The relatively quiet churn of an office printer, under a gentle but persistent hubbub of chatter, is the sound of one Oklahoma community preparing for the worst.
In the days following the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, hundreds of members of south Oklahoma City's predominantly Latino immigrant community attended a legal clinic hosted by the Oklahoma Latino Legislative Caucus and other community groups.
They were there to plan for their eventual detainment and removal from the United States as Trump's mass deportation policies are rolled out across the country.
Sen. Michael Brooks leads the Latino caucus and is an immigration attorney based in south Oklahoma City.
“So, we've got 25 stations here with volunteers, mostly college and law students,” Brooks said.He stretched his arm out gesturing to to the packed event center.
In the back corner, children pushed tiny carts, smashed various toys together, stacked blocks, or sat and watched cartoons turned low. A taped-out square on the ground, of about 20 feet on each side, marked where they waited for their parents to finish deciding who would take them if the family was separated.
”What we're doing is we're preparing powers of attorney and standby guardianship for probably about 350 people today.” Brooks said.
And that’s not including walk-ins, Brooks said.
From stressed to desperate
Elena Rios, 40, is a local public school janitor, a single mother of five, and was one of the people at the clinic looking for help.
She migrated to the U.S. from Mexico and has been in the country without federal permission for about 6 years. She agreed to tell her story if KOSU didn’t use her full name. The interview was conducted in Spanish.
”More than anything, we faced uncertainty,” she said. “I lost my husband to violence. So, I had a chance to cross the border and I took it. I came here with goals of better schools, better things, a house, lots of animals — for my kids.”
She says news of Trump's mass deportation policies, coupled with Oklahoma's politicians' gung-ho approach to facilitating those policies close to home, has stirred panic in her and many other immigrant Oklahomans.
”There's just so much going on,” Rios said. “First, you get stressed out and then you start to become desperate.”
She stopped to collect her breadth, looking at her daughter, who was accompanying her. Rios couldn’t hold back her tears, but her voice remained composed.
With a nod of support from her daughter, who asked not to be identified in the story, Rios shifted her focus to recent attacks against immigrants in schools.
”You come here from your country, for something better for your children, only to find yourself stumped again like this,” she said.
Days before the legal clinic, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters told Tulsa’s KTUL News that he welcomed immigration enforcement ‘raids’ in Oklahoma Schools.
“If that's what if President Trump sees fit,” Walters said. “If there's an illegal immigrant population there that needs to have enforcement remove them from the schools? Absolutely. We will work with them to make sure that he's able to carry that out.”
As Walters counts immigrants in schools, Stitt rolls out Operation Guardian and lawmakers make Oklahomans pay for mass deportations
The following week, the State Board of Education, led by Walters, approved new administrative rules seemingly requiring schools to verify the citizenship of parents and students during enrollment and report a tally to the state counting those who provided proof and who didn’t.
The rule doesn’t require the collection of any identifying information, nor does it prohibit any students from enrolling in schools. And Walters has repeatedly said his intent with the new rules is only to count people and determine the ‘burden’ of illegal immigration on Oklahoma’s education system.
“What we are doing is ensuring that we have the documentation around the child to understand if they are a legal citizen for the purposes of resources and personnel alignment,” Walters said during the last state board of education meeting.
What’s less clear is what happens when all unauthorized immigrants are accounted for and their actual economic impact on Oklahoma’s public school system is known. Walters has provided sparse details about his planned ‘resource and personnel alignment.’
The superintendent has sued the federal government for $474 million in accrued expenses while serving unauthorized migrants but didn’t include an accounting of how he arrived at that number in the filings.
The administrative rules now must survive the scrutiny of the legislature and the Gov. Kevin Stitt.
Meanwhile, official plans for Operation Guardian, Stitt’s sweeping immigration enforcement agenda, were made public last week. The state public safety commissioner, Tim Tipton, is spearheading that front, which is focused on targeted efforts against criminals with state charges who also happen to be in the country without federal permission.
Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who’s running for Governor in 2026, has also vowed to arrest and deport immigrants in the country unlawfully, starting with those involved in crime syndacites and drug and human trafficking.
And Oklahoma lawmakers have filed bills to prop up a legal and monetary infrastructure to carry out a Trump immigration agenda.
House Bill 1932 by Goldsby Republican Jonathan Wilk, is formally titled the ‘Donald J. Trump Mass Deportation Revolving Fund.” It makes Oklahomans pay for state-level immigration enforcement by injecting tax dollars into a growing pool of money.
Worry persists amid dwindling options and spreading misinformation
Rios says she is overwhelmed by the uncertainty entering her life. It’s what she meant to leave behind in Mexico.
About 90 volunteer law students, notaries and others stepped up to help Rios and people like her.
The soon-to-be lawyers had their heads buried in documents or laptop screens. The families they helped sitting across from them. The notaries ran back and forth from the printer to one of the desks, stamping legal documents. Others ushered people in, provided snacks and otherwise made people comfortable.
Among the volunteers was Oklahoma City University law student Rafael Dueñas. He walked people through getting power of attorney and standby guardianships.
For many, like Rios, that means arranging to give her children away to people who, she said, are essentially strangers.
She said she’s aware that it’s all just a precaution in case she is detained and deported. At least until she can have them sent to meet her.
It may never happen, she said, but the fear doesn’t go away.
Dueñas said the documents don’t only apply to deportation, though that is the top concern.
”It applies to the arrest or detention of a parent,” he said. “It does also apply to the physical or mental capacity of a parent. Just anything that hinders a parent from fulfilling their parental obligations and their duties to their children.”
Some at the clinic made similar arrangements for businesses and other assets.
Senator Brooks said then any federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, operations he’d been able to confirm in Oklahoma City were mostly targeted arrests of criminals. He said there is a possibility of collateral detainment, however, when such arrests take place.
A week later, though, Brooks posted to the Latino caucus Facebook page detailing an instance in which ICE arrived at a woman’s home and knocked. Brooks said the woman called him and asked him for guidance.
He said a surge of misinformation about ICE raids within community channels makes people even more worried. Some of it is true, Brooks said, some only partially and some more still is false.
Brooks said that immigrant community members must analyze information on social media before reposting it. If they can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not, they should visit the Latino Caucus on Facebook and ask for help.
Rios said she doesn't really feel safer thanks to the legal help and information support, but preparing for the worst is the only clear thing to do.
“Because I still have to go to work every day, but you never know if or when it’ll be your turn,” she said. “Same for my kids. You start to live with nerves, with a certain restlessness, worrying what will happen.”
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