Millions of immigrants in the United States woke up to a new political reality November 9: We will soon have the most rabidly anti-immigrant president in living memory. Even at the Undocumented Student Program at the University of California, Berkeley, where we have built a strong and resilient community, immigrant youth and parents walked into my office full of grief and fear.

President-elect Trump has promised to undo the reforms we fought so hard to win. His plan for his first 100 days in office, laid out in October, includes revoking legal protections given to young immigrants through President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, building a wall at the Mexican border, blocking funding for sanctuary cities, deporting people with criminal convictions and making it harder to legally immigrate to the United States.

Thanks to the expansion of immigration enforcement under both Presidents Bush and Obama, the Trump administration will already have the data it needs to launch new attacks on immigrants. Trump has appointed such hardliners to his transition team as Kris Kobach, the architect of the anti-Muslim registration system initiated temporarily in 2002 as part of the War on Terror.

But immigrants have already shown we can mobilize and resist under grave political circumstances. When Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R–Wis.) introduced legislation in 2005 that would have turned undocumented immigrants into felons, millions of demonstrators took to the streets in dozens of cities. The bill was defeated. Even as Obama deported more than 2 million undocumented people, many of them mothers and fathers, immigrants came out as “undocumented and unafraid,” occupying streets, political offices and lawns outside the White House and Congress.

An estimated 10,000 demonstrators took the streets of Manhattan the day after the election to protest Donald Trump. Photo by Erik McGregor (Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Many organizers have long known that, regardless of who is in office, we will need to resist local and national immigration enforcement against all marginalized communities. Under Obama, young immigrant organizers had to fight our liberal friends to win temporary relief from deportations. A Clinton presidency would have likely brought more of the same.

The end of a seemingly endless election should bring some relief. Time spent campaigning for one politician over another, while knowing that deportations would continue under a Democratic regime, took energy away from collective grassroots action. The threat looming before us is now crystal clear. Trump’s victory has galvanized liberals, who cannot look away from the very real violence his supporters are already unleashing against immigrants and people of color.

We need to shift away from purely electoral politics to mobilize and protect our communities—and engage all people who are left behind by the political establishment.

Prerna Lal is a staff attorney and clinical supervisor at the East Bay Community Law Center.

Read the rest of this special series from the December issue of In These Times: