Immigrant Communities in Hiding

At a barbershop in Los Angeles, only one of the 10 chairs was occupied on what would ordinarily be a busy evening. In San Francisco, a middle school student’s erroneous information about seeing an immigration officer on a city bus prompted the school district to send parents a warning.

In Chicago, a mistaken report that immigration agents showed up at a school set off panic that rippled across the country. At a church in Charlotte, N.C., more than a third of the usual congregants were absent from a recent evening service.

Hotlines set up by advocates for immigrants to report enforcement activity have experienced a spike in calls.

“The hysteria is out of control,” said Patrick Garcia, executive director of Embrace All Latino Voices, a group in Charlotte, N.C.

After taking office last week, the Trump administration began highlighting what it has characterized as a new and more aggressive effort to target illegal immigration and deliver on a key campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations. So far, the enforcement efforts have been primarily individual arrests, rather than sweeps of factories, farms or other large-scale sites. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reported on social media more than 5,000 arrests in around a week’s time.

An estimated 14 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States, according to demographers and other experts. The number includes people with no legal status as well as people who have some form of temporary status that is being contested in court or has been threatened with termination by the Trump administration.

Arresting and deporting even a small share of the population with no status or contested status is all but impossible. But stirring anxiety and uncertainty among those millions of people appears to be far easier, stoked by sharp rhetoric from Mr. Trump and his top aides and fed by news footage of federal agents massing in communities from Seattle to New York.

Even schools, churches and hospitals, places long considered insulated from immigration enforcement, have become fair game after the Department of Homeland Security’s recent announcement that such locations were not off limits to agents.

Denver Public Schools recorded a decline in attendance of 10 percent or more over the last week at some schools that have a large number of students from migrant families. An undocumented woman named Martha, 60, said she had stopped volunteering as a crossing guard and cafeteria worker at the school in her neighborhood in nearby Aurora, Colo., as raid rumors swirled. “My kids are grown up now, but they still need their mother by their side, and my biggest fear is that I will be picked up and taken away from them,” she said.

Thomas D. Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, said that allowing immigration agents to have access to sensitive sites gave them the ability to pursue targets wherever they want, in line with other law enforcement agencies.

“It’s not like we’re walking in and arresting everybody in the building, so the institution shouldn’t be afraid. The criminal alien should be afraid,” Mr. Homan said in an interview.

In San Francisco, Karen Rodriguez rushed to pick up her 7-year-old son from school after parents were notified by a worker there that ICE agents had been spotted in the area. “Fear is definitely a feeling we all have,” said Ms. Rodriguez, a 30-year-old Colombian. She said that she, her husband and their son had crossed the border and were planning to apply for asylum.

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Even in Los Angeles and San Francisco, cities that have passed laws to protect their immigrant communities, people are altering their routines.

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Self-deportation, or the idea that undocumented people will just leave, has been promoted by proponents of highly restrictive immigration policies to achieve attrition through enforcement.

Indeed, Mr. Homan, the border czar, said he hoped people would decide to abandon the country.

“It’d be wiser for people that are in the country illegally to simply go home and come back the right way. Absolutely,” he said.

John Sandweg, a senior Homeland Security official in the Obama administration, said the strategy was clear. “The administration is creating a climate of fear as part of a self-deportation plan,” he said.

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