During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised drastic changes in immigration policy, particularly mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. But a month into his term, local experts say it’s hard to judge if Trump is actually sticking to his promise.

“Right now, at least here in Massachusetts, we are not seeing arrests of people who don’t have criminal backgrounds at a large scale. But that doesn’t mean that we won’t,” Marcela García, opinion columnist and associate editor at the Boston Globe, said on GBH’s Under the Radar. “At the same time, I feel like ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and the federal government want to make it seem like they are arresting all these people. They want to create an atmosphere of fear just to make it seem like they are keeping the promise that Trump made in the campaign to make immigrants fearful, frankly. And so we’re not seeing these large-scale arrests and deportations. But again, it’s just a month. We’ve been at this for a month.”

Both García and Javier Marin, founder and executive chairman of El Planeta, said recent news about nonviolent undocumented immigrants being sent to Guantanamo Bay is an especially troubling development.

“The ACLU has already sued the government so that at least the immigrants there have access to legal counsel because as you can imagine, they’re pretty isolated,” García said.

“If the truth is that they’re sending regular people, that’s definitely a big mistake,” Marin adds.

Marin said an additional issue is rampant misinformation regarding arrests, deportations and ICE raids, both locally and nationally.

“The dissemination of information from this administration has been aggressively targeting a psychologic effect. And this is definitely information that shocks everybody. But again, we need to really get the right information,” Marin said. “I see this as an opportunity for us news media to prove to our readers that they have to wait until we get the facts and the real information. We’re talking to authorities. We’re talking to senior leaders. We’re talking to families to really get the facts and get the numbers.”

All that and more on this week’s Latinx news roundtable.

Guests

Stories discussed in this week’s roundtable