‘We’ve lived this before’: How activists are working to support Utah immigrants during Trump’s return

The grassroots campaign that Maria Montes and Brianna Puga launched has sometimes put them in Home Depot parking lots across the Salt Lake Valley — talking to undocumented workers at the crack of dawn.

Puga said they would become engrossed in a worker’s life story — until “he books it” to an arriving car on the lot. “Wait!,” Puga said she would yell, but the worker was suddenly busy, trying to land a job.

Quick, cautious introductions often have been how Puga and Montes reach out to Utah’s immigrant community. Other interactions, though, in backyards or home visits — with coffee and a talkative crowd — have drawn people to their cause.

Puga and Monte are known as the “co-leaders, co-founders” of the Salt Lake County Immigrant People’s Agenda, which canvassed for a year before an official launch in November 2023. That’s when 100 people — mobilized by their visits — came together to build “power” to the estimated 300,000 Utahns who were born outside of the United States.

The campaign has built its efforts around four pillars, issues that its members have repeatedly said were important: advocating for day laborers; seeking dignity for new immigrants; offering accessible education on Salt Lake City’s west side; and working for affordable housing and battling gentrification on the west side.

After the election — and the concern that President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportations will harm immigrants — organizers say the campaign’s mantra remains the same: “Solo el pueblo salva el pueblo” — “Only the people save the people.”

Optimism and fear

In the gymnasium of Centro Civico Mexicano, Cris Mora Rubio led the 100 or so people gathered there in a “grito,” or shout: “¡Si se puede!” (“Yes, we can!”)

The sound is loud enough to be heard in the parking lot on a recent October night, during the People’s Agenda’s first assembly.

Though most seemed to feel the optimism of the grito, a few scattered around the gym stayed seated, their arms crossed, their expressions relaying an unspoken question: How is this time different?

Some remember back nearly two decades, when similar rallying cries were heard in downtown Salt Lake City. It was 2006, part of nationwide demonstrations for May Day, and some 20,000 immigrants and allies marched that day through Eagle Gate and up State Street to the Utah Capitol — the state’s largest rally for immigration reform.

Levana Nicolía Ramos was a high school student then. She said she remembers her “whole community” — co-workers, church goers and neighbors — came together to support the cause.

She said she also remembers “the fear people felt.” Eight months after the march to the Capitol, 114 people were arrested on immigration violations in the raids, or “redades,” at the Swift meatpacking plant in Hyrum in December 2006.

Over the years, such raids — along with traffic stops, wage theft, workplace abuse and a lack of basic resources — have made the lives of immigrants dire, campaign organizers said.

Joel — who did not give his last name, he said, because he is undocumented — sat with his arms crossed at another meeting weeks later, listening to campaign members talk about what to do after Trump’s election victory.

Joel has attended the People’s Agenda’s biweekly meetings regularly in the last year, but he rarely engages. With his wife and young child accompanying him, he watches his daughter, an organizer, from a distance.

“Sometimes I participate, other times no,” Joel said in Spanish. “And yet, I feel fear because, first off, I don’t feel secure enough to participate.”

This, Nicolía Ramos said, is how the immigrant community has been “conditioned” to think. For fear of retribution or deportation, she said, immigrants “keep [their] heads down.”

Instead, she said, their activism happens in “quiet ways.”

“There’s a lot of grassroot work within the community,” Nicolía Ramos said. “Conversations that happen around coffee tables where we teach our friends how to navigate. … I like to call it everyday activism.”

Mora Rubio, on the other hand, bares his immigrant status freely. He said he has always seen himself as a high achiever — and that education was his path to “a better life.”

It was later, in his pursuit of higher education, that his status as an undocumented immigrant began to affect those plans.

Rejected from the University of Utah’s nursing program and ineligible for financial aid because of his immigration status, Mora Rubio enrolled in Westminster University — but three semesters in, he was dismissed from the program there because he was undocumented. He said the news was a “gut punch.” He pivoted to public health, and graduated in 2023.

Even with a degree, he said the past year has felt like “limbo.”

“I’m a college-educated person,” said Mora Rubio. “I have a drive to work and better my community, and I’m prevented from it.”

Months after graduation, Mora Rubio found the People’s Agenda campaign. It gave him a “little breath,” he said.

“This is my chance to make an impact with my story and with my community,” Mora Rubio said, “to take a stand and put up a fight.”

Goals to support education

By 6:40 p.m. at another meeting, the rest of the members have broken off into small groups throughout Comunidades Unidas’ meeting rooms and closet-like offices to discuss advancements on the campaign’s four pillars.

Cynthia Ponce-Orellana, who heads the education effort, shared her six-month plan to involve 50 young people into the campaign’s efforts. But as Ponce-Orellana discussed the agenda’s education pillar, one member’s child had other plans — choosing to treat the committee’s planning sheet as a Slip ‘N Slide.

Beyond the six-month plan, Ponce-Orellana said she has a bigger education goal — a high school on the city’s west side. Activists had sought to get a bond measure on the November ballot to fund such a school, but the Salt Lake City School District rejected that request.

“We’ve always had that disadvantage. We have to work harder for what we want,” said Ponce-Orellana, a University of Utah freshman who lives in West Jordan, “especially in education.”

Ponce-Orellana said she has seen it first hand. Her brother, a DACA recipient, “struggled when it came to achieving higher ed.” While Ponce-Orellana doesn’t expect a west side high school to be the only fix — much less be constructed anytime soon — relationship building with students and alumni, she said, will aid their cause.

“Creating relationships,” Ponce-Orellana said to the two other pillar members. “That’s how we’ve been able to build traction within our movement.”

Ideas circulating that night included a resource hotline and campaigns in K-12 schools. These plans, organizers say, will help all communities.

“There’s no separation between old immigrants, newer immigrants and incoming immigrants,” Nicolía Ramos. “This is a country where everybody who is not native is an immigrant.”

Reacting to Trump’s win

At the People’s Agenda’s post-election meeting at Comunidades Unidas, the optimistic gritos of two weeks earlier were gone. Instead, organizers expressed their concerns about the incoming Trump presidency.

“I saw the fear that these kids carry,” said one, who works with migrant youth in Ogden. “They can’t focus.”

One woman mentioned another fear: The potential end of birthright citizenship, which has been considered to be part of the U.S. Constitution since the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.

When it’s Montes turn to speak, she gives those gathered a wake-up call.

“Ya hemos vivido esto,” Montes said in Spanish. Translated, it means: “We’ve lived this before.”

Montes said the lack of solace from elected officials for the campaign’s tenets — even if dissimilar to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric — is a “frustration” organizers have dealt with for “years.”

“We’ve come to recognize that, unfortunately, they’re not on the same page about the issues that we care about,” said Montes, who also works as Comunidades Unidas’ director of power building.

Since November, the campaign has sent pleas to Utah’s leaders — in the Legislature, and at the county and city levels — to attend a meeting or arrange time with the campaign’s organizers. So far, they said, they have met with 10 leaders, including Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall.

But, Montes said, the campaign isn’t waiting for official recognition. “The reason why we decided to launch this whole campaign,” Montes said, “is because we recognized that it was in our best interest to take back power for ourselves, instead of leaving it up to public officials.”

Their grassroot success, Montes said, has rather come from organizers pushing their “gente” — the people.

“This is an opportunity for us to recommit to each other,” Montes said. “It’s a moment for us to lean back into each other — look [out] for each other when it comes to creating the conditions for us to feel safe.”