Jasmine Garst
Appearances
NPR News Now
NPR News: 02-05-2025 2PM EST
In the days after President Donald Trump's inauguration, as rumors of immigration raids in Chicago started to swirl, Roy, a second grade public school teacher in the city, says he noticed a shift.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 02-05-2025 2PM EST
Half of his students are from immigrant families, some without legal status. He requested NPR withhold his full name and the name of his school for fear of being targeted. Federal immigration agents can now enter a school as long as a judicial warrant is presented. The Trump administration has said it is not targeting schools. However, the prospect has sent shockwaves through some communities.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-29-2025 7PM EST
The Trump administration has also indicated that it is negotiating an agreement with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele. to accept deported migrants. Jasmine Garst, NPR News, New York.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-29-2025 7PM EST
At the White House signing of the Lake and Riley Act on Immigration, President Trump announced he would be giving an executive order to prepare a 30,000-person facility at Guantanamo Bay to house deported migrants.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-07-2025 4PM EDT
Abrego Garcia has been living in Maryland for more than a decade with a form of legal protection known as withholding of removal. He was arrested by immigration officials last month and sent to a notorious Salvadoran detention center. His lawyers contend he has no criminal record, and the Trump administration admitted it had made what it called, quote, an administrative error.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-07-2025 4PM EDT
Last week, federal judge Paula Zinnies ordered that he be brought back. The administration requested a stay, which a Fourth Circuit court panel denied earlier this morning.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-17-2025 6PM EST
Cindy Alamy is from Colombia. She and her husband owned a small store there. She says the local gang extorted them, so they headed north. The plan was to hire a coyote, that's a smuggler, to get them over the U.S. border. They were encouraged to instead try getting an appointment using CBP1, an app to legally request entry into the U.S.,
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-17-2025 6PM EST
She says they've been trying to get the appointment for five months. January 20th is almost here, she says, when President Trump takes office. He's vowed to shut down the CBP1 program and reinforce the border. She's starting to reconsider hiring a smuggler. Jasmine Garst, NPR News, California.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Tariff Response, Economics of Tariffs, SCOTUS Rules on Deportations
So the court's conservative majority didn't rule on the constitutionality of using the Alien Enemies Act to send migrants to a prison in El Salvador. Instead, the justices issued a narrow procedural ruling saying that the migrants' lawyers had filed their lawsuit in the wrong court.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Tariff Response, Economics of Tariffs, SCOTUS Rules on Deportations
When the Trump administration invoked this act, the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used wartime power, the ACLU challenged it, saying it's not legal. It denies people the right to fight the allegations in court. So what does this mean for the administration's immigration crackdown? So the Supreme Court backed the Trump administration.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Tariff Response, Economics of Tariffs, SCOTUS Rules on Deportations
In other words, it gave it the green light to continue using the act in order to rapidly deport alleged gang members. But it also made clear that officials must give migrants adequate notice that they're being removed under the Alien Enemies Act so that they have time to challenge it. And how is the decision being received? The Trump administration is celebrating this as a landmark victory.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Tariff Response, Economics of Tariffs, SCOTUS Rules on Deportations
Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X that this was a victory and they will continue implementing the act. Immigration advocates I spoke to are all very concerned. I mean, the act is designed to move the deportation process so rapidly, it's questionable how much of a chance detainees can actually have to defend themselves.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Tariff Response, Economics of Tariffs, SCOTUS Rules on Deportations
And that's especially concerning given how at this point it's been well documented that not all of the men being deported under these gang allegations actually have ties to gangs. There's been allegations of people just being picked up because they have a random tattoo of a soccer club.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Tariff Response, Economics of Tariffs, SCOTUS Rules on Deportations
Right. You're talking about Quilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. He's lived in Maryland for over 10 years. He had a form of legal protection that protected him from deportation, but last month he was detained and sent to El Salvador. The government says his deportation was, quote, an administrative error. The Trump administration does contend he's a gang member.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Tariff Response, Economics of Tariffs, SCOTUS Rules on Deportations
A federal judge said the government has presented no credible evidence that he was ever in a gang. In fact, he has no criminal record in any country. And a judge ordered the Justice Department to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. Now, this went fast.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Tariff Response, Economics of Tariffs, SCOTUS Rules on Deportations
All the way up to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts temporarily blocked the order to return Abednego Garcia while the full court considers what to do next.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Yeah. So the Chicago area was one of the first places the Trump administration targeted for immigration raids. So I wanted to be there. It was late January of this year. And You know, I've often described covering immigration right now. Like, do you remember that early scene?
