Going back home? As Trump returns, families prepare for mass deportations

Miami: Parents around Nora Sanidgo’s large, rectangular dining table had lunch before signing documents to make the Nicaraguan immigrant a legal guardian of their children, entrusting them to her if they are deported. She gave a list of what to carry with them: birth certificates, medical and school records, immigration documents, her phone number.

“Talk to your children and tell them what can happen, let them have my phone number on hand, let them learn it, let them record it,” Sandigo said Sunday. For the group at Sandigo’s southwest Miami home and for millions in the United States illegally or with temporary legal status, the start of Donald Trump’s second term as president on Monday comes with a feeling that their time in the U.S. may end soon. Trump made mass deportations a signature issue of his campaign and has promised a raft of first-day orders to remake immigration policy.

“You don’t have to be afraid, you have to be prepared,” Sandigo told the group of about 20 people, including small children, who watched a demonstration of how to respond if immigration officers knock on their door. “Take precautions wherever you are.”

Sandigo, who came to the US in 1988, has volunteered to be guardian for more than 2,000 children in 15 years, including at least 30 since December. A notary was on hand Sunday.

Erlinda, a single mother from El Salvador who arrived in 2013, signed legal rights to her US-born children, ages 10 and 8. She said she applied for asylum but doesn’t know the status of her case.

“I am afraid for my children, that they will live the terror of not seeing their mother for a day, for a month, for a year,” said Erlinda, 45, who asked to be identified by first name only due to fears of being detained.

Plans for deportation arrests appeared to be in flux after news leaked of an operation in

Chicago this week.