As Trump signs in his deportation plan, it is becoming evident that Trump is targeting blue states and so called sanctuaries (not just sanctuary cities but the traditional sanctuary of Church, School and Hospitals).

So now it’s time to think and plan the next move and how to protect those in our community. ICE isn’t very big and has no hope of any mass deportations scheme yet. But the deportations they do accomplish will traumatize families and even citizens (as they will obviously target any brown person, even US Citizens like Puerto Ricans).

The plan IMO is for us to make sure that our local schools and Churches collect as little information as possible. ICE will be looking for missing social security numbers for example and may target school and church databases with warrants. Now is the time to consider destroying or deleting that data if you haven’t already.

We don’t necessarily have to directly confront ICE officials to hamper their work. Indirect changes like this might be best especially given how small ICE is.

EDIT: I don’t believe there’s any good reason for schools to be keeping proofs of citizenship or building up such databases. Nonetheless, teachers and principals may have made that mistake 10 years ago before Trump was a threat or back in the era where ICE was literally not allowed into schools or Churches. Those days are behind us. If you know your school principal is trustworthy, you should campaign on getting unnecessary records deleted ASAP and start building defenses immediately.

Catholics know what I mean: our records on students and parishioners are kept for long periods of time. (Any Catholic knows and expects this, especially because we prioritize Baptism records and other such Church level Sacraments and such). I don’t know how all the other Churches do it but if your local church is anywhere on the level of organization of Catholics (I know 7th Day Adventists and Mormons are also “record-keepers”), you will want to check in with your church’s offices and maybe ask them to review records in the face of Trump’s new executive orders.