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
It's a famous scene in Alice in Wonderland where she's falling down the rabbit hole and she can't hold on to anything and she doesn't know where she's heading. Yes, I do remember that. Like, that's how it feels to be covering immigration right now. And that feeling... That started when I went to the city of Waukegan, which is right by Chicago.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
It all just felt like it was moving nightmarishly fast, but there are details, like snapshots, that really stuck with me. Like... The thick coat of ice covering Lake Michigan. The feeling that life had suddenly moved underground. I mean, people weren't accessing basic services like food pantries or medical services. And people were actually starting to hide in their own houses.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Um, it was like a mix of somber and frenzy. There's this one woman I remember, especially a young Honduran woman. Her name is Rosa. You know what I remember? She was wearing an enormous slinky winter hat. It was like the color of... And I think I remember her hat because there was something very youthful and quirky about it.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Like you might expect to see it on a hip young mom in Brooklyn throwing back to the 90s. Except that we were at a food bank and it was freezing and she was late in her pregnancy and she was so scared. And she asked that we withhold her last name because she's really scared of deportation. She said she was just spending her time at home. She just wouldn't go outside out of fear of being deported.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
And suddenly this fear had taken hold and people told me they were scared. They were scared to go to the hospital, scared to go to school. And Mari, the reason we are using her first name only is that this totally unassuming church mom, she started working kind of on the fringes of the law. She was helping out some of these immigrants who didn't have legal status.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
And she told me she had not been to the doctor. She hadn't been going to the doctor for fear of crackdowns and hospitals. And that if things continued this way, she wasn't sure she'd go back to the doctor. And I asked, well, how are you going to give birth? And she said, it's in God's hands now. Yeah, it was like watching a health crisis really unfold in that moment.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
And it was at the same food bank in the midst of this frenzy that this woman passed me by and said, I'm getting my kids their U.S. passports. I want us to get out of here. As in go back to her home country? Yes, right. That was the first time someone said that to me. In fact, the pastor who was in charge of the food bank told me that she's been getting a lot of these inquiries.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
How do I get my kids a passport in case I want to leave? So that, you know, maybe someday they can come back. They are U.S. citizens. So, you know, I don't know. I don't want to overstate self-deportation. But the truth is I've been covering immigration for some years now. And I never heard people talk about self-deportation so much in private behind closed doors.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Yeah, so early this year, I went to the city of Durham, North Carolina. Now, North Carolina is estimated to have over 300,000 people living in the state without legal status. I was there to spend time with this nonprofit organization called Siembra NC. It's an immigrant workers' rights organization, and one of the members, Jose, invited me over for dinner.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
So José and his wife are from El Salvador, and they requested that we refer to them by first name only because they don't have papers. They have two small kids. Both are U.S. citizens. And I do want to issue a correction on my earlier reporting. José and his wife invited me to eat chicken pupusas, homemade chicken pupusas, and those were actually the best pupusas I've ever had.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
on this side of the border. I'm issuing a correction.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Oh, wow. Okay, I didn't know that. Okay, yeah, so I miss doing a retraction. So we sat there having dinner, and we started having this really intimate conversation. And Jose's wife, she asked that we use her first initial only, S., And she said, you know, when the election happened.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
I didn't want to do anything. I just wanted to lie down and sleep and sleep and wake up when it was all over, like a dream. But then at night, she couldn't sleep. She had really bad insomnia, and so did her husband. So they would talk all night about leaving the U.S. Maybe we need to get out of here. And in one of those insomniac nights, she called her father up. He lives in Las Vegas.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
He has legal immigration status. And S says she told her dad... I'm driving out there. I'm driving to Vegas because if we get deported, you can get the kids quick. And S's dad talked her out of it. He said, listen, it's a 30 plus hour drive. You guys can't hurt. And he advised her to take the kids to get their U.S. passport.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
And then if you get taken or if you decide to leave to self-deport, at least they have passports. That's exactly what they did. But for now, are they staying put? Yes. For now, they're staying put. But they told me it is an ongoing conversation.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
There is a tremendous climate of fear, but I've also found a lot of resistance in communities of people organizing and taking a stand. And when you invited me to talk about that big picture, you know, that big picture, I've been thinking about social mobility, about whose kids get to move forward, whose kids get to go to school without fear. whose kids get prenatal care.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
And so on this really sunny spring day, this group Siembra, they were out canvassing in this trailer park. And my dinner host, Jose, was there. And at this canvassing event, I met one of the activists. Her name is El. We're dropping her last name because... You know, she's concerned about repercussions for her activism.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
She's an immigrant from Mexico, and in her free time, she volunteers to talk to U.S.-born children of immigrants about going to college. So I'm, like, following her around as she's knocking on people's doors. It's the most important thing she said, that they go to school. They have to go to school. And she said, yeah, times are very scary, but... You know what's really scary?
