Good morning. They had honeynut squash soup at the White House last night. The world’s richest and most famous joined President Trump to fete Saudi Arabia’s autocratic crown prince at a lavish dinner. Earlier in the day, Trump dismissed a question about a U.S. intelligence report that said the prince ordered the killing of a Washington Post journalist. And Trump berated a journalist for asking. Also in Washington yesterday: Congress overwhelmingly approved the release of the Epstein files. We’ll be digging into them when they arrive. And Trump has signed off on C.I.A. plans for covert measures in Venezuela, but he has also reopened back-channel communications with President Nicolás Maduro’s government, officials said. We’ll get to all of that below. But before we do, I’d like to direct your attention to a remarkable new survey of immigrants in the United States, both documented and undocumented. It tells us not only about President Trump’s immigration policy and the people subject to it, but also about the state of the American dream.
Fear and hopingRoughly 52 million people in the United States are immigrants. A little over half of them are naturalized citizens. The rest are a combination of those who are here legally and those who are not. President Trump wants to remake the immigration system and deport as many people who are here illegally as he can. He has sent people to countries they are not from. He has ended paths for immigrants to claim asylum. He has deployed border agents near schools and hospitals, to courthouses and Home Depot parking lots, searching for people to detain and remove. (Here’s how the immigration crackdown is playing out in each city where federal forces have intervened.) So it’s no surprise that about half of all the immigrants in the survey say they feel less safe in the United States since Trump took office. Regardless of immigration status, they’re increasingly worried that they or their family members could be bundled into a van or put on an airplane bound for parts unknown. That’s one takeaway from the poll, then: Immigrants are scared. Here’s a second: They’re still glad to be here. Roughly 70 percent said they would still make the choice to migrate to the United States — a percentage that is largely unchanged from before Trump’s election and push for mass deportations. They believe their own future, and their children’s future, to be bright, my colleagues write.
Across every measure — their finances, their jobs, their educational opportunities — immigrants told pollsters that they’re better off in the United States than they were in their home countries. About half said they felt safer here. And 80 percent, including a majority of undocumented respondents, said they were either on their way to achieving the American dream or had achieved it already. (Of course, that means 20 percent do not think they’re on that road. Which is the fine print of the American experiment, regardless of immigration status: Your mileage may vary.) Many immigrants told the pollsters they understood the need for an immigration crackdown: 40 percent of them say they feel Trump’s enforcement agenda is necessary, in the wake of more lenient Biden-era policies. “Trump is trying to make this country more valuable instead of bringing anybody that wants to come in and do whatever they want,” as Gustavo Rojas, a citizen who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1990, told our reporters. Few approve of Trump’s tactics, though: Just 28 percent of immigrants approve of officers in masks, and only 16 percent approve of deporting people to countries where they are not from. (The survey was administered by The Times and KFF, a nonprofit organization that conducts polling and research about health policy.)
Staying homeAnother takeaway from the poll is that about a third of immigrant noncitizens say they are avoiding activities that most people don’t think twice about. (For undocumented immigrants, it’s about 59 percent.) They regularly avoid travel. Forty percent say they or someone in their family has stayed away from work. My colleagues Miriam Jordan and Ruth Igielnik spoke to one of them. Ana Luna, 47, has lived with her husband and children in Los Angeles for nearly two decades. She and her husband are undocumented immigrants from Mexico. “With the way things are now,” she told them, “we feel afraid and insecure.”
The couple have five children. For years, Luna drove them to school each morning before commuting to her own job as a janitor. That was then. More recently, agents have shown up at the strip mall where she works and near the school her youngest child attends. One day, a shopkeeper she knows called to tell her to delay her arrival at work so she wouldn’t run into them. “We have been the work force,” she said. “Now we have to run, hide or stay inside.” But not always. Next month, when Luna’s eldest daughter completes her training at Camp Pendleton, south of Los Angeles, she will become a United States Marine. Luna will be there, she told our reporters, no matter how risky it is to be on the road. “I wouldn’t want to miss her graduation,” she said. Her American dream abides. Now, let’s get you caught up.
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