A woman named “E” was in a clothing store in Tampa, Florida, with her daughter when she realized it was time to leave.
It was her daughter’s 15th birthday, and she wanted to buy her an outfit. She says she felt the salespeople giving them dirty looks. “Really ugly looks,” she says. “They might call immigration,” she remembers telling her daughter. “You’re an American citizen, but you’re also Hispanic. We need to get out of here.”
They left the store, she says, with the feeling that it was also time to leave the state. The question this family is grappling with is: where to?
Under the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, many are deciding to hide in place, while others are self-deporting. But there are also anecdotal reports that people are moving, from cities with aggressive immigration enforcement to places with fewer raids, where they feel safer.
E. asked that we use only her initial, because she and her husband are both undocumented. She says she would like to return to Guatemala as soon as possible. Her daughter, who recently started high school, wants to stay in Florida. Her husband does too, who feels that after about 20 years living in the US, this is home.
But under the leadership of Republican governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has embarked on one of the country’s harshest immigration crackdowns, promising to lead President Trump’s campaign. Her husband’s workplace — a construction site — was recently raided. He happened to be out that day. And the family knows several people who were deported, including the pastor of their own church.
For now, the family has decided to leave Florida for a small town in Michigan. A neighboring friend, also an immigrant, just moved there. “She called me recently,” says E., “and told me: ‘Why don’t you come here? Things are calm here. You don’t hear about raids. And I can get you a job.’”
It’s hard to track the movement of undocumented immigrants across the US. There are no exact numbers. Demographer Matt Brooks from Florida State University studies these population flows and says we’re seeing clear trends since at least the 1980s. “There is definitely a pattern and, in the aggregate, these patterns make a lot of sense.”
Brooks says immigration to the US is often a multi-step process: migrants tend to arrive first in big cities, but over time make a second move, increasingly to the South or Midwest, seeking jobs in agriculture or manufacturing. And, he says, sometimes there’s a third move: away from immigration enforcement, to cities and towns that seem safer.
Brooks cites Mississippi as an example. In 2019, there was a large immigration raid at several food processing plants near Jackson. “We know immigrants have been leaving Mississippi since then,” he says. After that raid, he points out that “the flow of immigrants leaving Mississippi is more than double the flow entering.”
The Trump administration hasn’t even completed its first year, but the immigration crackdown is already having widespread effects. The Department of Homeland Security claims that 1.6 million immigrants left the country voluntarily, which the administration calls self-deportation. There is also evidence of something else: internal migration, as families flee enforcement zones for safer ground.
For a Salvadoran man in Omaha, Nebraska, who asked to be referred to by his initial, R., moving to another state was a panicked, last-minute decision.
In the summer, a large raid at a meatpacking plant sent shockwaves through immigrant communities in Nebraska. The next morning, R. says he stood in his factory’s parking lot, debating whether to go into work or leave the state for good. “I feel like I’m between a rock and a hard place,” he told NPR. He asked that his full name be withheld because he’s concerned for his safety, as he’s seeking asylum in the US from El Salvador’s authoritarian government. He says being sent back could be a death sentence.
A few days later, R. left. He drove almost non-stop from Nebraska to North Carolina — 21 hours at the wheel, fueled by coffee and electrolytes. The destination: a small town that his friend said was safe, where immigration raids were rare or non-existent.
When he arrived, he went straight to work at his new roofing job.
That was five months ago. NPR recently got in touch with him.
“It’s calm here,” he says. He wouldn’t say he’s happy, but there are fewer Hispanics, “so the town just isn’t a big target for immigration enforcement.”
At least for now. He hopes it stays that way.
Source: npr.org by Jasmine Garsd