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Just last Friday, she says, I was knocking on doors just like this. I was trying to get kids to fill out college financial aid applications. And these kids told me they didn't want to. Because what if asking for financial aid makes their parents, who are undocumented, a target? I don't want us to just be people who clean and wash dishes. I want us to move forward.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
I want us to be doctors and teachers, to be great. You know, when I go to a hospital, she says, and I see a doctor, and he's a Latino, I feel this joy. I think we're going to make it to the top. Algún día, muy pronto.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Yeah, so I was working on a story about the fear in the immigrant communities because of these new Florida laws and policies. And I kept hearing about something called raiteros. Like everywhere I went, there were posters or little business cards offering raites. And raite is a word that comes from ride, like car ride.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Basically, when the new rules targeting immigrants without legal status went into effect in Florida, people started to get scared, especially scared of driving. And so this kind of underground transportation system took off. And I was kind of expecting these drivers to be like these tough trucker type guys, you know, like straight out of central casting with the cutoff denim and the trucker hat.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
But instead, I met a lot of church ladies. Now, if you can imagine, like, Like a helmet hair of hairspray and pink lip gloss and blouses with rose patterns. Like your classic tia, your auntie. And one of them was this woman, Mari. She's the one I spoke to in the trailer park. And she'd been driving people in part to make a little extra money.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
You know, she offered kind of like a cheap Uber service, but also because she was really, really worried about the whole situation. I mean, like these are her friends and her neighbors. who are very scared.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Yeah. So Mari is a resident of the U.S. She's here legally with papers. She's originally from Mexico. And for a long time, she was married to an American guy. They're now separated. And she says that he was abusive. So she started attending this domestic violence support group.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
But after Florida started seriously cracking down on immigrants without papers, Mari noticed that a lot of women stopped coming to the domestic violence support group. So she started offering rides, raides, to some of the women who are here without legal status. She started taking people to the supermarket to get food. And then she started taking kids to school.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
And it became like this little mini business. Yo en mi vida había pasado así. Fíjese. And she's saying, I've never seen anything like it. Imagine being so scared of going to get food for your kids. It broke my soul. And then Mari told me that pretty soon people started heading further north to places that were friendlier to immigrants. And so Mari kind of graduated to the interstate.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
She does these long overnight trips transporting entire families trying to get out of Florida. And all of these people picking up and leaving, that's what Mari was referring to when she told me. They're going to turn this into a ghost town.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
I found that it was happening throughout Florida. I found a widespread fear, particularly in agricultural areas. I spent a lot of time in central Florida in like a park called Plant City, where a lot of workers had just picked up and left north. And also in areas that have been hard hit by hurricanes, where there is a labor force like roofers and builders who just, again, picked up and left.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
You know, I spent a lot of time in Springfield, Ohio, where the rising xenophobia and lies, just outright lies about Haitian immigrants spread. That was a preview of where we're at now. And that's gotten so much coverage. So I want to tell you a different story today about my trip to Nebraska in late December of last year. Now, Nebraska has a huge labor shortage.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
I mean, look, we know there's a labor shortage across the U.S., but Nebraska has one of the worst in the country. And they're also one of the top beef producers in the nation. And for these reasons, Nebraska business leaders and the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce have for years had this goal of becoming the most welcoming place in the country for immigrants.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Nonetheless, the state overwhelmingly voted for Trump. So when I was in Nebraska, I talked to people who voted for Trump and who told me they believed in no uncertain terms that he would only go after criminals, that he would not go after the everyday immigrant workforce. And one of those people who told me that was a rancher I met. His name is Tim Thompson of North Platte.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
He drove me around his property. It was dusk. It's a small property. There were a lot of deer. And as we sat there in his pickup truck watching the deer, I asked him about the workers and the beef plants. And rancher Tim told me he really appreciates them and that they're very hardworking people, to which I asked, Do you worry that they're going to get deported?
