(CNN)
Across the United States, some unauthorized immigrants are keeping their children home from school. Others have suspended after-school visits to the public library. They have given up coffee shop trips and weekend restaurant dinners with family.
Some don't answer knocks on their doors. They're taping bedsheets over windows and staying off social media. Nervous parents and their children constantly exchange text messages and phone calls.
From New York to Los Angeles, a series of immigration arrests this week have unleashed waves of fear and uncertainly across immigrant communities.
"There are people that I work with who essentially want to go dark," said Cesar Vargas, one of the first immigrants without legal status in New York state to be sworn in as a lawyer.
"They don't want to be public in any way whatsoever. They spend less time on the street. They go to work and go straight back home. They don't go on Facebook. They put curfews on themselves."
The fear started to set in after President Donald Trump's inauguration last month, according to advocates. It heightened after Thursday's deportation of an undocumented Arizona mother of two who was making a routine visit with immigration officials. And Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents this week carried out numerous actions in California, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Texas and other states.
"There are teachers who told me they had students missing from school out of fear," said Greg Casar, a city council member in Austin, Texas.
"I was with a constituent, a single mother with kids -- good, hardworking everyday folks -- and she had duct-taped sheets up and down her windows. ICE had come and knocked on her door earlier in the day."
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Casar, the son of Mexican immigrants, spoke on the phone Saturday from a meeting of about 100 teachers who gathered to discuss how talk to children about ICE actions and assure them they're safe at school.
A construction worker, Antonio said he has paid taxes for years. He was part of a small army of unauthorized immigrants who toiled in the reconstruction efforts in Queens and Staten Island after Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
"We were among the first to respond during that catastrophe," he said.
"We helped rebuild homes and the owners still seek us out for work. But some people feel we're taking away (jobs). We take the jobs they don't want. So it's, 'Oh, you helped me rebuild my house but now I don't need you and you should go back to Mexico.'"