Naranjo at ULA's City Hall protest: "We're full of fear.” Paula Naranjo fought back tears as she spoke on the front steps of City Hall about what Donald Trump’s second presidential administration could mean for New Haven-area immigrants like herself.“I work like every other person. I go to school, and I’m just trying to build a life,” she said, facing Church Street with a bullhorn in hand. ​“Trump as president again is scary. We’re full of fear. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re scared of getting deported. We’re scared that more of our rights are going to be taken away.”Naranjo, 20, is a Hamden resident and college student who immigrated to the United States four years ago. She spoke up Monday night as part of a rally organized by the local immigrant and workers advocacy organization Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA).Naranjo was one of a half-dozen speakers at an event that marked ULA’s first public action since the presidential results came in earlier this month — and signaled the group’s readiness to push back at the local level on the president-elect’s promises of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants“Migrants will rally to organize a resistance to the new regime!” a press release announcing Monday’s event declared. That release said that the City Hall outing was designed to ​“send a clear message to the new Trump administration, that ​‘We are here and we are not leaving.’ ”Behind Naranjo on Monday evening, filling the steps leading to City Hall, stood roughly two dozen ULA members, some wearing green bandanas to avoid potential identification by immigration enforcement agents. They held up banners colored red, white, and black, reading: ​“WEARETHERESISTANCE” and ​“PORQUESÓLOELPUEBLOSALVAALPUEBLO,” or ​“Because only the people can save the people,” a phrase attributed to the Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magon that has been taken up by protest movements across Latin America over the past century.Though the speakers emphasized the role they hope local and state officials will play in blocking federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and penalizing abuses in the workplace, a common theme throughout the night was the need for the community to mobilize itself to protect its members.“We need to start organizing our community,” said ULA Co-Founder and Community Organizing Director John Lugo, ​“because we have the power to organize and defend ourselves.”Lugo has been doing that work for decades now. Leading ULA, he says he’s fought deportations and employment discrimination before. He’s negotiated with local police departments to limit coordination with federal immigration enforcement officials and worked with the city to create a municipal ID card that is open to undocumented residents.But the current situation feels different.“They’re promising to remove citizenships from naturalized citizens,” he said. Trump has floated the idea of deploying the military to conduct mass round-ups of undocumented people across the country, he added. But there’s momentum on the organizing side, too. Roughly 70 people showed up to ULA’s first meeting after the election, Lugo said, whereas an average Monday night before Election Day on Nov. 5 might have seen 15 or 20 attendees.Still, much will be in the city’s hands once Trump assumes office. Toward the end of the rally, once the sun had fully set and the banners were starting to be folded up, Board of Alders Majority Leader Richard Furlow made his way through the crowd outside City Hall and greeted the ULA organizers. Although ULA activists have renewed their push for the city to codify a Sanctuary City law since last winter, nothing has been added to the legislative docket yet, he said.Conversations around legislation to protect undocumented people in the area are ongoing.“It’s been a few years, just trying to get the wording right, trying to protect the city also, because of the possibility of losing federal funding,” Furlow said. ​“So there’s a lot to this. It’s more than just creating a law that just magically makes everyone safe. Federal law will trump anything we do, no pun intended with ​‘trump,’ so we need to do something that’s smart, and that’s going to be efficient, and that’s what we’re going to be thinking about doing.”ULA's John Lugo on Monday: “We need to start organizing our community.” Majority Leader Furlow (center): "It’s more than just creating a law that just magically makes everyone safe."