Advocacy Organizations Brace for Second Trump Administration

Following the election of Donald Trump to the presidency for the first time in November 2016, Queen City Nerve editor-in-chief Ryan Pitkin, at the time a reporter for Creative Loafing, spoke with a number of local organizations serving vulnerable populations that found themselves the target of Trump’s most incendiary rhetoric.

The weeks leading up to Trump’s first term in office were marked by fear of the unknown — fear that proved justified in 2017 as increased ICE raids split families apart and kept the immigrant community on edge while the Trump administration rolled back Obama-era non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people.

The unknown now known, the sentiments and issues discussed in Pitkin’s 2016 story are back front of mind for those with the most to lose during a second Trump administration.

As Trump promises mass deportations and even stricter immigration policies during his upcoming term, which begins on Jan. 20, with a Project 2025 transition plan that proposes all new threats to LGBTQ+ rights, we spoke once again with leaders at local advocacy organizations Time Out Youth and Carolina Migrant Network (CMN) as they prepare for President Trump 2.0.

Protecting young folks at Time Out Youth

The team at Time Out Youth (TOY), a Charlotte-based organization that provides resources and support to LGBTQ+ people aged 13-24, took a half-day on Nov. 6, the day after Trump was elected to a second term, to come together and discuss their fears.

The TOY staff comprises mostly women and people of color, making them multiply impacted by the feared outcomes of a second Trump administration. Their main concern, however, lay with the youth they work with every day — specifically the transgender youth, a group that has become a favorite target of Trump and his followers.

The TOY team questioned what it will mean to be trans under this administration. If someone hasn’t had their name legally changed, will they be able to? Will those on hormones be forced off of them? Will those who have yet to receive hormones ever be able to get them?

One question stuck with TOY’s Chief Executive Officer Sarah Mikhail. A young person asked her, “Will it be illegal to be trans?”

It was a fair question. The Trans Legislation Tracker reported 669 anti-trans bills introduced across the nation in 2024 that would affect trans people’s access to health care, education, sports, public bathrooms and their legal recognition.

Mikhail said she has two main concerns with Trump taking office again. First, there’s the effects on the courts, with more federal judges appointed by Trump sending more cases to the Supreme Court, already stacked by Trump during his first term, setting new precedents that take more rights away from trans and queer people.

Her second concern is with the uptick in hateful rhetoric that comes from Trump’s supporters once he takes office, emboldened by his electoral victory and convinced that their exclusionary ideology has been vindicated. While most adults remember what it was like to live under Trump’s first administration, a majority of the children that TOY serves were too young to recall the experience.

For Mikhail and her team, the threat is all too real. They are hyper-focused on protecting the youth they serve based on their knowledge of what Trump and his followers are capable of. However, in her 20 years of working with young people, Mikhail has learned that you can’t say you know something for sure if you don’t.

“As we prepared to talk to our youth, we wanted to be able to give them any certainty or assurance we had, but not make promises,” Mikhail said.

As reported by the Brookings Institution in 2019, FBI data showed that Trump’s election brought an anomalous spike in hate crimes concentrated in counties where Trump won by larger margins. It was the second-largest uptick in hate crimes in the 25 years for which data are available, second only to the spike after Sept. 11, 2001.

Though hate crimes are typically most frequent in the summer, in 2016 they peaked during election season with the new, higher rate of hate crimes continuing through 2017.

Mikhail spoke on the deeply human, emotional impact it has on a community of young people to be hyperaware that a certain segment of the government, especially a ruling party, hates their existence. It’s a topic that comes up often during counseling sessions at TOY’s community center on Monroe Road.

The fear is valid, as nearly one in five hate crimes recorded since 2020 have targeted people for their sexual orientation or gender identity, according to the FBI. Anti-transgender incidents alone increased by 40% from 2021 to 2022.

Mikhail said many of the youth her team works with are also concerned with how divestments in federal funding will affect access to gender-affirming care through Medicaid and if current protective legislation will be taken away.

Though it restricted access for people under 18 from receiving hormones or puberty blockers, NC House Bill 808 did ensure that those already accessing hormones or puberty blockers wouldn’t have them taken away.

Mikhail reminds young people that we have a Democratic governor in North Carolina that openly supports and protects LGBTQ+ rights. November’s election did away with the Republican Party’s supermajority, and Mikhail feels confident that any queer protections left up to the state will stay safe.

Mikhail also said TOY relies on a diverse stream of grants and philanthropy and will remain operational even if all federal funding is stripped.

In the meantime, the organization will continue to offer numerous programs and services to queer youth, including virtual name change clinics, resource days featuring hormones and blockers, hosting sexual health discussions and more.

Carolina Migrant Network wants you to know your rights

“The presidential election results reopened a deep scar many of us had yet to fully heal from,” read an email from Stephanía Arteaga, co-founder of Carolina Migrant Network (CMN), to supporters and clients on Nov. 7.

Speaking in the lead-up to Inauguration Day, Arteaga emphasized to Queen City Nerve that many people including herself still have a lot of trauma associated with the first Trump administration.

“There’s a lot of fear, there’s a lot of concern on what’s to come after January 20,” Arteaga said. “And one of the things that we’ve been trying to ground folks on is that, to a degree, we already know what’s going to happen.”

Carolina Migrant Network offers pro-bono legal representation for people targeted by the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration (DHS). They plan to learn from the lessons of the first Trump administration and shape their plan accordingly for the second time around.

Under Trump 1.0, residents in east Charlotte saw more ICE activity, as that area is historically one of the larger immigrant hubs in the city, Arteaga said. Agents from the Charlotte ICE office would park outside neighborhoods, apartment complexes and trailer parks in the area beginning early in the morning simply to intimidate community members.

According to Arteaga, agents would detain individuals seemingly at random, oftentimes settling for “collateral,” or people who happened to be there at the wrong time and were not targets for deportation.

Episode 4 of Netflix’s six-part immigration enforcement documentary series Immigration Nation, which highlights the work of Arteaga and others around the country during the first Trump administration, depicted this intimidation tactic in play, showing officers hiding behind the CVS on Central Avenue and agents pulling over unmarked vehicles filled with work crews.

In December, following Trump’s second election victory, CMN held a Know Your Rights clinic, for which 130 people showed up to prepare for similar situations in the years to come.

“We just want to make sure that people are informed, while also ensuring that we can train people to also create networks of defense in their neighborhoods, where they can be in communication with their neighbors around what type of activity that they’re seeing,” Arteaga said.

It’s not just undocumented people who have to be concerned with the effects of Trump’s second administration. As is the case with staff at Time Out Youth, Arteaga and her team know that Trump’s influence over like-minded folks also emboldens them, giving them the green light to behave in intolerable ways.

In fact, Arteaga has already seen how this plays out, as people have questioned her own sibling’s immigration status solely based on the color of his skin.

Trump’s election has left immigrants — those already in the US and those outside our borders — doubting their decision to move to or stay in the country after Jan. 20. Arteaga knows folks who are considering a move to Canada rather than face the uncertainty of the next four years.

Some people may not be leaving on their own terms, however. Trump has touted his strict immigration enforcement policies since his re-election campaign began, promising to carry out the “largest deportation effort in American history.”

Learn more: Nooze Hounds: Carolina Migrant Network Reshapes the Narrative (2021)

CMN has had countless conversations with community members who are trying to get their affairs in order in case of deportation. For example, some are enlisting the help of her organization to establish power of attorney so that, should they be detained, their US citizen children would go to a trusted individual instead of Child Protective Services.

Stephen Miller, a leading player in family separation efforts as Trump’s senior advisor in his first term, will now take the role of White House deputy chief of policy during the upcoming administration while also working as the president’s homeland security advisor.

The position will grant Miller, someone who has long pushed the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory, the power to write and enact Trump’s immigration agenda.

“You can have your country back, you can have your future back, you can have your state back,” Miller said during a Trump rally in Salem, Virginia, as reported by NPR. “You can look your children in the eye and say, ‘We did it, we saved America, we saved this republic. We didn’t let it get stolen from us.’”

The aftermath of Trump’s immigration agenda is not only completely void of any sense of humanity, Arteaga said, it’s also economically implausible.

In 2019, the New American Economy and the American Immigration Council reported 274,200 immigrant residents in the Charlotte metro area, with 83.4% of foreign-born workers considered to be working age. One of the top industries with the highest share of foreign-born workers is construction.

CMN reported that unauthorized immigrant workers make up nearly 65% of North Carolina farmworkers. Agricultural loss data taken from Georgia, a comparable agriculturally intensive state with a similar share of unauthorized immigrant workers, showed that NC could lose up to $140 million in agricultural losses without immigrant workers.

The city of Charlotte owes its ability to develop and grow the local economy to immigrant workers, Arteaga emphasized.

“We can’t ignore that in certain industries, immigrant labor is needed,” Arteaga said.

The threat of mass deportation and restricting immigration for both lawful and unlawful immigrants will negatively impact North Carolina’s economy, stripping the Charlotte area of $2.7 billion in taxes paid by immigrants and $7.4 billion in immigrants spending power that supports local businesses, according to the New American Economy.

The next four years will be emotionally and financially taxing, but Time Out Youth, Carolina Migrant Network and countless other Charlotte-based organizations will continue to work and remind folks that they still have autonomy.

“We’ve been around for … almost 35 [years], [through] different administrations, so we’re just reminding our young people that we’re here, we’re not going anywhere,” Mikhail said. “We’ll tell you what we do know, and we will be with you as we fight for the things we don’t know that are coming down the pipeline.”

Arteaga pointed out that the fear of deportation and family separation never went away, and while that risk may be increasing in the coming years, she and her team will continue to do the work they’ve always done to protect the rights of our city’s most vulnerable.

“The more folks are aware of what their rights are and the tactics that ICE has used in the past,” she said, “the more we can have an organized network of community members ready to fight back.”

Carolina Migrant Network will hold another Know Your Rights clinic at St. John’s Baptist Church from 4:30-6:30 p.m. on Jan. 11.