As immigration scholars, we’ve long studied the policies and politics that shape how people cross borders, build communities and seek opportunity. We’ve interviewed families, analyzed survey data, collaborated with immigrant organizations, informed local governments and documented the complex ways in which immigration law shapes everyday life.

But recently, our inboxes have fewer queries for dispassionate data and more desperate questions about travel, safety and rights.

International students are asking us whether they should leave the country this summer to visit their families or to conduct research. After all, graduate students and researchers on student visas have seen their legal status revoked without explanation or due process, sometimes based on their political activity, social media posts or even old parking tickets. The State Department calls this policy “catch and revoke” — but let’s name it for what it is: a tool of political intimidation and ideological surveillance.

And it’s not just students and scholars. Across Southern California, undocumented residents, legal permanent residents and their mixed-status family members are finding their lives torn apart by fear and uncertainty.

There are nearly a million undocumented immigrants living in Los Angeles County, and more than 200,000 in next-door Orange County. They are not newcomers: In Los Angeles, according to our most recent estimates at the USC Equity Research Institute, more than 70% have been in the U.S. for at least a decade. And these Californians who may have crossed the border without authorization or overstayed a visa are outnumbered by their immediate family members who are American citizens and lawful permanent residents.

These immigrants are not on the margins of society. They are our society. They are our neighbors, co-workers, community leaders and family members. They are raising their children in our school districts, running needed small businesses and helping to rebuild our region after fires ravaged our communities.

Now they are being detained or deported. Or they’re simply slipping into the shadows, afraid to drive, afraid to go to work, afraid to drop their kids off at school. It is happening in Highland Park. In Lynwood. In Fullerton, where the daughter of one of us worries every morning what will happen to her friends and their families.

She seems to know what others need to recognize: The lives and fate of these mixed-status families are bound to ours by daily interactions and by the broader reality of what is at stake.

For this moment is a moral crisis — and a democratic one. Immigration enforcement has become the front line for testing how far our government can go in punishing, surveilling and silencing people. The federal government is amalgamating a multitude of big data sources from individual agencies, including the U.S. Postal Service, Social Security, the IRS and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, to target adults and children of various legal statuses.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is also quietly building the infrastructure for mass detentions by resuscitating agreements with local police and state agencies across the nation to help in finding and removing immigrants.

Legal permanent residents and citizens are being swept up as well. Just last week, ICE deported three U.S. citizen children— one of whom has a rare Stage 4 cancer — with their mothers. In another case, 20 armed ICE agents raided the home of a mother and her three daughters in Oklahoma City — all U.S. citizens — making them stand outside in the rain in their undergarments while ICE confiscated their electronics and life savings.

The mechanisms being used against immigrants — unprecedented levels of private data sharing across federal agencies, the building of a detention army, secretive visa revocations and the illegal detention of citizens— are the same ones that could be used to suppress dissent, limit freedoms and punish anyone who challenges government power. Watching the widely seen video of unidentified, masked operatives seizing Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk as she walks down a Massachusetts street puts us all on notice: Immigration enforcement is where authoritarian tactics are being sharpened and tested.

That’s why we are bolstered by the momentum of a movement built on solidarity, resistance and collective care. All over Southern California, we are seeing people rise up in defense of the immigrant community — not just in protests, but in practical, collective ways that make a difference in immigrants’ daily lives. School districts are adopting sanctuary policies. Principals are refusing to let ICE onto campuses. Mutual aid networks are offering legal support, emergency funds and community defense. Immigrant rights organizations are drawing huge crowds for “Know Your Rights” workshops. And neighbors are watching out for each other.

This is what democracy looks like: people refusing to abandon each other.

Our public institutions — from city councils to school boards to universities — need to help. That means checking records and attendance daily to protect international students from wrongful deportation. It means legal support, public education, protective policies at the local and state level that shore up immigrant safety, and rapid response protocols when ICE is active in a neighborhood or region. It means treating people of all statuses as what they are: vital members of our communities.

Research can play a role. When misinformation spreads rapidly, carefully collected data allow us to challenge those who associate immigrants with crime, to track the erosion of civil liberties, to measure the human impact of enforcement. At a time when power is being wielded to punish, exclude and erode freedoms, research can help us hold institutions accountable, advocate for humane policy and affirm the dignity of those most under threat.

But in this moment, the language of data and scholarly neutrality feels woefully inadequate. Our region has always formed a front line — for justice, for resistance, for possibility. We can allow fear and cruelty to rule, or we can continue to meet this moment with courage and clarity. In Los Angeles and Orange counties, where immigrants are so strongly woven into our existence, we understand: If immigrants are under attack, we all are. And when we fight for their freedom, we defend our own.

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Jody Agius Vallejo and Manuel Pastor are professors of sociology at USC, where they direct the university’s Equity Research Institute.

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