President Donald Trump signs the Laken Riley Act in January. It directs law enforcement authorities to detain and deport immigrants who are accused but not yet convicted of specific crimes, if they are in the country illegally.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
President Donald Trump signs the Laken Riley Act in January. It directs law enforcement authorities to detain and deport immigrants who are accused but not yet convicted of specific crimes, if they are in the country illegally.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
On Tuesday, President Trump will address Congress and the nation in a major speech, where he’ll sum up what he’s accomplished in his first month. And while the Trump administration has already claimed success in curbing illegal immigration, many people affected by his policies have experienced chaos and panic.
One person seeing that impact is Andrea Lino, a supervising attorney with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. She represents individuals in several western states.
“I think that not knowing what’s going to happen is scary,” she said in January, days before Trump’s inauguration. “But at the same time, I feel that I am in the right place, so I feel pretty privileged to be able to use my work and my knowledge to make people safer.”
Immigration attorney Andrea Lino says the Trump administration is moving way faster than she anticipated, “but at the end of the day, there are still rights, and he’s not above the law.”
Andrea Lino
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Andrea Lino
We checked in with Lino several times over the last month to see how Trump’s actions on immigration affected her work and her clients.
One week into the new administration, she told NPR Trump had moved faster than she had expected – not with mass arrests or a spike in deportations, but with executive actions that created confusion and stress among her clients.
“At the end of the day, there are still rights. And he’s not above the law, and his administration is not above the law, but he’s definitely making our job harder and making people panic,” Lino said.
By the end of Trump’s first month, she had noticed a pattern: traffic stops leading to detention.
“What we call driving while Black or brown basically. They just follow those people, stop them and ask where they are from, which is illegal. You have to have reasonable suspicion to believe that a person is here unlawfully,” she said.
In this episode, Lino also shares stories of some of her clients’ harrowing experiences, as well as one legal victory her group celebrated during this new administration.
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This episode was produced by Alejandra Marquez Janse and was edited by Ashley Brown with Nadia Lancy. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
This episode was produced by Alejandra Marquez Janse and was edited by Ashley Brown with Nadia Lancy. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
