Trump’s Deportation Vow Fuels Fear and a Potential Showdown in New York

Mayor Eric Adams of New York City has vowed to prevent mass deportations, but migrants and immigration lawyers are preparing for them.

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victory this week spread fear and panic across New York City’s more than 400,000 undocumented immigrants as they braced for the impact of one of his central campaign promises: a mass deportation program.

City officials scrambled to decipher the effect that a national immigration crackdown would have on the city’s two-year influx of asylum-seekers staying in city shelters.

Immigration lawyers were inundated with frantic calls from clients, while activists rushed to stage rallies, raising alarms about how mass deportations might separate families and disrupt the underpinning of the city’s economy.

“There are many people who feel nervous, people who don’t have papers yet,” said Edwin Tito, a 40-year-old migrant who arrived from Ecuador two years ago.

“I don’t have papers and people are nervous that they are going to come and take a lot of people out from their work sites and deport them,” he said, as he took a short break from working at a Midtown construction site on Thursday. “There are people who have already gone through that during his last presidency.”

Mr. Trump’s vow to more aggressively secure the U.S.-Mexico border could stem the number of migrants arriving in New York — more than 200,000 since 2022. A reduction could be welcome news for Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, who has repeatedly denounced the burden the influx has placed on the city.