A woman named "E" was at 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 looks. "Real ugly looks," she says. "They could call immigration," she recalls 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's also anecdotal evidence that people are relocating, from cities with aggressive immigration enforcement to places with fewer raids, where they feel safer.
E. asked that we only use her first initial, because she and her husband are both undocumented. She says she'd like to go back to Guatemala as soon as possible. Her daughter, who recently started high school, wants to stay in Florida. So does her husband, who feels that after some 20 years living in the U.S., this is home.
But under the leadership of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has embarked on one of the strictest immigration crackdowns in the nation, vowing to lead the way in President Trump's campaign. Her husband's workplace - a construction site - was recently raided. He just happened to be out that day. And the family knows multiple people who've been deported, including their own church pastor.
For now, the family has decided to leave Florida for a small town in Michigan. A neighbor friend, also an immigrant, just moved there. "She called me recently," E. says, and she told me, 'why don't you come up here? Things are quiet here. You don't hear about raids. And I can find you a job.'"
It's hard to track the movement of undocumented immigrants throughout the U.S. There are no exact numbers. Demographer Matt Brooks at Florida State University studies these population flows, and says we've been seeing clear trends since at least the 1980s. "There's definitely a pattern and on the aggregate these patterns make a lot of sense."
Brooks says immigration to the U.S. is often a multi-step process: migrants tend to first land in big cities, but in time they make a second move, increasingly to the South or the Midwest, seeking out 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 points to Mississippi as an example. In 2019, there was a massive immigration raid at multiple food-processing plants near Jackson. "We know that immigrants have been leaving Mississippi ever since," he says. Following that raid, he points out "the flow of immigrants out of MIssissippi is more than double the flow in."
The Trump administration hasn't hit its first anniversary yet, but the immigration crackdown is already having widespread effects. The Department of Homeland Security claims 1.6 million immigrants have left the country voluntarily, what the administration calls self-deportation. There's 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 first initial, R., relocating to another state was a panicked, last minute decision.
Over the summer, a major raid at a meat packing plant sent shockwaves throughout immigrant communities in Nebraska. The morning after, R. says he sat in the parking lot of his factory, debating whether to go into work or leave the state altogether. "I feel that I'm in between a rock and a hard place," he told NPR.. He's asked for his full name to be withheld because he is worried for his safety, as he is seeking asylum in the U.S. from El Salvador's authoritarian government. He says to be sent back could be a death sentence.
A few days later, R. was gone. He drove almost non-stop from Nebraska to North Carolina—21 hours behind the wheel, fueled by coffee and electrolytes. The destination: a small city his friend said was safe, where immigration raids were rare or non-existent.
When he got there, he went straight to work at his new roofing gig.
That was five months ago. NPR recently checked in with him.
"It's been quiet here," he says. He wouldn't say he's happy, but there are fewer Hispanics, "so the town just isn't a big immigration enforcement target."
At least for now. He's hoping it stays that way.
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