By Alejandra Garcia on February 8, 2025
Immigrant workers protesting Trump’s deportation policy. Photos: Bill Hackwell
U.S. President Donald Trump rose to power by making mass deportations of undocumented immigrants a central promise of his campaign. Today, those promises have become a stark reality, one that the world is watching with growing concern. Jose Pertierra, one of the top immigration attorneys in Washington, D.C. shared with this reporter, during an interview for the multiplatform Telesur, that the consequences of this decision will be immeasurable for the U.S. society.
Alejandra Garcia: As an attorney, how are you experiencing this scenario in your direct contact with undocumented clients who are seeking ways to legally remain in the United States?
Jose Pertierra: First let me say that it is an honor for me to be in the front line of combat against fascism and xenophobia in the United States.
Clients and immigrants in general are terrified of what’s going on because this is a movement that is being televised by Trump for the purpose of engendering terror, fear in the hearts of every immigrant in the United States. The raids are on purpose televised with reporters embedded with Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) as they raid different places where immigrants may be gathering. And they’re hoping that the images will be shown on television so that people will leave the United States of their own accord. Most immigrants, however, are going to stay here, and they’re going to ride this out, and they’re going to fight, resist, and defend themselves.
AG: In what ways are the human rights of immigrants being violated in these deportations? We witnessed recently the tensions between President Gustavo Petro and Trump because Colombian deportees were being tied up, shackled, and also Trump recent announcement about his intentions to house over “30,000 high-profile criminal aliens”, as he said, in the Guantanamo Naval Base, which is a territory illegally occupied by Washington. What does this mean?
Jose Pertierra
JP: In those flights to Colombia and Brazil, the deportees were being shackled like dangerous criminals. Their wrists and their feet were shackled, and they were made to kneel down in military planes. That is a humiliating way to deport people from the United States. These are people who came here to work. They came to the U.S. to improve their living conditions and the lives of their family.
The vast majority of them are hardworking people, and to treat them this way is a way to try to, again, terrorize the rest of the immigrant community and say this is what will await you if we catch you. And that is a violation of the human and civil rights of the deportees. Deportees have constitutional rights in this country, and one of them is the right to be treated humanely.
And if they want to deport people, if they have an order of deportation, and they want to exercise that order of deportation, they should be flown out on commercial flights and with all the dignity that a human being deserves.
AG: You mentioned that migrants are people who come to the U.S. to work. Of the 7.6 million undocumented residents in the labor force, three-quarters of a million are self-employed, having created their own jobs and in the process creating jobs for many others. Let me ask you, what will the short and medium-term consequences of these deportations in social and economic terms?
JP: This country needs immigrants. For example, we just had a series of fires in Los Angeles that devastated the city. Who’s going to rebuild those areas? Anybody who drives around construction sites in this country sees that the vast majority of the construction workers are immigrants. The vast majority of the service industry workers are immigrants.
Restaurants, hotels, the people who wash the windows in the skyscrapers are immigrants. They are the ones who are doing the work in this country, even high-tech. The doctors and nurses in the hospitals of the United States are immigrants.
With this notion that we’re going to get rid of immigrants, who’s going to do the work? What’s going to happen to the crops in this country? Who’s going to pick them? Who’s going to serve them in the restaurants? Who’s going to attend to people in nursing homes when they’re sick? Who’s going to attend to old people when they need help? It’s something that President Trump will find out if he is successful in getting rid of a large segment of the immigrant population.
AG: Venezuela just received a special envoy from the U.S. government regarding the massive deportations that the U.S. is trying to do. What’s the meaning of this visit, in your opinion?
JP: First of all, it shows that the United States, when it wants to negotiate with Venezuela, negotiates with the sitting president of Venezuela, and not with the so-called interim president, who I think is in Spain. But also, it shows that the United States has got a problem on its hands with the Venezuelans coming to this country. Why? It’s because of the heavy sanctions that have been imposed on Venezuela.
Same with Cuba. Cubans are coming here in large numbers because of the sanctions that the United States has applied against these countries. If they want to diminish Venezuelan and Cuban immigration, they should get rid of the sanctions and allow the economies of those two countries to flourish, so that people don’t leave their home and their family in order to look for ways to support themselves and their loved ones.
Alejandra Garcia is a Latin American correspondent for Resumen Latinoamericano – English
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English