it has rebuilt since 2016 can be preserved.

“We have some programs that are not likely to be impacted, like our legal services, the funding for which doesn’t come from the federal government,” said Plummer, who added that CRIS might have to adopt cost-cutting moves, such as embracing attrition and not filling open positions if and when funding begins to dry up. “We will do our best to shelter as many people as possible, but we won’t be able to shelter everybody.”

There are also a number of unknowns about precisely how draconian the immigration policy might be under Trump. In recent months, administration officials have floated everything from an executive order revoking birthright citizenship – a move that would almost certainly lead to protracted legal action – to rolling back the Temporary Protected Status for some legal migrant populations, including Haitians, whose presence in Springfield, Ohio, became a racist flashpoint in the electoral campaign, with Republicans such as Vice President-elect JD Vance falsely claiming that Haitian refugees were eating pets and driving local increases in communicable disease.

“Yesterday, we had a Haitian legal clinic, and you’ve never seen such a somber group of people, because threats have been made that [Trump] will revoke their Temporary Protected Status,” said Plummer, who added that these proposals are being pitched at the same time the Federal Aviation Administration banned flights from the U.S. to Haiti in the wake of gangs shooting at three planes. “And, really, we’re going to deport people back to Haiti? So, we’re very concerned for the people that our mission is to help.”

Plummers concerns are heightened by actions she watched unfold during Trump’s first term, including the family separation policy, called zero tolerance, which mandated that parents who illegally crossed the southern border be separated from their children until legal proceedings concluded. Additionally, reductions in the number of immigrants accepted into the U.S. sometimes kept loved ones apart for years, in some cases creating lingering fractures that can’t be quantified on a spreadsheet.

“We had cases where spouses eventually got here, but the marriages fell apart because they had been separated for so long,” Plummer said. “It’s hard to measure the intangible damage that was done to human relationships.”

In anticipation of what’s to come, Plummer said groups such as the ACLU have already started to develop legal strategies in the hopes of at least stalling certain actions related to immigration. And at the grassroots level, she said those who want to advocate for the migrant community should continue to contact representatives and look for opportunities to protest as they arise. “I have to hold at least some belief that even people who voted for Trump don’t want to see this kind of cruelty and scapegoating,” Plummer said. “Yes, there are plenty who do, and I saw the posters advocating for mass deportations at his rallies. But I hope there are those who voted for him for other reasons, and whose moral compass will perhaps bring them out to protest or to contact elected officials.”

Longer term, Plummer said there needs to be more focus on curating a greater sense of empathy in order to shift the tone of the conversation around immigration, which for too long has been driven by fear and othering rather than a focus on those human traits that bond. “And I think some of that started to happen with child separation, because people could very clearly empathize with, ‘Oh, God. What if that were me? What if someone took my kids and I didn’t know where they were?’” said Plummer, who lamented that it took the surfacing of such horrors for so many to be shaken to attention. “So, yes, there is a crisis of empathy. … And people are too often like, ‘We have to help our own.’ And who are our own? We should help those living in our neighborhoods and cities. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also care about what’s happening to people who are living in Haiti, or in Africa, or elsewhere. This isn’t a zero-sum game.”