‘Every time someone knocks, you get scared’

All week, Veronica had distracted herself from a constant barrage of news about a series of coordinated immigration raids the Trump administration planned to begin this weekend in cities across the country.

She worked late every night, preparing for a weeklong family vacation to Florida to visit Disney World and go fishing. She booked a three-bedroom apartment for herself and 13 family members. She packed her 4-year-old daughter’s Mickey Mouse backpack and Frozen-themed suitcase with clothes, stuffed animals and a blanket to sleep with.

But then, the woman who cleans Veronica’s home, who is living in the country illegally, showed her cellphone videos of immigration arrests happening in Miami. The woman warned that Freddie, Veronica’s husband and partner of 15 years, who is unauthorized and has a standing deportation order, could be swept up. Other family members and friends started to call, saying the same.

Hours before the family was scheduled pile into cars for the long drive to Florida from their home in Prince George’s County, Md., Veronica, who asked to be identified only by her first name, called her immigration lawyer for advice. The lawyer told her to cancel. “It’s a disaster because my daughter was happy that we were taking this trip. She’s only 4 years old but she knows a lot things,” Veronica said. “Now we don’t know how we are going to explain to her that we’re not going to be able to go on vacation anymore.”

President Donald Trump’s promises Friday that the administration would execute a series of immigration arrests nationwide added to fears that have been growing among immigrant communities for more than a month, as the raids have been debated, scheduled and then rescheduled.

The operation will target some 2,000 unauthorized immigrants who crossed the border recently, in groups of family units. That is a departure from what is typical for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who tend to focus on deporting adults who entered the country alone. But word of the operation seems to have struck fear across targeted immigrant communities, including among people who have been living here for years.

Now, a number of unauthorized immigrants — particularly those in the dozen or so cities that are said to be a focus of the event — are making plans to evade arrest. Some have fled their homes, choosing to get as far as possible from the addresses the government has on file. Others are hunkering down with reserves of food, planning to shut themselves inside until the operation ends.

They are helped by the fact that ICE agents cannot forcibly enter the homes of their targets under the law. But if past tactics are any measure, agents are likely to come to the operation armed with ruses to coax people outside. They will likely have new strategies that might help to counteract the preparations that unauthorized immigrants have been making with the help of their lawyers.

Anticipating that they will not manage to block all the arrests through preventive strategies, immigration lawyers and advocates across the country have been working swiftly to distribute contingency plans for those who are captured.

Shannon Camacho, a coordinator of the Los Angeles Raids Rapid Response Network for immigrants, said the organization is urging immigrant parents with children who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents to sign caregiver affidavits, so that if the parents are deported, the children will not be left without legal guardians.

“When people are arrested, their children can’t be picked up from school, or if they’re caring for the elderly, no one will be around to give them their medicine. We tell them to have designated people in their friends or family networks to respond,” Camacho said.

Mony Ruiz-Velasco, director of PASO-West Suburban Action Project, a community group in Melrose Park, Ill., said her staff and volunteers were advising families to memorize at least one phone number so that they can call for help if they are detained.

Win, the largest nonprofit provider of shelters for families with children in New York, notified families with undocumented members to be cautious and to leave over the weekend, if necessary, a person familiar with the instructions confirmed. The nonprofit operates 11 shelters and houses about 10 percent of the nearly 12,000 families in the city living in shelters.

A 17-year-old girl, who lives in one of the shelters and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said a shelter employee used coded language to warn her family to go into hiding and to return Monday. “They said, ‘Your room is going to be very hot this weekend. Come back Monday when things cool off,’ ” she said.

Meanwhile, immigrants’ rights lawyers were preparing to file court motions to reopen the immigration cases of people who are arrested in the operation before they can be deported. Doing so will require that the lawyers get access to the detention centers where the migrants will be held, and it is unclear whether federal officials will make such access available, lawyers said.

“We have a library at this point of different kinds of motions that we can file,” said Judy London, directing attorney of Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project in Los Angeles.