‘Not American Enough’
Veronica was born in California into a family with roots in Mexico. She flies the American flag outside her home on national holidays, and proudly belts out “The Star-Spangled Banner” with her hand over her heart at sporting events. Sitting in the bleachers at her son’s baseball game last month, Veronica started chatting with another mom in Spanish. Then she stopped and looked around, wondering if other parents might suspect that the women were undocumented and report them to immigration authorities. Is this going to get me in trouble? she recalled thinking.
Veronica’s concern has only deepened. Two weeks ago, after watching immigration agents arrest and kill U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, she talked with her 14-year-old son about how he should behave if law enforcement asked whether he was in the country legally. If it happened when they were together, she told him, agents would be more likely to focus on her because of her darker complexion. “I’m a U.S. citizen,” she reminded him. “You’re going to see me again.”
Similar conversations are taking place around the country in group chats, classrooms, churches, and at dinner tables among American-born Latinos who feel powerless amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. They are scared of being detained or mistakenly deported, and are contending with their identity and place in a country whose highest court has given permission to agents to use a person’s race, ethnicity, or accent as a factor in immigration stops.
About two-thirds of U.S.-born Latinos told the Pew Research Center that they feel their situation has worsened over the past year; nearly half of those queried said they feel less safe in their area because of the mass-deportation blitz. Those I spoke with (all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity or allowed only their first name to be used because they fear retribution) said they are changing their habits. They carry photos of their birth certificate or passport and have saved lawyers’ numbers in their phones. They’re sharing videos of Americans being stopped by authorities and are being tipped off about immigration raids by friends and clients. School administrators are preparing for immigration-enforcement operations at pickup and drop-off. One woman told me that her son came home from school upset because he had a Spanish first name. He asked why he wasn’t given an English-sounding name, like his brother.
Many say they are offended that their legal status, and by extension, their patriotism, could be questioned. Gina Hinojosa, a Democratic state representative from Texas who was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley and is running for governor, said that everywhere she goes, Latino voters tell her they are insulted by the way the mass-deportation blitz has been carried out. “We love our country; we feel just as American as anyone, because we are,” she told me. “To be treated as not American enough, not Texan enough, is just a slap in the face.”
In Phoenix, where I live and where 42 percent of the population identifies as Latino, people have distinct memories of the last time immigration-enforcement operations were carried out this aggressively. Then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio had his deputies flood heavily Latino neighborhoods about 18 years ago, stopping and detaining people suspected of being in the country illegally. The sweeps, followed by a 2010 state law that was intended to crack down on undocumented immigrants, caused pervasive fear, not just among people who were in the country unlawfully.
The Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign has now put much of the sprawling metropolis on edge, including residents who are American citizens. When an entourage of ICE vehicles was spotted at a park where youth-sports practices take place, word quickly spread on a neighborhood social-media page and in family texts: Stay away from the park. One 27-year-old who works in financial services told me he changed the route he drives to work to avoid ICE-marked SUVs. A small-business owner worries that her citizenship might be stripped because her mother came to the U.S. unlawfully. One prominent local restaurateur, whose family’s history in this country spans generations, told me he now lives with an undercurrent of anxiety, especially when his family travels through places that might have immigration checkpoints or when he gets close to the U.S.-Mexico border. “I’m the darkest one in my family,” he said. “I always turn down the music, I’m always very serious when we cross borders.” His wife and children have made fun of him. “You guys don’t understand,” he told them.
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Students are particularly affected, their parents and educators told me; some have asked whether college scholarships could be rescinded because of their ethnicity, and some now prefer remote learning because of the possibility of raids. Robert is a dark-skinned 17-year-old who plays soccer, is learning Spanish, and gets good grades. His great-great-great-grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in the late 1890s; Robert was born in Arizona. But he told me he’s started thinking that other people don’t believe he belongs in the U.S. He hears the demeaning words some classmates use when talking about politics, and said he often feels hostility from others because of the color of his skin.
He recently dug up a picture of his passport to have at the ready in case authorities demand to know where he was born. His parents warned him to stay under the speed limit to avoid drawing attention from police. Robert said he has drifted away from friends who have said they support Trump’s immigration policies.
“All of this stuff brought me to the question of: Am I proud to be an American?” he said. If he were to leave the U.S., he wondered, where would he go? “Do I want to be called an American? Is that a source of pride or is that a source of shame?” He isn’t sure.
A man who served in the military, and whose 26-year-old daughter, born in Germany, has dual citizenship, told me she recently asked whether she could be deported. Although his family has been in the U.S. for more than 100 years, he didn’t know what to say. “They’re doing lots of crazy stuff,” he told her. “I don’t know what could happen.” She asked him for help getting a U.S. passport, and he agreed. Before hanging up the phone, he told his daughter that he should be her first call if she ever ran into trouble with immigration authorities.
Stoking helplessness and fear may be part of the point of Trump’s crackdowns and rhetoric, experts who study cultural identity and politics told me. The administration’s tactics send a message about who belongs in the country, “who is morally worthy, and who is not,” Tomás R. Jiménez, a sociology professor at Stanford University, told me.
The alienation that message creates—particularly in combination with extreme partisanship—has the potential to reshape the way Americans interact with their neighbors, schools, employers, churches, and democratic institutions. Politically, it could threaten gains made by Trump and the Republican Party among Latino voters, who helped return him to the White House. Latino voters—like most people—want to feel like they are getting ahead economically, but recent polling shows that they feel like Trump and Republicans haven’t kept their promises to lower prices. In a special election in Texas this month, a Democrat won a state-Senate seat in a deep-red district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024, a shift powered by Latino voters turned off by Trump’s immigration operations and their economic situations. Even when Arizona was reliably red, it placed limits on hard-line immigration enforcement. Arpaio’s efforts in the early 2000s, followed by the state law, activated a generation of young Latinos who helped oust Arpaio in 2016, even as Trump won Arizona.
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Electoral defeat could await Republicans who don’t distance themselves from Trump’s immigration raids, Richard Herrera, a professor emeritus of political science at Arizona State University, told me. “When people feel betrayed or feel abandoned,” he said, “they’re more likely to look for alternatives.”
The many people I spoke with told me the scenes from Minneapolis have made them feel more civically connected, because their rightful place in their country is at stake. After a popular chain of restaurants in Maricopa County was raided by immigration agents late last month, the teenagers of several parents I spoke with joined thousands of other high schoolers in and around Phoenix to march out of school. They will soon be old enough to vote. Among them was Veronica’s son.