COPAL Executive Director Francisco Segovia speaks at a press conference in support of Temporary Protected Status for Ecuador on May 29, 2024. COPAL led a campaign urging Minnesota Latinos to vote in the general election in November. Photo by Madison McVan/Minnesota Reformer.
At a busy Lake Street intersection on Sunday afternoon, Ecuadorian immigrants and their allies chanted and displayed signs advocating for Temporary Protected Status for Ecuador — part of a last-ditch effort to convince President Joe Biden to protect Ecuadorians from deportation as one of his final acts in office.
“Do we think that Trump will be supportive of this legislation?” Erika Zurawski, a member of the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, asked the crowd.
“No!” the few dozen attendees shouted back.
If the campaign can’t convince Biden to designate Ecuador for TPS — which would allow all Ecuadorians currently in the U.S. to legally live and work for up to two years — it’s almost certainly not going to happen under a Trump administration.
Ecuadorians and other Latinos in Minnesota are preparing for a sweeping net of immigration enforcement that may entangle citizens and legal residents alongside the millions of undocumented immigrants President-elect Donald Trump has promised to deport during his second term.
A Trump presidency will likely bring an end to any hopes of Temporary Protected Status for Ecuador. It could also mean that hundreds of thousands of people protected from deportation by TPS and similar programs — including so-called Dreamers here under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — could see their protections expire in 2025 if Trump and his incoming Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem opt not to continue the programs.
As President I will immediately end the migrant invasion of America. We will stop all migrant flights, end all illegal entries, terminate the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals (CBP One App), revoke deportation immunity, suspend refugee resettlement, and return Kamala’s…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2024
And some Minnesota Latinos fear Trump’s claims that immigrants are criminals and mentally ill will foster increased racism and harassment from neighbors.
Minnesota Latinos are a diverse demographic group; around two-thirds are of Mexican heritage, and there are large populations of Puerto Ricans, Ecuadorians, Salvadorans and other nationalities living in pockets across the state. The 2020 Census identified more than 345,000 Hispanic people in Minnesota — more than double the number in 2000. Nearly 80% are U.S. citizens, and Latinos are much younger, on average, than the state median.
At a rally in St. Cloud in July, Trump said other countries are closing their jails and asylums and sending the released people to the U.S. (There’s no evidence to suggest this is happening.)
“In Minnesota, you will have lots of people that you don’t have now — although many of them are here now,” Trump said. “You’ll have people from their jails and from their mental institutions in Minnesota.”
Some Latinos living in the St. Cloud area bristled at the comments; weeks earlier, the Diocese of St. Cloud abruptly ended the area’s only weekly Spanish Mass — a move that many churchgoers felt was discriminatory. Multiple St. Cloud Latinos say they’ve been harassed for speaking Spanish at church or in restaurants.
Ma Elena Gutierrez, executive director of Fe y Justicia, a faith-based workers’ organization in Waite Park, fears a Trump presidency will heighten the racism towards Latinos in central Minnesota. Latinos may feel less comfortable spending time in public, she said.
“I feel like people will take precautions… people are scared about it, because when he was in the presidency, we got a lot of stress,” Gutierrez said.
Trump’s promises of mass deportations remind some of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on a Worthington meatpacking plant in 2006. ICE officials arrived at the Swift plant — now owned by JBS — with ten buses, bringing work to a standstill while workers were detained and asked to provide identification. More than 250 people were arrested, including many parents, leaving families scrambling to find child care.
Francisco Segovia is the executive director of COPAL, a nonprofit group that organizes Latinos around a variety of political issues. He remembers bringing toys to children while their parents were detained during the raid.
“Some of us have that experience in our memories — the huge social impact for everyone, not only for the people who are victims or targeted by the raids, but for kids, for non-immigrants as well,” Segovia said.
Despite Trump’s rhetoric towards immigrants, more Latinos voted for him in 2024 than in previous elections, according to exit polls and results in heavily Latino districts. (Overall, Vice President Kamala Harris still won most of the Latino vote.)
Latino voters have offered up a variety of reasons for voting for Trump over Harris; one Venezuelan immigrant in Northfield who came to the U.S. legally wants Trump to crack down on illegal immigration, he told MPR News.
Another Latino voter in Arizona told the New York Times that he felt left out of the Democratic party.
Some Latino groups with ties to countries that have suffered under the rule of socialist autocrats — like Cubans and Venezuelans — have leaned towards Republicans for years.
Segovia speculated that abortion, and Trump’s position on economic issues, could be other topics attracting some Latinos.
Kristian Ramos, a Democratic strategist who did surveys and focus groups in the Southwest, told the New Yorker this summer that the party was too focused on immigration and other issues at the expense of bread-and-butter economics, which were consistently the most important issue to Latinos — as with other demographic groups.
And in any case, Biden has not delivered on the immigration reforms he promised — in part due to congressional Republicans, at the urging of Trump, blocking a bipartisan border bill that would have raised the standard for asylum claims and expedited proceedings for those who qualified.
Gutierrez said for the nearly 30 years she’s lived in the U.S., she’s watched presidents kick the can down the road on immigration reform.
At the rally for TPS for Ecuador, speakers highlighted that Biden has so far refused to grant protections to Ecuadorians, though it is in his power to do so.
“We leave our country out of necessity — we’ve had to make the most difficult decisions of our lives,” said one Ecuadorian immigrant, who asked not to be named, in Spanish. “If you can’t keep your family safe, if you can’t feed your children, you have to do something.”