Under Trump’s administration, undocumented immigrants in the United States are on the alert, afraid of being arrested and deported to their home countries.

According to Vox, President Trump plans to deport 3 million immigrants. To that effect, raids, arrests and deportation are being put into action throughout the United States. ICE (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has been conducted raids and rounded 678 people last week in 12 states, and 26% of those arrested were non-convicted criminals, USA Today.

The 287(g) program is being implemented by the Department of Homeland Security that authorizes the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to train local police officers and sheriffs deputies to locate and catch undocumented immigrants living in their communities. Also, the new administration is planning to use the military to deport as many immigrants as possible.

President Trump is too bold with his immigration plan, but he is doing nothing to immigrants that Obama did not do. According to ABC news, between 2009 and 2015, Obama administration has removed more than 2.5 million people through immigration orders, which doesn’t include the number of people who "self-deported" or were turned away and/or returned to their home countries at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The increase in the Immigration enforcement is the result of Trump’s fulfillment of a campaign pledge. He always claims that he would target convicted criminals, gang members, those who pose a threat to national security. However, people should not let this administration fool them. Its goal is to rid the United States of most immigrants. Why should there be a travel ban on legal immigrants? Why are green card holders being harshly interrogated upon their arrival at major U.S. airports? It’s panicking.

The complexity of the immigration problem in the United States has prompted an influx of immigrants to seek a safe haven in Canada. Also, those without legal status and with Temporary Protected Status, known as TPS, are marrying their U.S. citizen partners both for love and convenience.

I was once an undocumented immigrant myself. I first visited the United States with a tourist visa in 1979. Then, I went back to Haiti after spending a two-week stay in Florida and Georgia. About a year later, I came back to Florida, and I stayed ever since. Back in 1980, Cuban-Haitian entrance status, the necessary form of legality that I had, was like a green card and it could easily be obtained at the U.S Immigration upon request. It was a document that allowed immigrants to stay and work in the country, but without permission to travel abroad.

In retrospect, I feel every immigrant's pain, and I empathize so much with them that I wrote about a year ago this article: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/should-millions-of-undocumented-immigrants-be-allowed-to-live-in-the-united-states. It is the article that has the highest readership on my dashboard, a total of 400. It is followed by"When war is justified" with 333 readers and by "Public education for children of undocumented immigrants" with 275 readers. The interests the readers have demonstrated in the article entice me to complement it with this one.

On the other hand, how about the fate of millions of undocumented immigrants who are currently living in the United States? Legalizing all of them should be a part of any measures taken to solve the immigration crisis. However, harassing them with raids and arrests would alienate them into hiding.

Then, chaos in low-paying jobs and menial labor would ensue. For no born Americans or legal immigrants would fill the vacuum left by the unskilled immigrants in factories, industries and in agricultural fields. God forbid the government succeeds in deporting all of them; then, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) would backpedal, and the engine of the U.S. economy would slow down to an unimaginable speed.

The immigrants' issue is a tough pill for Trump's administration to swallow; however, it does more good to swallow it as it is to solve the immigration crisis than to exacerbate it by resorting to the use of forced deportations and nationalistic ideology.

The plight of millions of undocumented immigrants cannot be swept under the rug. In all fairness, any solution to the immigration situation should include securing the borders, deporting criminal immigrants and legalizing all the hard-working men and women. It's long overdue. Their eventual amnesty would be as beneficial to them as it would be to the United States of America. “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists,” Franklin D. Roosevelt.