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
So, you know, it's interesting and it's worth noting that across the country, many immigrants who have become U.S. citizens appear to have shifted towards President Trump in 2024. I mean, Trump may have in fact won the immigrant vote or at least split it 50-50. But in Nebraska, you know, by many estimates, there's about 40,000 immigrants without legal status.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Okay, so about a year ago, I was in Florida, in Fort Myers, and I'm in this trailer park where mostly Latino immigrant agricultural workers live. And I'm hanging out with this woman. She's this older church lady. Her name is Mari. And she says this thing to me about a popular Sunday market in the city. And these days, I think a lot about what she said. ¿Y ahora qué? No hay nadie. Se fueron.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
And it is common knowledge that many of them work in the meatpacking plants. And a lot of people I spoke to told me they were really afraid. I spent a lot of my time in Fremont, Nebraska. You know, let me paint a picture for you. Nebraska has so many of these meatpacking towns. You know, picture this. It's the Great Plains, right? So it's just really flat.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
And the light, I've never seen light like that before. It's just eerie and stunning. And in that flatness, you see these factory towns with their billowing smokestacks. And you can see them on the horizon. Sometimes you can smell them, too, long before you get there. And so I got to Fremont, to this meatpacking city, and it was empty.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
And I was kind of freaking out about that because, you know, I'm a reporter. I'm in town to talk to people and everyone is locked in their homes. So I ended up going to this bar downtown. It's called Reinita, Little Queen. Now, if you can imagine like this secret tropical bubble in the middle of this frozen industrial tundra, that's Reinita.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
There were tropical flowers hanging everywhere and like this really loud, festive music. But the place was totally empty. It was like a deserted tropical island in the tundra. I ended up speaking to the owner, Berta Quintero, and she told me she built this place to seem like home, like Antigua, Guatemala. Now, Berta has legal status.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
And Aisha, I've got to say, she brought me some of the best pupusas I have ever eaten in my life. The best ever. And it's in Nebraska. I'm prepared to go on record saying that those were the best pupusas I've ever had on this side of the Americas. And my theory, hear me out, is that nostalgia was the secret ingredient.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Like these pupusas could only have been created in the nostalgia of an industrial town in the Great Plains in winter. So anyway, I sat down with Berta Quintero And we talked about fear, fear and dreams. That's the title, I guess, of this chapter, Fear and Dreaming in Nebraska.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
So as the night went on, we spoke about her own story. And Berta told me that after she left Guatemala, she took a job at a meatpacking plant.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
She was rubbing her shoulders as she told me this. And then Berta pointed at her teenage daughter, who was waiting tables, wearing this big Harvard sweatshirt. A school that Berta says her daughter dreams of attending.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
And then she asked me this question. She says, you know what I always think to myself?
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
So what now? She asked me. Everyone is gone. On Sunday mornings out here, there used to be cars. And now there's nothing. They call it a ghost town. They're going to turn us into a ghost town. So when I was in Florida in summer of last year, the state had enacted some of the nation's toughest laws targeting people without legal status.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Yeah, and I think that there's like this idea that the immigrant dream is for the immigrant themselves. But I've never met an immigrant that has the dream for themselves. I think there's like every time I've spoken to an immigrant, there's like this acknowledgement that life is going to continue to be very difficult.
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
Maybe less difficult than it was back home, but that the reason you're doing this is actually for your kids. Yeah. And, you know, there's been so many policy changes that it's become hard to see the forest for the trees. Like, where are we heading?
Up First from NPR
Fear and Dreaming in the USA
What I really started to see clearly when I was in Nebraska was how this constant state of fear would make the kind of social mobility that Berta dreams about for her daughter really hard.