As Inauguration Day approaches, President-elect Donald Trump’s declaration to launch the “largest deportation operation in American history” is spreading fear across immigrant communities around the country.

In Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, Lincoln United Methodist Church is already guarding against potential deportation raids by moving its in-person Spanish services to virtual services online.

“I really think that they would target my church, so we are not going to be sitting ducks … because we were a target during the last presidential term of Donald Trump,” said Emma Lozano, a pastor at Lincoln United Methodist Church and longtime activist who founded Centro Sin Fronteras in 1987. “Two people have gone and done prison time that have come to our church and threatened us. And broke our door on one occasion and hurt one of our volunteers and one of our congregation members. So we just decided that the best thing that we could do was go virtual like we did during the pandemic. We learned a lot during that time that we could still be together, even though we were apart, and we could still hold worship service together.”

According to former Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan, who has been dubbed Trump’s “border czar,” mass deportations will begin in Chicago.

“There’s a lot of reasons, I’m sure, Donald Trump and his administration is targeting Chicago,” Lozano said. “We’re a sanctuary church. ... And I think that that’s what the reason why they’re saying they’re targeting Chicago and the sanctuary cities because that’s how they motivate their base of hate towards us.”

Spanish-language masses went virtual at the church as of Christmas Day last month, and the church also offers legal aid following its Spanish masses that was also moved online. However, the church’s English-language masses will remain in-person.

“I have a responsibility to my congregation,” Lozano said. “The English congregation that is younger, Black, Brown and White, they will continue their service. But my service, that we’re mixed at as families, will not, and we will be on virtually. This is no different than the pandemic. The only thing, the medicine is not the vaccine. The medicine now is for our leadership, for our community, for our city, to come together and say that, ‘We’re going to resist this.’ This is going to divide families. This is going to hurt our economy, hurt our communities, because we’re talking about families that have been here and have roots here.”