Jennifer Aguilar
speaker
40 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Jennifer Aguilar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I wanted to stop here because I just wanted to stand in front of these beautiful dresses.
Jennifer Aguilar and I are standing in front of a shop that sells quinceañera dresses. Those sparkly ornate gowns girls wear for their coming-of-age parties. We're in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago.
Okay. Yes. You were styling. Jennifer is now executive director of Little Village's Chamber of Commerce. And to be clear, Little Village is not little. The neighborhood's main corridor is about two miles with more than a thousand shops and businesses. After the magnificent mile in downtown Chicago, Little Village generates the most money in the city.
And now I'm standing here with Jennifer just a few days after Trump has been sworn in and after his first flurry of executive orders. There haven't been raids in Little Village yet. But Jennifer says the moment Trump was sworn in, the neighborhood changed.
We'll also look to a recent mass deportation effort and how it gave economists an unusual chance to study what really happens when hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers disappear from the labor market. Little Village is not totally a ghost town. We see a fair number of reporters like us coming and going.
And we felt that on the street. When we stopped people to talk, we heard that people were scared to go into work, that people were keeping their kids home from school. One person who told us she didn't have legal papers was worried about what would happen to her family if she had to go back to Mexico. Her daughters only ever lived in the U.S.
But when we asked all of those people if they'd feel comfortable being recorded, they were like, no, not at all.
Jennifer walks us up in front of what looks like a used clothing store.
There's a sign, plain white paper with handwritten black letters.
And then below that is like a little word of encouragement.
Basically, keep your head up. This too shall pass. Were you expecting a change like this would come? Or has this been a surprise in any way?
As of this recording, five days into the Trump presidency, there have been more than 60 immigration-related executive orders or agency directives. They affect everything from refugee and asylum programs to changing where immigration arrests can occur to challenging the very idea of birthright citizenship. That last one has already been temporarily blocked by a judge.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement says they've been making individual arrests, as they were also doing during the Biden administration. And in terms of the kinds of big surprise raids at businesses or public places, there's reportedly been at least one of those sweeps.
The mayor of Newark, New Jersey, announced this week that agents raided a local establishment and detained undocumented residents as well as U.S. citizens.
What Khloe is waiting to see is what else is happening besides the raids. How the Trump administration plans to systematically deport millions of people as they've promised.
When President Obama left office in 2017, he had been nicknamed the deporter-in-chief. And that is, in part, because of this one particular mass deportation effort.
You can actually find a law enforcement training video from 13 years ago when this program was being expanded.
This video was made for local law enforcement agencies, you know, like police departments. And it was made by the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, because under this new program, those local police departments were suddenly a big part of this national deportation effort, Secure Communities.
So, yeah, the message from DHS to local law enforcement was this doesn't really change anything you do. We'll make it easy.
Now, we don't know if this new Trump administration plans to use this exact program. But Trump did use a version of secure communities during his last term. And, Chloe says, it seems clear he's already approaching immigration and deportation in a similar way, leaning on local law enforcement to be part of the effort and trying to expand the list of crimes that can get someone deported.
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