Immigration security


Immigration Lawyers Are Advising Their Undocumented Clients to Stay in the Shadows

With Donald Trump taking office in less than two months, immigration lawyers and advocates are trying to reassure their nervous clients that there is hope for them despite the president-elect's caustic anti-immigrant rhetoric during the campaign. But those lawyers say they know almost as little as their clients about what the Trump administration may do, and they are telling many undocumented immigrants to stay in the shadows rather than rushing to find paths to legal status in the remaining weeks of the Obama administration.

"There's just a lot of fear about what's going to happen, and a lot of that has to do with the language and the sort of hate-mongering that we heard during the campaign," says Lindsay Toczylowski, the executive director of Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles. "I think that fear of the unknown has just resulted in sort of extreme caution." Even immigrants with clear paths to green cards or other forms of legal status have been scared enough to wonder if they should still go forward with their applications, she says.