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President Donald Trump has renewed his threat that raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, officers could start following the Fourth of July. Those threats have impacted Indiana businesses.
Last month President Trump tweeted ICE raids would take place across the country due to what he sees as a lack of action to close immigration loopholes.
Jordan Rodriguez runs the Indianapolis Mayor’s Office of International and Latino Affairs. He says he’s hearing from Indianapolis business owners about it.
“What we’re seeing a lot, I’ve had a bunch of people tell me like, ‘Hey, like half of my workers didn’t show up today. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to run this restaurant, I don’t know how to finish this project that we’re building,’” says Rodriguez.
He says the city earlier saw a spate of children absent from school shortly after Trump took office, due to similar fears. According to the National Immigration Forum, Indiana is home to about 92,000 undocumented immigrants.
Rodriguez says the Trump administration’s rhetoric is scaring some into staying home and not going out and spending money.
“I think there’s a lot of fear that’s causing a lot of limitations and a lot of like purchasing power, right, to be kinda squashed, right,” he says. “So it’s having a huge effect on how the community kind of process through their own, like I just mentioned, the change that we’re seeing.”
Though the president has tweeted that he might authorize such raids, no specific timetable or details have been released.
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