TRACY, Calif. (AP) — Michel Bérrios left the United States a few days before the new year, giving President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign for mass deportations a small victory before they even started.
A former leader of a Nicaraguan student uprising, Bérrios had been in the U.S. legally, with nearly a year remaining under President Joe Biden’s unprecedented use of humanitarian parole authority for citizens of certain vulnerable countries. But harsh talk during the U.S. election campaign filled her with anxious memories of hiding from authorities back home.
Advocates and immigration experts who have noticed such departures say Bérrios’ decision to leave the U.S., despite her legal status, shows how uncertainty and threats have led a growing number of people to leave the U.S. before Trump takes office on Monday.
Trump and his allies are counting on this “self-deportation,” the idea that life can be made unbearable enough to make people leave.
“Because (the U.S.) is not a third world country like the ones many of us come from, I thought there would be a different culture here, and it was a rude awakening to realize that you and your family are not welcome,” Bérrios, 31, said days before her departure.
SELF-DEPORTATION helps Trump to achieve his goals without the government having to spend or do anything in such cases. Trump has long said he wanted to deport millions of migrants but never deported more than 350,000 a year in his first term. Only 41,500 detention beds are funded this year, so carrying out massive deportations has significant logistical hurdles.
“If you wanna self-deport, you should self-deport because, again, we know who you are, and we’re gonna come and find you,” Trump’s incoming border czar Tom Homan has said.
Bérrios had been living legally with her cousin in California, east of San Francisco, working at the front desk of an auto repair shop with Trump supporters, but she knew it was temporary — especially once Trump was elected. Anti-immigrant comments by her colleagues increased, and her discomfort grew.
In Nicaragua, “I spent five years hiding. I had to change my routine. I had to completely change my life. I stopped visiting my parents, my friends,” Bérrios said of President Daniel Ortega’s crackdown on dissent. With Trump returning to power, “that uncertainty has returned.”
Such fear is natural for anyone without permanent legal status, said Melanie Nezer, vice president for advocacy and external relations at the Women’s Refugee Commission. People with temporary permission to live and work, like Bérrios, may see that status end soon.
“Many, many people are in this situation,” she said. About 1 million people have temporary protected status and about another 500,000 like Bérrios have humanitarian parole granted to asylum-seekers from four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Trump has said he wants to end both.
UNTIL 2018, Bérrios led a fairly normal life in Nicaragua, working at a call center in Managua. She studied marketing and hoped to pursue a master’s degree in dance.
Then changes to Nicaragua’s social security system drove retirees to protest. When they were roughed up by police and Ortega supporters, students came to their aid.
Bérrios became a protest leader at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua’s Managua campus. Then known only by a code name, she told The Associated Press from hiding in July 2018, “Now, I really have no future.”
Hundreds of other protesters were imprisoned, many tortured and more recently expelled from the country and stripped of citizenship.
