By Matthew Ponsford
NEW YORK, Dec 13 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – (Editor’s note: strong language in 46th graf) On the morning of Nov. 9, 2016, Bianey Garcia walked to her office in Queens, New York, numb from shock and reeling from the night before.
“I felt like my dreams, my everything, had gone,” she said.
Waking to the news of Donald Trump’s election victory, Garcia, a 27-year-old transgender woman originally from Mexico, paced “like the walking dead” to her desk at Make the Road, New York’s largest immigrant organisation.
More than a million of the country’s estimated 11.1 million undocumented immigrants live in the city and its suburbs, many having worked there for decades and built families on the way.
That morning, they woke to a new reality: a Trump presidency that pledged to rapidly deport 2 to 3 million people living in the country without visas.
In her offices below the elevated tracks of the No. 7 train – the so-called “Immigrant Express” across Queens, where nearly half of residents are foreign born – Garcia saw chaos.
She recalled tearful children refusing to leave for class, afraid of being bullied at school or losing parents to deportation before they got home.
Yet amid the palpable fear, Garcia said nobody had yet thought to ask one key question:
What about the reams of records the undocumented had all handed to the city in more optimistic times: almost a million personal documents that today risk leading federal immigration forces right back to their front doors.
The documents were the underpinning of an ambitious city identity card system – IDNYC – set up by the mayor in 2015 with the express aim of helping those who fell under the radar.
Now that data might come back to bite.
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