MILWAUKEE — While communities around the country brace themselves for immigration raids promised for this weekend by President Donald Trump, Latinx voters and immigration activists say they need to hear from Democrats that they oppose not just Trump’s immigration agenda but also the raids and deportations carried out under President Barack Obama.

“I also want a country that’s safe and sovereign. But my husband wasn’t a criminal. He wasn’t a rapist. He wasn’t a drug dealer,” said Cecilia Garcia, 44, a US citizen whose husband was deported in 2012 after being pulled over for an expired license plate despite not having a criminal background or a pending deportation order.

She said Democrats need to recognize that they have played a significant role in creating the system that led to her husband’s deportation, including Obama’s deportations and reaching as far back as the Clinton administration’s introduction of a 1996 law that made it harder for US citizens to adjust their spouses’ immigration statuses and easier for more immigrants to be deported.

“Democrats know what’s going on, and it’s beautiful that they went to the border, but what now?” said Garcia, a member of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Latinx civil rights organization in the US, at the group’s annual convention this week in Milwaukee.

“I think in Obama’s first term the title of ‘deporter-in-chief’ was well-earned. It wasn’t until the second term that we saw progress with him stopping the deportations, signing DACA and DAPA, and finally having a more humane and more compassionate immigration policy, but it took five years,” said Domingo Garcia, LULAC’s president.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, announced in 2012 and now subject to a court battle, protected people brought to the country as children from deportation. Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, or DAPA, announced in 2014 but never implemented due to court challenges, was intended to shield undocumented parents of children in the US who are citizens or legal residents from deportation.

“There’s still a distrust factor. President Obama promised to pass immigration reform in the first 100 days of his administration. It didn't happen, and the Democrats controlled the Senate, the presidency, and the House,” he said.

The current environment of fear and repeated attacks on immigrant rights under this administration have created a situation where undocumented people and their families feel far more threatened than they did under Obama, especially because Trump has reversed the Obama-era policy of prioritizing people with criminal records for deportation above others. While immigrant communities are worried about the raids Trump has promised for this weekend, there’s little indication of how far-reaching they will be, and it’s unlikely they’ll affect anywhere near the broad numbers the president has suggested.

But advocates said they need to hear more explicitly from Democratic presidential candidates that they acknowledge that Democrats also carried out a program of mass deportations, especially in the early years of the Obama administration, when Obama’s pace of deportations outran Trump’s. And they want a firm commitment from candidates that they will not simply return to that status quo if they defeat Trump.

Two of the four presidential candidates who traveled to Milwaukee for LULAC’s town hall, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former housing secretary Julián Castro, pushed back on Obama’s immigration legacy and promoted their own immigration plans, both of which would make crossing the border without documents just a civil rather than a criminal offense.

“I’ve said that when I was mayor of San Antonio, I was critical of some of the things the [Obama] administration was doing. I also have recognized that as the years went by the administration did get better on some issues, especially with DACA and DAPA,” Castro, who served in the Obama administration beginning in 2014, told reporters in Milwaukee on Thursday.

Warren, also speaking to the audience at LULAC’s town hall Thursday, said the immigration system “was broken long before Donald Trump came along,” and called for “big change.”

Sen. Kamala Harris also distanced herself from the Obama administration’s immigration record during the Democratic debates in Miami two weeks ago. “I disagreed with my president,” she said then, adding that she had specifically opposed Obama’s expansion of the Secure Communities program, which allowed ICE to access state and local fingerprint records when immigrants were arrested for even minor traffic offenses.

That was in contrast to former vice president Joe Biden, who said during the debate that “President Obama did a heck of a job” on immigration.

For many people at the LULAC conference, and for immigration activists who have been watching the primary unfold, that judgment represents a disregard for the damage caused to immigrant communities by ICE raids and the lack of comprehensive immigration reform they were promised under Obama — who was dubbed by activists the “deporter-in-chief” for his record of having been the US president who carried out the largest number of deportations during his tenure.

"The fact that [Biden] would celebrate Obama’s deportation numbers on the debate stage shows he’s not really committed to dismantling ICE’s deportation machinery," said Jacinta Gonzalez, an Arizona-based organizer and policy analyst for immigrant rights group Mijente.

"Obviously Trump is far worse, but Biden needs to apologize and come to terms with the massive deportations under Obama," said Thomas Kennedy, a Miami-based immigration activist, who helped several candidates visit the area around the immigration detention center for children in Homestead, Florida, during the week of the debates. Biden did not visit the center.

“We need to learn the lessons of the past,” Castro told reporters in Milwaukee. “I have learned the lessons of the past. It seems that Vice President Biden has not.”

Jeh Johnson, who served as Homeland Security secretary in Obama’s second term, defended the administration’s policies against what some Democrats are proposing now in a Washington Post op-ed this month. Declaring a policy of not deporting anyone in the US illegally except for criminals “is tantamount to a public declaration (repeated and amplified by smugglers in Central America) that our borders are effectively open to all,” he wrote. Decriminalizing border entry, he wrote, would have the same effect.