Trump’s victory has meant emotional whiplash for many across America, but few have as much at stake as the country’s estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants. From the very first day of his campaign, Trump had talked about his plan to “build a great, great wall” at the U.S.-Mexico border to keep out “rapists” and “people that have lots of problems,” and during a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on Sunday Trump vowed to waste no time deporting as many as three million people upon his Inauguration, starting with “people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers.”

Following those deportations, the President-elect said, he’d focus on border security, and then assess which immigrants are “terrific people” and which deserve the boot—categories that, for Trump, may not be mutually exclusive.

That Fatima belongs in the “terrific” camp makes her, paradoxically, more vulnerable. She’s one of the Obama Administration’s “Dreamers”—the seven hundred thousand-plus undocumented youth who benefited from a program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which offered short-term protection from deportation, as well as the right to work.

At a press conference on Monday, President Obama, who said that he would urge Trump to maintain the DACA program, noted, “These are kids who were brought here by their parents. They did nothing wrong. They’ve gone to school. They have pledged allegiance to the flag. Some have enrolled in the military.… By definition, if they are part of this program, they are solid, wonderful young people of good character.”

 Yet to access DACA’s safe haven, young people like Fatima had to turn over information to the government—their names, birth dates, addresses. Trump has railed against the executive action that gave young people this reprieve, and one early lesson of his victory now hovers over them: what executive authority gives, executive authority can take away.

Fatima came to the U.S. at the age of eleven, from Mexico. She got temporary relief, by way of DACA, in 2012, at the age of eighteen. In her bedroom in Tulsa the day after the election, she felt she didn’t have time to worry about her own well-being: she was focussed on soothing her siblings and on responding to a hailstorm of panicked texts.

Fatima works mentoring teen-agers as the Hispanic Program Coordinator at a local nonprofit called Camp Fire, and many of the undocumented middle- and high-schoolers she helps were texting her, “What now?”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” she told them. She said the same thing to her little brother, as she pulled on her jacket, packed her bag, and left for work. “We’ll be fine.”

At work, Fatima found a colleague crying, bewildered by the outcome of the election and what it would mean for the kids they serve. Then a friend called to say that a child she knows—a fourth-grade boy—had faced an unexpected conversation with his mother that morning, following Donald Trump’s victory speech in the wee hours. “She sat him down,” the friend explained, “and showed him how to write checks to pay the rent, how to access the money, how to dial an international phone call to Mexico, and where to find the family’s lawyer’s number on the fridge.” She wanted him to be prepared to run the household if he came home from school one day and found her gone.

Fatima called the boy’s mother right away. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she stressed, to a stranger who was now a kindred of sorts. “Let’s try to be a little bit positive, and let’s not ruin the holidays coming up.” Fatima then conferred with her friend, making a plan to get counseling services to the fourth-grader and sharing some advice about how to respond to similar calls that were likely to come in.

“Tell them it will be fine,” Fatima said. “But don’t promise anything.”

I met Fatima at a lunch banquet of the Coalition of Hispanic Organizations on Thursday. I had been driving around Tulsa, searching out the voices of young immigrants in a state in which all seventy-seven counties voted resoundingly for Trump. (This year saw the lowest percentage of Democratic votes in Oklahoma since 1972, when George McGovern ran, according to the Oklahoman.) Oklahoma is one of the reddest states in America—one smack in the heartland, but also one in which, by the Pew Research Center’s count, at least ten per cent of residents are Hispanic.

The annual lunch banquet was held to give out Gracias Awards, and was meant to be an eat-and-be-merry affair: big plates of bourbon chicken and cake served up in a packed hotel auditorium alongside Highway 169.

Four local leaders were to be fêted for their service to the city’s growing Latino population: a pastor, an educator, a local radio host, and a doctor. It sounded, admittedly, like the setup to a joke, but as the honorees strode to the podium, the celebration became, bit by bit, more funereal. The radio announcer wept as she took her award, telling the audience, “People are so afraid.” Soon, half the people in the crowd seemed to be wiping their eyes. A deputy sheriff nodded mournfully; children clutched the hems of their mothers’ skirts.

Fatima sat at a table near the back. In her big hoop earrings, fashionable leather boots, and slicked-back ponytail, she looked unruffled, the consummate anti-alarmist. But when the awards presentation wrapped up, she told me what had happened after she’d sent her brother off to school the previous day with comforting words, convincing him that everything was fine.

“He came home later, and he was like, ‘No, really, where are we going to move?’ “ Fatima said. White boys at school, her brother explained, had been chanting at Latino kids in the hallway that morning. Their refrain was just two words: “The wall! The wall! The wall! The wall!”

Fatima conceded that the family should sit down at the dining-room table and create a contingency plan. In case of Trump’s promised raids on a scale unprecedented in America (a plan that would cost billions of dollars and require a massive surge in federal immigration-enforcement powers), where would they go? And what would happen to Fatima’s little brother?

Multiply a ten-year-old Tulsa boy’s panic by millions and you’ll get a sense of what this past week has been like in undocumented America. At the Gracias Awards lunch, I sat beside a group of mental-health providers who work bilingually with children in public schools across five states in the South and Midwest. “We’re seeing a lot of fights in the schools,” Tayrin Saldivar, the multicultural program coördinator for Dayspring Community Services, in Tulsa, told me. “Kids are telling other kids, ‘You see, you have to leave now, because you’re not from here.’ “

She then shared a remarkable number: “Yesterday, we got contacted twenty-five times from schools here.… They were saying, ‘We need help.’ Mostly, she was hearing reports of racially motivated bullying.

