SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
That was how the issue played out in the election for immigrants. But what about January 20 and onward? For more than that, we are joined by Lindsay Toczylowski, an attorney with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, an organization that provides legal representation for immigrants. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
LINDSAY TOCZYLOWSKI: Thanks for having me.
DETROW: I want to start with something that you posted on social media just before the election. In a post on X, you wrote, we might be preparing for the worst, but we are ready. We have been here before and survived regardless of the outcome of the election, then you went on.
I want to take both parts of that. We have been here before and survived. Is that how you're thinking about this? - because I feel like a lot of people are thinking about, this is going to be a radically different administration when it comes to immigration.
TOCZYLOWSKI: The mandate that they came in with in 2017 is really the same today, which is, you know, cruelty will be the point when it comes to immigration and immigrants. You know, we survived some of the worst things that we could imagine, which was looking to create a end of the asylum system, many people in deportation proceedings, eliminating protections for victims of domestic violence - all of those things happened, and we fought him at every turn.
And he's not going to be facing the same immigrant rights movement that he was facing in 2017. My organization alone - we have dozens of attorneys when we had less than 10 back in 2017. The movement is more organized. We're not surprised. We are not caught flat-footed this time around. We knew this was a possibility. And what he's talking about - some of these major policy changes like mass deportations - we know that he's going to move forward with those, and we have been scenario planning. We've been thinking about it, and we're ready to fight him at every turn.
DETROW: I want to circle back to several of the things you just said, but let's start there with scenario planning. How do you envision these mass deportations that were a key part of his campaign plan, seem to be a key part of conversations from advisors like Stephen Miller and others? What are your meetings like right now? What do you think that could look like? And what does a group like yours do?
TOCZYLOWSKI: You know, we're really looking to work with all of our partner organizations to do things on all fronts, and that means educating community members. That means, you know, really talking about the fear they have and making sure they understand that the Constitution of the United States did not go away with this election. People still have rights. They still have a right to due process and proceedings.
And frankly, some of the things that they are purporting that they will be doing - putting tens of millions of people into deportation proceedings into a system that, as it exists currently, with 3.7 million cases pending nationwide - takes years for these cases to get through the system. He's talking about putting millions of more people into a system that is currently not functioning. And so we really intend to look at ways that we can prevent that.
He also is talking about putting more people into detention centers. This is something they did the first time around, and we fought back. We fought back against the idea that you can hold people incommunicado. And, you know, frankly, these policies also will not be popular once people see what mass deportation actually looks like because there has been a lot of othering of immigrant communities.
But if you start to round up millions of people from our communities, people will realize that that means your kid's friend's parents, your - kids in your school, people in your community, people who own businesses that you go to will be rounded up, and that is not going to be a popular policy. So we will use that to our advantage, and we will be pushing positive narratives. We will be making sure that we are fighting him in court and in litigation.
DETROW: Can I ask about opinion of this, though, because we have just seen an election where Trump won the popular vote? In, frankly, most of the counties in the United States, he did better than he did four years ago. We saw in exit polling, we saw in other factors, that what he said about immigration seemed to resonate with so many voters. How do you process that? How do you think about that? Does that make your job tougher if millions of Americans are saying, yes, we heard what he was saying, and we want him to do that?
TOCZYLOWSKI: You know, I look back to 2018 when people saw what was happening with family separation. And he, at that time, thought that he had a lot of support for his immigration policies as well. But when people heard those kids and that audio of them screaming after being ripped away from their parents and crying, people reacted. And what I see in that example is that when people are faced with the human realities of these policies, there is a way to change people's hearts and minds.
And I think we'll see that again when we see our own communities being affected. The ripple effects of a deportation are huge. When people feel that, when they see it, I am confident that people will recognize that this is not reflective of the values that we want as a country. This is not the direction we want to go in.
So as an immigrant rights movement, we have a lot of work ahead of us to make sure that we are lifting up the humanity of the situation but also looking at why people said they agreed with these policies. In part, people said it was because of their own economic situations. A mass deportation plan would be disastrous for our economy. It would mean ripping people out of jobs. It would mean taking people who are contributing to our economies, contributing to our small businesses, out of our communities. That will be disastrous, and I think when people see the actual impacts of the policies that he's proposing, it will be deeply unpopular.
DETROW: That's Lindsay Toczylowski, an attorney with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. Thanks so much for talking to us.
TOCZYLOWSKI: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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