President-elect Donald Trump has promised to slash immigration — legal and illegal — and ramp up deportations on Day 1.

Immigrants are racing to get ahead of the crackdown.

Foreign-born residents have been jamming the phone lines of immigration lawyers. They’re packing information meetings organized by nonprofits. And they’re taking whatever steps they can to inoculate themselves from the sweeping measures Trump has promised to undertake after he is inaugurated on Jan. 20.

“People that should be scared are coming in, and people that are fine with a green card are rushing in,” said Inna Simakovsky, an immigration lawyer in Columbus, Ohio, whose team has been overwhelmed with consultations. “Everyone is scared.”

People with green cards want to become citizens as soon as possible. People who have a tenuous legal status or who entered the country illegally are scrambling to file for asylum because even if the claim is thin, having a pending case would — under current protocols — protect them from deportation. People in relationships with U.S. citizens are fast-tracking marriage, which makes them eligible to apply for a green card.

About 13 million people have legal permanent residency. And an estimated 11.3 million people were in the country without legal permission in 2022, the latest figure available.

“The election result put me in a state of panic that propelled me to immediately find a permanent solution,” said Yaneth Campuzano, 30, a software engineer in Houston.

Brought to the United States from Mexico when she was 2 months old, she was eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era program that has allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants who entered the country as children to remain in the country with work permits.

But DACA was a target of Trump’s during his first term and is being challenged in a lawsuit that could help him end it. Given the program’s precarious state, Campuzano and her fiance, an American neuroscientist, have expedited plans to marry. They will wed next month — before Trump takes office.

“Only after my status is secure will I be able to breathe again,” she said.

Republican and Democratic voters have been frustrated by chaos at the border during President Joe Biden’s administration. Trump campaigned on a promise of mass deportations, and last week said that he intends to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to accomplish his goal. His top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, has said “vast holding facilities” would serve as “staging centers” for the operation. This past week, the state land commissioner in Texas offered the federal government more than 1,000 acres near the border to erect detention centers.

Deportations are not uncommon. Trump deported about 1.5 million people during his first term, according to analysis by the Migration Policy Institute. Biden has removed about as many. President Barack Obama removed 3 million in his first term.

But not since the 1950s has the United States sought to deport people en masse, and it has not previously created a vast detention apparatus to facilitate expulsions.

In addition to Miller, the president-elect has tapped other immigration hawks for key roles, including Thomas Homan, a veteran of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to be “border czar.”

Sergio Teran of Venezuela has legal permanent residency. After five years as a green-card holder, Teran, 36, who lives in Lakeland, Florida, became eligible for U.S. citizenship in late July. The uncertainty surrounding the election was one of the factors that pushed him to recently apply.

“I wanted to do it quickly,” he said. “I am an upstanding community member, but with a green card you can still be deported. I feel much more secure knowing my citizenship is in process.”