The most immediate threat after the US president's move next week is not to the residents of those countries that Donald Trump has thought about attacking. It is for the millions of people inside the United States who are about to enter four years of fear: the undocumented migrants that Trump has promised to deport in large numbers.
They include young people who came as children and whose entire life memories are within the US alone.
These people are preparing in several ways. They are uploading digital panic button to notify loved ones, if federal agents come. They are researching their rights and saving the phone numbers of lawyers.
Families are encouraged to plan for the worst: to have food, shelter and childcare ready in case the adults disappear one day.
Their situation will come into focus on Wednesday, when US senators have a chance to question Trump's choice to lead the border and deportation agencies at her confirmation hearing for Homeland Security Secretary.
“It's a paralyzing fear,” said Saul Rascón Salazar, who arrived in the country 18 years ago, when he was five. His family came from Mexico on temporary visas and never left. Now he is a college graduate and works in fundraising for a private school in California.
“I say (this) as someone who hates fear and is totally against it. (But) I don't think things are looking good. In terms of everything – emotionally, financially, rhetorically. see this situation getting better.”
These young people were not meant to be here anymore.
Four years ago, they were optimistic. Joe Biden, who had just been elected US president, supported a program to allow them to stay in the countryand talk about a new immigration law that remains in the air.
Those hopes then grew. Congress lack of votes for law, Trump was re-elected and migrants now face a double threat – from the next president and the courts.
Reality hits on election night
Rascón said he was feeling optimistic, up until election night. He never believed that Trump would win. But the new reality sunk in when he brought in the election returns on November 5 with friends in Arizona.
“It was a very dark, dark vibe in the room,” he said, recalling how he and his friends began to struggle through things to change.
Rascón is an international relations graduate from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, so, he said, his first thoughts went abroad to Ukraine and the Middle East, and then to domestic issues such as abortion, minority rights and gun laws.
It was only after that, he said, that he started thinking about immigration, and he insists that it took a few days for his own personal truth to come home.
For example, said Rascón, he urges people in families like his, if they use social media as he does, so that they are not published and where they are.
They should set aside money for lawyers, for shifting fees and, in the worst case scenario, for long-term carers, he said.
Trump insists that he does not like to deport young people like Rascón.
It is among more than half a million people enrolled in a program created by Barack Obama in 2012, canceled by Trump during his first term as president and revived by Biden called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). He always delays their deportation if they arrived as young people, went to school or work and had a clean criminal record.
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Trump tries to encourage young “Dreamers”.
In a recent interview, Trump suggested that he would eventually deport these young people, referring to them by a common nickname, “Dreamers”; the incoming president even said that Congress would like to protect them with a permanent law.
“We have to do something about the Dreamers because these are people who were brought here at a very young age,” Trump told NBC in December.
“They don't even know the language of their country. And yes, we are going to do something about the Dreamers.”
But there is plenty of reason to be suspicious. “They are just empty words,” Rascón said.
After all, in his first term, Trump tried to cancel the DACA program. In his own words, he would even deport entire families where the children were born in the US and are full American citizens. Additionally, there is a legal challenge to ending DACA through the courts.
To overcome everything, Trump's friends promise punish and accuse people which restricts exports.
One young woman, a college student in Texas who was interviewed by CBC News, illustrates the point Trump made: that this land, the United States, is the only land she remembers. (The CBC has agreed to keep the woman's name confidential, as she fears she will be deported for speaking publicly about her experiences).
She said she was taken by car from El Salvador at the age of two. She was granted permission a few years ago to leave and re-enter the US to see an ailing grandparent in her native country, describing it as culture shock.
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The woman recalled one interaction with an El Salvadoran street vendor who referred to her as “chele,” or white. Others started calling her Mexican. Although she speaks Spanish well, her language is influenced by the many Mexican Americans around her.
As for the possibility of being treated as a criminal now, she says it is cruel.
“I didn't choose to come to the US,” she said. “How is that fair?”
Same family, different status
One of the more unknowns is the fate of mixed-status households, like Rascón's: His parents and older siblings are completely undocumented, he is in the DACA program and his two younger siblings are citizens born in the USA.
Trump has said that entire families like this could be uprooted. His border czar who came in later He clarified that he cannot send away real US citizens – but if their parents are deported, they can decide whether to take their children with them.
It is not always clear where they will go. Take the case of Marina Mahmud.
She was born in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to a Syrian father and a Ukrainian mother. Her family's common language at home is Russian.
Mahmud was a child when her parents went on a trip to the US 20 years ago and never returned home. She now has a college degree and is working in Michigan as a babysitter.
In 2016, she was called out of class the day after Trump was elected to meet with her parents and lawyer and discuss next steps, such as whether to flee. from the country and should they hide.
Her situation has changed dramatically since then: Mahmud has just obtained permanent residency through relatives, which means, in theory, that she is protected. She is even allowed to travel internationally and has visited Canada three times.
But on election night, she was sad, thinking of the hundreds of thousands of other Dreamers who don't have the safety she found.
When she drove home from work that night, she heard about Trump's early lead on the radio and tried not to cry at the wheel. She got home, opened several screens and broke down.
“I cried all night,” said Mahmud. “I couldn't stop.”
She compares it to survivor's guilt.
Mahmud has promised her friends in the DACA movement that she will continue to support them and protest with them.
She described texting one friend after the election: “I'll be your human shield if I have to be,” Mahmud said, recalling the message.
But she admits that her own situation is not certain. Trump and his team have about shaking residence of some people and challenging the US Constitution citizenship rules.
Being a human shield at a protest is not without risks either. A permanent resident could still leave if convicted certain crimes.
For undocumented immigrants and their allies, the four years of fear will begin when Trump takes the oath of office in Washington, DC, on Monday at noon ET.
