Volunteers across the U.S. are delivering food and necessities - in a Meals-on-Wheels type program - to undocumented immigrants who are too afraid to leave home.
Networks of volunteers are taking matters into their own hands after President Donald Trump promised the largest deportation operation in America’s history.
Trump’s spending bill that passed last week hands more than $170 billion to immigration enforcement over the next decade, with $45 billion going directly to Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the next four years to spend on detaining migrants.
Fears among some immigrant families are so prevalent that they now rely on kind-hearted strangers to bring them food, volunteers have said.
“I can't really appreciate how afraid they are because I don't think I've ever been that afraid,” Lynne McFarland, a volunteer in Nashville, Tennessee, told CBS News.
McFarland is part of a network of volunteers and delivers about 25 boxes of food and basics a week to undocumented families living in Nashville.
The 80-year-old told the outlet that “most” of the families she supports have had a loved one detained or deported.
“I think there's fear on all sides,” McFarland said. “I think there's fear that we don't know who's next, and we know that there will be a next.”
Republican state Sen. Jack Johnson parroted the Trump administration's rationale for the mass deportations in an interview with CBS.
“Our law enforcement officers here in Tennessee are committed to finding you, apprehending you, and getting you out of our community and out of our country,” Johnson said. “If you're in the country illegally, then I think you should be concerned.”
ICE raids sparked mass protests across Southern California and beyond last month. In California’s Ventura County, volunteers are delivering food to farmworkers who are too afraid to go to work.
“They need to eat, and then they're not going to the fields because they're very scared,” volunteer Carolina Guillen told ABC10. “They haven't left their homes, so yes, it's terror, they're terrorized,” Guillen added.
Thousands of migrants work in the fields in Ventura County, where ICE carried out raids in June.
“I think it's so so unbelievable because, you know. Ventura County, you know, they have, about 42,000 workers, and Ventura County, they get about, it's a $2 billion a year in industry,” Guillen said.
More than 40 percent of the nation’s crop workers are undocumented, according to estimates from the Department of Agriculture.
Trump admitted his own anti-immigration agenda was hurting the agricultural industry. “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” the president wrote on Truth Social on June 12.
The number of people without a criminal record being arrested by ICE agents and held in detention has jumped 800 percent since January, as officials face pressure to boost numbers, according to figures from June.
