Donald Trump’s deportation plan would destroy families like mine

In 2022, I met my future wife on a Christian dating site. I was immediately attracted to her beautiful smile, but over our first hours-long phone call, I fell in love with her deep faith and her commitment to her family. I was an Uber Eats driver at the time, working my way through Penn State Law, and this incredible woman would keep me company riding along on my deliveries. She was clearly the one; six months after meeting, I asked her family for their blessing to marry her.

Eventually, I graduated from law school and passed the bar exam. Today, I’m an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia. My wife and I now have a 1-year-old baby boy. He’s pure magic. I love seeing him laugh and smile or toddle around with a soccer ball at the park. I try hard to be the kind of father for him that I never had.

But as the election approaches, my wife and I feel increasing terror whenever we hear about plans to round up and deport millions of immigrants. This would destroy families like mine.

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When I was a young child, I fled civil war in Sierra Leone. After living several years in a refugee camp called Kouankan in Guinea, I crossed the Mexico-Texas border without papers in 2003 with a group of strangers. I was 7 years old. After crossing the border, I settled in Maryland with my mother. In 2020, I applied to law school and received a full merit scholarship to Penn State Law.

Although my life changed when I met my wife, who was born in New York, my immigration status did not. This is an aspect of the immigration system most people don’t know about. If an undocumented person marries a U.S. citizen, the law requires that they must leave the country in order to adjust their status. However, if anything goes wrong with their case (I’ve heard too many horror stories of bureaucratic errors), they could be barred from reentering the country for 10 years. That’s a risk most people with established lives, families, and careers here are unwilling to take.

I am able to work legally because of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has provided work visas for immigrants who came here often decades ago and grew up in our communities and school systems. However, DACA is being challenged in the courts. Without it, I am completely vulnerable. Even with DACA, it’s unclear if I’d be protected if deportations begin.

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I shudder to think about what mass deportations would look like for immigrants like myself — and how it would devastate Americans like my wife and son. My wife trained to be a medical assistant, but right now she takes care of our son and her elderly mother, who is in poor health.

My salary makes this possible. Without me, my family’s thriving middle-class life would literally vanish overnight. Our two-parent household would be reduced to that of a single mom trying to make ends meet. Both my son and mother-in-law would be without a caregiver.

Ours isn’t the only family that would be affected. About 5.1 million American children live with an undocumented family member, according to a new report by the American Immigration Council. If such deportation plans were implemented on a wide scale, millions of kids might have to watch their parents get arrested and taken away. We’re talking about imposing life-altering trauma on an entire generation of innocent children.

It’s easy to think mass deportation wouldn’t impact your neighborhood or your community. But it’s impossible to tell who is undocumented. Immigrants who live here without papers are essential members of the workforce — filling roles in childcare, health care, agriculture, and even law. Removing undocumented immigrants would lower our national GDP by up to 6.8%. For example, the country would lose the 22% of my wages that I pay in annual taxes, including property taxes.

I want people to understand that all this deportation talk is extremely painful. It hurts to talk about and is even worse to imagine. Mass deportation is not good for our communities, our economy, or real, hardworking families like mine.

Foday Turay is an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia and a member of the nonprofit American Families United.