Volunteers help immigrants wary of deportations
REDLAND, Fla. — Antonia Catalan maneuvers her gray sport utility vehicle around potholes in the dirt roads where rural South Florida meets the swampy Everglades. She’s looking for a man who’s in the country illegally.
She puts on her reading glasses and grabs a crumpled piece of paper with the address of a nursery that grows palm trees for Miami’s affluent communities. A muddy driveway leads to a trailer home and a young man with an empty water jug.
“Where are we heading? You are the boss,” says Catalan, 59, tossing her long braid over her shoulder. “I’m in no hurry.”
The 32-year-old Guatemalan passenger is one of a dozen workers Catalan drives for free. It’s her one-woman response to the fear spreading in immigrant communities over President Trump’s enforcement directives.
Around the country, many more ordinary people are volunteering to help people who are in the country illegally. Hundreds of church members are signing up to create or support sanctuaries, hoping to protect immigrants from deportations inside houses of worship. Others are training to accompany immigrants to court or check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement where they could be detained and deported.
Immigration law experts say volunteering to help immigrants already in the country illegally is generally not against the law, but Trump has raised doubts by ordering rules to penalize people who “facilitate their presence” in the U.S. Conservative critics say these kinds of volunteers should be punished along with the immigrants they are helping.
Catalan’s ride-hailing service has grown as she tells neighbors and friends in her town of Redland that she’ll drive immigrants to supermarkets, money-transfer booths, package couriers and even the hospital.
She was born in Mexico, but unlike many of her neighbors, she’s a U.S. citizen with a driver’s license. California, Illinois, Washington and Maryland are among the states that issue driver’s licenses to undocumented migrants, but not Florida, where staying out of trouble by driving carefully is a strategy migrants can’t count on.
Since Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez agreed in January to hold people in jail for even minor offenses if Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to pick them up, six people arrested on a single charge of driving without a valid license have been turned over to ICE.