For Jesús Alberto, watching this year’s presidential election is a potentially life-changing event. The 31-year -old Venezuelan single father and asylum-seeker, who worked as a welder in his hometown, has traversed multiple countries with his 5-year-old son — including Colombia, Ecuador, Chile and Peru — to make it to New York City in July of this year.
He did so, he said, “looking for a future.” But if Trump wins, he fears he’ll likely have to leave again.
“You travel across so many countries — to be removed like that, without being given a chance to show if you are good or here to contribute, it generates fear,” he said in Spanish.
Alberto is not alone with this worry. Documented spoke to over a dozen migrants who feel the same. Gustavo and Leiri, a married couple who did not want to share their last names due to fear of deportation, came to New York from Venezuela with their two children seven months ago. They said they heard that “they are going to deport us immediately,” if Donald Trump is elected.
Immigration has become one of the most heated topics during this tight presidential race, and throughout his campaign Donald J. Trump continuously threatened to carry out mass deportations if he was re-elected. His attacks on the Biden administration’s record on border security has also pushed Kamala Harris and her party to adopt a harsher line on immigration. The focus on immigration has put the national spotlight on people like Alberto, Gustavo and Leiri, who are among the more than 210,000 migrants who have come to New York City since 2022 and whose arrival has been hotly debated by both parties.
Many of these migrants are still waiting for their work permits, which would enable them to establish themselves in their new home. They are forced to sit and watch – often for months – as both Democrats and Republicans politicize their status in the country and turn them into talking points, while they have no say in the matter. Amid the tumultuous election cycle, misinformation that asylum seekers will get deported as early as Nov 6 has spread.
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These rumors, mostly broadcast on social media, warn migrants that Trump’s plans would be enacted right after the election, which is legally and feasibly impossible. These concerns grow amid a wave of increased threats against their communities over the past few weeks of the campaign, making it hard for migrants to distinguish between what may or may not actually happen.
While both candidates have vowed to be tougher on immigration, experts raise questions about just how the candidates might execute their plans.
“[When] asked how he plans to carry out large-scale deportations — which would require vast new resources and the cooperation of many other countries to accept [the] return of their citizens — Trump has skirted the question,” Diego Chaves of the Migration Policy Institute told Documented.
According to a recent report by the American Immigration Council, “the cost of a one-time mass
deportation operation [of] an estimated total of 13.3 million immigrants without legal status is at least $315 billion,” considering costs of “arrest, detention, legal processing, and removal,” in addition to the impact on the U.S.economy because of lost labor. Doing it over the more feasible span of 10 years, “[d]eporting 1 million immigrants per year, would incur an annual cost of $88bn.”
Chaves believes that it’s hard to imagine a bipartisan consensus in Congress to pass substantial immigration reforms, which makes some of Trump’s promises seem hard to implement in the short term.
“The ever-greater reliance on executive action in the face of entrenched congressional paralysis on this issue will inevitably engender new legal challenges, as has been the pattern over the last several presidencies,” he said. “The next president likely will inherit a narrowly divided Congress,setting the stage for continued legislative inaction on immigration.”
Regardless of who will become president, the U.S. will likely take a harsher stance on asylum and reduce the number of visas given to migrants.
For many migrants who spoke to Documented, this increased attention during the 2024 election cycle has put their community under intense scrutiny and brought hostility. During the national presidential debate in October, Trump pointed to Aurora, Colorado, as a city that was “violently” overrun by Venezuelan gangs, which the city’s mayor called “grossly exaggerated.”
“They always focus on the negative things related to our nationality,” Gustavo said. Tensions are running high at the shelter where he lives between the migrants and the security guards, Gustavo explained, and have worsened as the Trump campaign has focused on a handful of crimes committed by Venezuelans and other migrants of the past months.
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“They treat us poorly, with rudeness… always in English, they offend us,” he said, as he stood outside of the shelter in midtown Manhattan he and his family are staying in.
The dozen migrants that Documented spoke with said that they hope to get a work permit soon, to be able to enter the labor market and provide a better future for themselves and their families. All of them said that their lives would be at risk if they were expelled from the country, for either economic or political reasons, if not both.
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Gustavo said that a Harris win would give him and his family a better future. Since he arrived in New York, he has seen his children start to thrive.
On a recent Thursday, outside the city shelter where he spoke with Documented, Gustavo was waiting for his two kids, 6 and 12, to get off the school bus that brought them in the afternoon. His sons held drawings they made during Halloween celebrations, and showed them proudly to their parents. Gustavo and his wife hope that their asylum request is approved soon so that they can find a job and choose where to live in the city.
But he also feels anxious about how close the votes are, especially given that his fate is in the hands of voters.
“We don’t know what could happen [to us], because rules change when the president does,” he said. “We don’t come here for sport or tourism—we are fleeing a crisis.”
