By Kristina Cooke and Ted Hesson
Blanca Figueroa and Severiano Martinez have known from the start of their eight-year marriage that she was at risk of deportation because she entered the United States illegally.
Now – with President-elect Donald Trump expected to issue a flurry of executive orders aimed at speeding the deportation process on the day he takes office on Jan. 20 – that risk has become an overwhelming source of anxiety and discussion in their central Florida home.
Figueroa, who is from Guatemala, and Martinez, who is a U.S. citizen, live with their seven-year-old son who was born in the U.S., and a teenage son from an earlier relationship who has a green card. Figueroa says she is the family’s main breadwinner and Martinez’s caregiver after he was injured at his job on a horse ranch.
“He worries a lot that if they deport me that he would not be able to manage the house and the boys,” she told Reuters.
About a third of the 1.4 million people expected to be prime targets for deportation – those like Figueroa with “final orders of removal” – live in the Florida and Texas enforcement areas, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by Reuters.
The two states have enacted their own laws cracking down on immigrants in the country illegally. At least another third of migrants living under final orders are in California and other “sanctuary” states that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
Reuters spoke with half a dozen immigrants living in Florida and Texas with removal orders as well as immigration advocates and church leaders, who described rising anxiety and a scramble to meet with lawyers and make contingency plans for children and other dependents in case they are deported. They described their fear of being picked up by police indiscriminately or for driving without a license.
John Budensiek, sheriff in Martin County, Florida – an hour’s drive north from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club – said that many offenders who pass through his jails could be “low-hanging fruit.”
Budensiek, a Republican, said the sheriff’s office has “had a really rough time” getting ICE officers to pick up immigration violators from their jails during President Joe Biden’s presidency.
“I believe that the Trump administration will be pretty aggressive with grabbing them up,” he said.
An ICE spokesperson said the agency considers individual circumstances when determining whether to detain someone.
Figueroa, 36, crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in 2016 and was ordered deported after she missed an immigration court hearing that November. She met Martinez, 64, later that year, when they worked on the same ranch. “He was, and still is, my angel here,” she said.
Despite marrying a U.S. citizen, Figueroa has been unable to legalize her status. She missed the window to appeal her deportation order, and a judge denied her motion to reopen the case, court records show.
None of the options Figueroa and Martinez have discussed in case of her deportation – him staying in Florida with the kids; moving as a family to Mexico – seem remotely workable to them as they depend on Figueroa’s income and on Martinez’s health insurance.
A longtime Republican voter, Martinez stayed home last year because of the rhetoric around immigration. “They try to blame all the people who come to America but the country is built on immigrants,” he said. Even so, he hopes the bombast around mass deportations remains just that. “We have to have faith,” Figueroa said.
‘BIGGEST FEAR’
Tom Homan, who will be border czar in Donald Trump’s incoming administration, has said immigrants with final deportation orders have already had a chance to argue their case in front of a judge.
“At the end of that due process, when they get ordered removed, those orders have to be executed or what the hell are we doing?” he told Reuters in October. “If those final orders don’t mean anything, then shut down immigration court.”
Immigration advocates counter that many people under final deportation orders are long-term residents, law-abiding, contributing economically and have U.S.-citizen children or spouses.
“The majority of undocumented people in this country have been here for over a decade,” said Representative Maxwell Frost, a Democrat whose district includes half of Orlando and surrounding areas. “These are our neighbors. These are people who are working.”
Frost said he plans to meet with Orlando-area mayors, law enforcement, judges and school leaders to encourage them to limit cooperation with the deportation effort.
“We’re not going to let them do this stuff in the shadows,” Frost said.
Trump’s plan to prioritize deportations of people with final orders of removal is a dramatic shift from Biden’s focus on serious criminals and national security threats.
The Biden administration directed ICE officers to consider certain factors before making an arrest, including whether the person was a long-term resident or primary caregiver.
“Those are the kinds of factors that would be relevant to a law enforcement officer in making a public safety determination,” said Tom Jawetz, a former U.S. Department of Homeland Security official who helped draft the Biden guidance.
Trump’s new guidance would prioritize criminals but allow anyone without legal status to be picked up, giving more discretion to ICE officers, Reuters reported in November.
Such a shift could put people like Adriana, a Cuban woman with a 2-year-old U.S. citizen son, at greater risk of deportation. She spoke on condition her last name not be used for fear of being targeted for deportation.
Adriana received an expedited deportation order when she crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021, although her husband was given the chance to make his political asylum case in immigration court. His next hearing is in 2027.
Because she could not be immediately deported to Cuba, she has to check in regularly with immigration officials in South Florida, where she now lives. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, I can’t sleep, I can’t eat,” she said. “What if I’m separated from my baby?”
DEPORT TO OTHER COUNTRIES
For Jorge Lopez-Giron, 47, a gay man from Honduras who has been living in the U.S. without legal status since 2000, the anticipated hardline shift under the Trump administration means he could be at an even greater risk of deportation because of a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction.
Lopez-Giron, who works as a rideshare and food delivery driver in Austin, spent three months in ICE detention after he was convicted in 2009 following a bar fight with his then-boyfriend, he said. He was ineligible for asylum because he had spent years in the U.S. without applying.
The Austin-based advocacy group American Gateways helped pause his removal order based on his fear of anti-LGBTQ discrimination in Honduras. The order could be reinstated if he commits another crime, if conditions in Honduras change, or if a third country agrees to take him, said Edna Yang, an attorney with the group.
Lopez-Giron feels a measure of security with his removal case paused, but also knows people with criminal records will be a focus of the Trump administration.
“I’m afraid,” Lopez-Giron said. “What if a police officer arrests me because of the color of my skin or because I don’t speak English well?”
Other migrants – from countries like Cuba and Venezuela that have frosty relations with the U.S. and accept few deportees – were low priorities for deportation under Biden.
Homan, Trump’s choice of border czar, told Reuters he will work to increase deportations to those nations or recruit other countries to accept them.
Alain, a Cuban who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in 2021, now lives in Houston with his wife Erika, a Honduran who also lacks legal status, and their four children. Their two youngest are U.S. citizens.
Alain, 32, first left his family farm in Cuba’s Matanzas Province in 2019 after he was harassed and detained by police over the business and his opposition to the communist government, he said.
He applied for asylum from Mexico during the first Trump administration and was denied. He then crossed the border illegally. At that time, Cuba was not accepting U.S. deportation flights. Alain was released with an order of supervision and ordered to check in with ICE once a year.
He has been working with American Gateways to contest his deportation order and recently purchased a big-rig truck and trailer to start his own trucking business.
Deportation flights to Cuba resumed in 2023 and the Biden administration has also been deporting some Cubans caught crossing illegally to Mexico.
Alain worries how Erika would support their children if he was deported.
“I had plans to buy a house next year, but I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s a risk to buy a house because if I’m deported, I’ll lose everything.”
(Reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Ted Hesson in Washington; Additional reporting by Octavio Jones in Ocala, Florida, and Evan Garcia in Austin, Texas; Editing by Mary Milliken and Suzanne Goldenberg)