On a chilly Saturday morning at a Maryland public high school, where one in four students is of Hispanic origin, about twenty-five Latino students and parents gather to hear attorney José Campos explain what to do if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents show up at their home. “Regardless of your status, you have constitutional rights,” Campos says.
After showing the group what an official judicial warrant looks like, the lawyer urges them to memorize “five magic phrases.” The slide he pulls up reads: “I do not want to talk with you; I do not want you to come inside; Leave; I do not want you to search anything, and I want my lawyer.” And remember, he adds, “Always turn your phone camera on. Record what is happening. Don’t let them intimidate you.”
This is easier said than done as anxiety among Latino communities across Maryland, which represent the third largest ethnic group in the state and make up approximately 11 percent of the population, is growing, and young people are experiencing it first-hand.
“My mom has been very anxious lately,” says “Monica,” a 17-year-old student attending the Saturday meeting with the Fulcrum. Her mother is from Nicaragua and does not have legal status in the U.S. despite being here for twenty years. “She is my protector, and I have never seen her this worried before.” “Monica,” born in the U.S., says that if her mom is deported, she will go live with her dad, a U.S. citizen. “I have many opportunities here, but if I were to leave with my mom, all her efforts would be in vain.” The Fulcrum uses a pseudonym for “Monica,” per her request.
Across the state, schools host “Know your Rights” meetings like the one at a Montgomery County High School, which the Parent Teachers’ Association organized. Information is power, and Monica, as the editor of the Spanish language school newspaper, is leveraging her passion for journalism to launch a podcast in Spanish where immigrants can get answers to their questions from a network of pro bono lawyers. “People must educate themselves, and social media cannot be their only source of information. A podcast is accessible and low-cost.”
Resources like Ayuda are crucial for informing immigrants about their rights as ICE quietly expands its collaboration with local enforcement agencies through the 287 (g) Program, named after Section 287 (g) of the 1996 Immigration and Nationality Act. This allows the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to sign agreements with state or local enforcement authorities that authorize them to act as ICE agents. A fact sheet on the 287 (g) program by the American Immigration Council states that as of December 2024, ICE had agreements with 135 state and local law enforcement agencies across 21 states.
Though only three counties in Maryland have such agreements with ICE—Cecil, Frederick, and Harford counties—immigrant rights organizations are striking back hard to counter President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda. In early February, CASA Maryland joined forces with other civil society allies and faith institutions to push for three bills to protect immigrants in Maryland. One of them, the Maryland Values Act, is aimed explicitly at terminating 287 (g) agreements in the state.
At a rally held in front of the Maryland State House on February 4th, Ashanti Martinez, Chair of the Maryland Legislative Latino Caucus, said in a press statement by CASA MD, “I know that all of us here understand what’s on our shoulders – the responsibility that we have to make sure that every family, no matter what your status is, feels protected, loved, seen, and valued here in Maryland. We value personhood more than status.”
The Protecting Sensitive Locations Act, the second piece of legislation introduced by CASA Maryland and allies, establishes clear guidelines for limiting ICE access to what are often referred to as “sensitive locations.” These include schools, courthouses, hospitals, places of worship, and other sensitive locations.
A win related to this motion came on February 24 th, when U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland ordered ICE not to conduct immigration enforcement actions “in or near places of worship.” The judge responded to a complaint filed by the Quakers and other religious groups about their constituents’ rights. While a setback for President Trump’s mass deportation agenda, the ruling applies only to one sensitive location.
The final piece of legislation is the Maryland Privacy Act, sponsored by state delegate Lorig Charkoudian and state senator Clarence Lam. This bill requires ICE to have a warrant to access Maryland residents' private state and local agency data. Under state law, undocumented immigrants can still obtain a driver’s license or identification card.
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“This is a privacy bill to ensure the federal government cannot go through a fishing expedition in our state databases,” said Senator Lam at the Maryland State House rally. “This legislation really is about promoting transparency and promoting privacy. Marylanders have a right to know who’s attempting to access their data.”
In an interview with the Fulcrum, Stacey Brustin, a professor of law at Catholic University and a member of the advisory council for Ayuda, an immigrant rights organization in the Washington D.C. greater metro area, says that the biggest differences when it comes to immigration policy in the second Trump administration are “the targeting of sensitive locations, the stopping of enforcement priorities so that anyone can be a target and the diminishing access to legal representation while in detention.”
For Monica and other Latinos in Maryland, fighting back means overcoming the escalation of daily
trauma.“Fear creates stress, and stress creates illness,” says Beatriz to the Fulcrum, a woman in her 60s born in Colombia and now a U.S. citizen. “There is an emotional pandemic playing out in our communities, and I believe the consequences will be felt for years.”
Beatrice Spadacini is a freelance journalist for the Fulcrum. Spadacini writes about social justice and public health.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.