Abogados enfrentan un aluvión de migrantes inquietos por las promesas de Trump | EE. UU. | EL PAÍS English

El conocido abogado de inmigración Willy Allen recibió la visita de una preocupada mujer nicaragüense en su oficina de Miami la semana pasada. Más que preocupada, ella estaba aterrorizada. Desde que cruzó la frontera en 2007, la mujer ha permanecido en Estados Unidos "sin ningún tipo de documentación" que acredite su situación migratoria. Estaba abrumada por el miedo que actualmente sienten millones de inmigrantes en su misma situación, quienes han comenzado a imaginar todo tipo de futuros aterradores: autoridades golpeando la puerta de sus hogares y llevándolos; agentes de ICE arribando a sus lugares de trabajo; encontrarse repentinamente a bordo de un avión lleno de deportados. La mujer quería saber si tenía alguna posibilidad de escapar a estas inquietantes situaciones.

It wasn’t what Allen wanted to tell her, but it was what he had to tell her: there was probably nothing she could do at this point. “What chance does she have? None,” he says. “I explained to her that right now, she couldn’t regularize her status. She has a 15-year-old son, but even that is no guarantee.”

Among the woman’s many fears, that was the greatest: that her younger son, who had been born in the United States, would be deported or that she would have to leave him on his own. No one really knows how president-elect Donald Trump will carry out the campaign promises that helped win him the White House, but he has said quite plainly that he will not hesitate to deport mixed-status families. In other words, the so-called “largest deportation in history” might not impact 11 million migrants, the official tally of those currently in the country, but many, many more individuals. “I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back,” the Republican said in a recent interview on Meet the Press, his first since the election.