CHAMPAIGN COUNTY, Ill. (WCIA) — Undocumented immigrants far and wide are bracing for President Trump’s promised “largest deportation program in American history.”

“It’s creating a lot of fear among a lot of people,” Lucia Maldonado, Urbana School District Latino family liaison, said. “This is going to affect families, this is going to affect the economy, this is going to affect businesses.”

Reports that Trump’s initial push for mass arrests would be in Chicago has raised concerns across the state.

“Immediately I started getting messages from people asking what was going to happen, what they had to do to prepare,” Maldonado said.

About 2.5 hours away from Chicago, places like Champaign County are preparing for potential arrests and deportations, although there are no clear signs the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will raid the area. 

“People are assuming okay, it’s happening in Chicago, it’s happening in Illinois and it’s going to happen here eventually,” Maldonado said. 

The fear of the future has people on high alert.

“We’ve already had our first ICE sightings, pseudo sightings of course, it has not happened as far as we know,” CU Immigration Forum Board Member Ricardo Diaz said. “People are very nervous and they start seeing things. If my family was threatened very directly, I would probably be overly cautious.”

A 2016 report found about 24,000 immigrants called Champaign County “home.” Just under 30% percent of those were likely undocumented. 

Lisa Wilson, East Central Illinois Refugee Center executive director, said she’s not sure how much those numbers have changed, but their situations of why they’re here remain the same. 

“They just want an opportunity to provide for themselves and their families,” Wilson said. “They come from such meager situations where there’s just such abject poverty that they feel that their only choice to live is to leave.”

Urbana has declared itself a sanctuary city meaning they’ll offer some protections to people who enter the country illegally. Champaign is a welcoming city meaning their policies promote immigrant inclusion.

Those assurances are in addition to statewide protections like the TRUST Act that prohibits local or state police from cooperating with federal authorities if they’re investigating an immigrant but don’t have a criminal warrant.