San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday)
A Trump win strikes fear in these Californians
After news of Donald Trump’s fourth criminal indictment broke the other day, one MSNBC pundit asked, “Does anybody care?”
If you’re talking about likely Republican voters, the answer is, “not many.” On the eve of the first Republican primary debate this coming Wednesday, polls continue to show that nearly twothirds of GOP voters want Trump to run and that he’s maintained a nearly 40 percentage point lead over his closest competitor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Too often, though, we see this imperviousness as the story that matters. But Californians like Mariela Vasquez care that Trump could return to the White House. She says her life has been shaped in many ways by his presidency.
The 24-year-old Madera resident was brought to the U.S. from Mexico when she was 8 and later became a “Dreamer,” protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
Vasquez remembers the Trump presidency as a time of intense fear for the undocumented members of her family. They often stayed inside their home, frightened they would be detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as part of Trump’s crackdown on the undocumented.
For four years, that worry shadowed Vasquez’s family at work and at school — even if they wanted to take a walk to a nearby park.
“We would hear that ICE was at a corner store — it would be all over Facebook and we’d be hearing it from our friends,” Vasquez told me. “So during that time, a lot of my family would pretty much not do a lot of the things that they used to.”
Her family’s fear was rooted in reality. Trump threatened to pull federal funding from any government entity that didn’t cooperate with ICE. Even though many California jurisdictions are sanctuary cities and counties — places that restrict cooperation between local authorities and federal deportation agents — Madera County and much of the Central Valley are not. The Tulare Police Department was one of 90 jurisdictions that a 2019 ACLU investigation found shared scans of license plates with ICE.
The Vasquez family heard how two Delano farmworkers — the parents of six children, four of whom were U.S. citizens — were killed in a car crash after being pursued by ICE agents in March 2018. They knew ICE agents, seeking to counter sanctuary policies, arrested 232 people during a Northern California sweep in February 2018, half of whom the agency said had prior criminal convictions.
Vasquez’s parents immigrated to the U.S. about 19 years ago. They are field workers who pick tomatoes, garlic and watermelons throughout
the Central Valley. Sometimes, they would hear that an ICE raid was imminent at their workplace.
These were often false rumors, borne of anxiety at an uncertain time. Still, they would stay home, sometimes for days.
“They would be afraid of being taken at work and then all their kids would be alone,” Vasquez said. “Like a lot of immigrants, they had to take time off of work, just so they could kind of feel safe with us.”
Having no income during those times forced families to cut costs where they could. Instead of paying for a bus pass for a 15-minute ride to school, Vasquez and her younger siblings would walk 45 minutes each way.
Though Vasquez was in high school during part of Trump’s presidency, she and other young, undocumented Latinos felt the impact in other ways. She said
some of her teachers in that more politically conservative part of California were “very public” about their support of Trump.
“So it was kind of very hard for us to be like, ‘Oh, like where should we go for advice? What should we do?’” Vasquez said. “So we sort of shut down, because it wasn’t good for us to voice our opinions, because we knew if we said something that didn’t align with what they were feeling, it wouldn’t have been good for us.”
School officials told students and their families they would be safe from immigration enforcement on campus. But school dances were held off campus. Vasquez struggled with whether to attend. She knew how worried her parents would be.
Ultimately, she never did go to a dance.
“It was outside of school, so anything could happen,” Vasquez said. “I was like, I don’t have to
go. This isn’t something I need to do.’”
Her life, she said, basically consisted of, “go to school, come home, eat, do your homework and go to sleep.”
One major regret: She didn’t attend her grandfather’s funeral. He died in Mexico, a couple of months after Trump took office. Though a provision in the DACA program allows participants to apply to travel out of the country for humanitarian reasons, like a funeral, Vasquez’s parents urged her not to go.
“My family was like, ‘No, don’t do it. You’re not going to come back.’ And it was like a huge thing (to them). And since we were already living in fear, I didn’t do it because it was too risky,” Vasquez said. “I really, really wanted to go. I felt like I was robbed of an opportunity that I could have said goodbye to my grandpa.”
Through the help of scholarship programs, Vasquez graduated this year from Fresno State University with a degree in sociology. She is working as a field organizer in the Central Valley for Power California, an organization focused on building the influence of young people of color and their families.
Aurora Castellanos, the field director for Power California, was herself brought to the U.S. from Mexico at age 9. Her family, which includes some undocumented members, also felt their lives dominated by the Trump presidency.
Castellanos, a Concord resident who is now a U.S. citizen, recalled that when her grandmother had a mild stroke, the family briefly debated whether to take her to the hospital — worried about being detained by agents who might be waiting there.
They ultimately took their chances, but Castellanos agonized over that kind of “second-guessing that you have to go through when you’re put in positions where your community is being criminalized at the national level.”
Now, the 33-year-old UC Berkeley graduate is trying to transform fear of a second Trump presidency into political action. For her, the story that matters is the one that can be told by people who stand to be most affected, such as young immigrants.
“We know that young people are coming up as a big voting bloc in the 2024 election,” Castellanos said. “And young people are determined to ensure that (Trump) will not be reelected.”