Usually, she said, her organization gets ten or so contacts a month; the day’s tally had more than doubled their monthly rate. Most of the taunts targeted Latino or Muslim kids. Some were aimed at the city’s growing community of refugees; Tulsa is home to a large population of Burmese refugees, as well as others from Liberia, Iraq, and elsewhere. “They were asking us to intervene before the kids dropped out,” Saldivar said.

I wandered over to a table where several school teachers were seated. “We have some fourth-graders who came to school really upset,” Lisa Shotts, an educator at McAuliffe Elementary School, in nearby Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, said. “The teacher had to pull up a YouTube video to explain that there are checks and balances in our country—that it’s not just the President making all the rules.” Complicating this comfort, for older kids, was the realization that, come January, the check-ready arms of government—the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, and, quite likely, the Supreme Court—may enter into an unusual state of ideological synchronicity.

Emma Thadani, who received a Gracias Award for her work as McAuliffe Elementary’s community-school coördinator, chimed in. About fifty per cent of the school’s Latino parents are undocumented, and Thadani works to insure that their kids’ chances of a good education aren’t hindered.

“One girl in fourth grade’s mother was deported in August,” she said. To the best of Thadani’s knowledge, the mother had faced a minor criminal charge for which she was unable to afford the court fees and fines; she’d been rounded up and sent away. “The girl is living with her eighteen-year-old brother right now,” Thadani said. If he weren’t around, she might have entered foster care. “We’ve seen a big shift in her performance.”

Her point was that deportations, and the turbulence they can create, are not a new phenomenon. The Obama Administration has deported 2.5 million immigrants since 2009, in an effort that many people viewed as part of a political calculus to clear the way for a path to citizenship—a path that never materialized. Obama expelled more immigrants than any other President, but his tally now seems dwarfed by his successor’s bold, if impractical, campaign promise: the deportation of all eleven million immigrants who are living unauthorized in America.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Trump is considering expelling those who have been accused but not convicted, suspected drug dealers, and people charged with such immigration violations as illegal reëntry. “These kids, they already had fear,” Thadani said. “But now it’s elevated to another level.”

Trump’s campaign promise had been to deport eleven million people, but on “60 Minutes” he trimmed back that number to three million (at least to start). The scale of that mass deportation still seems a logistical and financial tangle. Even the smaller number of three million “criminals” he says he will expel is confusing. The Obama Administration—which embraced a policy of deporting “felons, not families”—estimates that there are only 1.9 million non-citizen immigrants convicted of crimes and subject to deportations across America. (Many of these people’s convictions were for “illegal reentry,” a felony often involving parents who try to return to their families after deportation; others have records from the distant past.)

Where will the other million come from? In the interview, Trump steered clear of the DACA question. But gutting it remains a possibility; it would be easier, logistically, to strip those young people of legal status and work permits than to proactively hunt down “criminals” who have not yet been convicted.

After Fatima and I parted ways, I went to a meeting of Tulsa’s Hispanic Affairs Commission, at City Hall. There, a range of community leaders—from the sheriff’s office and fire department, and also from the worlds of education and industry—had come to hash out a diverse set of concerns affecting local Latino residents. In a high-tech conference room with a live broadcast camera, commissioners—a librarian, a realtor, a police officer, and an L.G.B.T. advocate—took their seats while other participants filtered in. An exhausted bilingual counselor from the local domestic-violence-intervention program made a plea for more interpreters and shelter staffers, and a member of the group’s education committee highlighted recent efforts to change the high rates at which Latino youth are pushed out of public schools—the kind of grinding, granular concerns on which local democratic government churns.

The meeting concluded with one of the commissioners reading “When the World as We Knew It Ended,” a poem by the writer Joy Harjo, a member of the Tulsan Mvskoke tribe, and its subtext was self-evident:

“…We heard it.

The racket in every corner of the world. As

the hunger for war rose up in those who would steal to be president

to be king or emperor, to own the trees, stones, and everything

else that moved about the earth, inside the earth

and above it. …

And then it was over, this world we had grown to love …

But then there were the seeds to plant and the babies

who needed milk and comforting, and someone

picked up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble

and began to sing…”

When the reading ended, Laura Bachman, an immigration attorney from the local Y.W.C.A., stood up, wearing burgundy cowboy boots, and announced an upcoming forum to be held at a local church for Dreamers and immigrant families. “We want to arm people with real information on what they can do to be prepared,” she said. Volunteer lawyers would be on hand at the event to discuss DACA kids’ legal rights in the months ahead, and to answer families’ questions under the forum’s umbrella: “The State of Immigration After the Election.”

Not far away, as dusk fell, Fatima Linares’s friends from the Dream Act Oklahoma group, mostly DACA youth, were gathering together to figure out their options. “We’re going to hold forums, do know-your-rights sessions,” her friend Jordan Mazariegos, a fellow Dreamer and the group’s president, told me as we talked in a nearby park before he headed over to the gathering. His parents brought him to Tulsa from Mexico at the age of two. “I grew up here, pledging allegiance to the flag. And I’m going to fight.” Over beer and pizza, the group made plans for their own role at the upcoming church forum.

Fatima couldn’t join them to grieve and plot—she had class—but she plans to be at the forum in two weeks, with her ten-year-old brother and twelve-year-old sister on her mind. Her sister had told her about a boy at school who’d taunted her, “I’ll come visit you in Mexico.”

Fatima felt ready to roll up her sleeves. She plans to comfort local Dreamers by insisting, “We have to keep going, keep working and going to school and doing the things we’ve always done.” But with her inner circle she’ll share her less-assured mantra from this past week, which could double as advice for a whole nation of tremblers: “Tell them it will be fine,” she keeps repeating. “But don’t promise anything.”