After months of divisive rhetoric on the campaign trail, including vows to crack down on border control and aggressively ramp up deportations, tensions surrounding immigration in southwestern Pennsylvania have skyrocketed in the days since President-elect Donald Trump's win.

Amid claims from Trump that he will carry out "the largest deportation operation in American history," local refugee and immigration groups said they have been inundated with calls from people concerned about what a future in this country will look like during a second Trump administration.

"Some may say, 'you're overreacting; it won't be that bad.' But in this sector, we know that even day one can bring massive shifts — the refugee pipeline is likely to dry up overnight," Sloan Davidson, CEO of Pittsburgh-based refugee resettlement nonprofit Hello Neighbor, wrote in a post-election message to supporters.

The region has seen increasing arrivals of immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees in the years leading up to the 2024 election, which is expected to continue at least until Trump takes office on Jan. 20, Davidson told the Post-Gazette.

Hello Neighbor has helped resettle 752 refugees since receiving federal, state, and local approval to do so three years ago — including 400 over the past federal fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, Davidson said.

She expects the organization's plans to continue ramping up resettlement efforts to change if Trump lowers the ceiling on refugee admissions, as he did during his first term.

The president sets the limit for the number of refugees the country can accept each year through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. Under Trump, that number fell from an 85,000-refugee cap in 2016 to a ceiling of 18,000 in 2020 — the lowest number since the program was created in 1980. By comparison, President Joe Biden approved a ceiling of 125,000 refugees this fiscal year.

"There is no world in which I'll be resettling 400 people this fiscal year because the program will be slashed," Davidson said. "If we don't welcome those folks before (Trump's inauguration), there's a chance that they will never have the opportunity again, or that they will languish in a refugee camp or a pretty terrible situation.

"So we feel a moral obligation, but it's a real crunch for the team and for our community to ramp up the arrivals we expect to see this quarter."

Dana Gold, chief operating officer of Jewish Family and Community Services in Pittsburgh, said there is a palpable fear of the unknown as Trump is poised to take office.

"There's fear in individuals concerned about their own safety," Gold said. "There's fear about what others may feel free to do or say in this very different environment. There's fear the laws will change. There's a lot of uncertainty."

The JFCS offers refugee and immigrant services to approximately 2,000 people each year. Recently, a large portion of the immigrants JFCS has served have come from Uzbekistan — either as asylum seekers or through the Diversity Immigrant Visa program, also known as the Green Card Lottery.

The organization has also offered aid to arrivals from Spanish-speaking countries, as well as Afghanistan, Ukraine and Syria.

She said JFCS workers have been meeting with similar groups to share information and prepare for any changes that may come.

"It's impossible to know, but when someone says they're going to make changes, you have to believe them, then wait and see," she said.

Gold said JCFS has also been working for the past few years with a growing Haitian community in Charleroi, which was thrust into the national spotlight in September after Trump claimed the immigrant population had "virtually bankrupt" the small borough on the banks of the Monongahela River.

The comments came after he also claimed Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — spurring even more tension between residents in Charleroi that have yet to dissipate.

"They come from a country where you really can't trust the system that they live in," she said. "Their government has been challenged by a lot of problems, so they come from somewhere where trusting is a difficult thing, so this shakes them as well."

Patrick Joseph Murphy, an immigration attorney who has been working on cases in Charleroi, said he's received increasing calls from clients since the election.

"It ranges from not interested, that's a small percentage, to the bigger percentage, which is concerned, obviously," he said. "About 20% of these people are being put on tilt and they call me every couple minutes ... the fear of the unknown is a much bigger fear than the fear you know once there is a new (immigration) rule."

'It's going to get tough'

In his first term, changes Trump made included slowing the process to obtain work permits, automatically rejecting asylum or immigration documents for anyone who left a blank space on the form, and reversing the order in which immigration cases were called, Murphy said.

To be granted asylum in the U.S., a person must first meet the definition of a refugee as established in the Immigration and Naturalization Act. This means they must demonstrate before a judge that they fear returning to the country they left because of persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or their inclusion in a particular social group.

"You can play havoc with people by reversing the order in which cases are called," he said. "So people who filed asylum last week are being called down for an interview. They haven't had time to fully develop testimony. Normally, you have years to think about what your claim might be."

When Biden took office in 2021, his administration ended the "blank spaces" rule that was put in place by Trump during his first term. But Murphy said he anticipates new efforts to complicate the process are on the horizon.

"It's going to get tough," he said. "I don't know exactly how ... but there's some pretty strong talk coming from (Trump)."

He said he has told his clients the people likely to be the first impacted by any changes are those who already have deportation orders including, for example, someone who was convicted of a crime while here.

"I tell them, this is not my first rodeo with (Trump)," he said. "Last time around, he seemed more interested in stopping people from coming in than throwing people out."

But Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have the ability to carry out raids and take people into detention regardless of their status, said Julio Rodriguez, political director at the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition, which has 60 members statewide across 27 counties.

Those actions have the potential to impact up to half of the nearly 1 million foreign-born individuals statewide who are in various stages of the green card or asylum process, he said.

"I think a very nuanced thing that people don't realize is that anyone who is not a citizen can be deported," Rodriguez said. "A large majority of immigrants have a green card and are eligible to naturalize and eventually become citizens, but because they aren't citizens yet, they could technically be removed as well ... this could affect the state very overwhelmingly."

Rodriguez said people who have been denied asylum could also be detained and deported before they are able to appeal their cases.

"We touched base with a majority of (our members) ... and they've been getting inundated with phone calls from clients and community members," Rodriguez said.

"Questions like should they leave the state or should they continue to do things like they normally do ... we've been trying to be as supportive as possible with the reality that we just don't know the scope of what will happen."

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