Fear is consuming many immigrant communities since the nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration. This week on The Sunday Story, NPR Immigration Correspondent Jasmine Garsd travels from Florida to a meatpacking town in Nebraska to a food bank near Chicago and finally to North Carolina to find out how immigrants are coping with the current situation.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the impact of immigration policies on communities?
I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday story from Up First. Every Sunday, we do something special. We go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. Not too long ago, NPR's immigration correspondent Jasmine Gartz was at the laundromat in her predominantly Latino neighborhood in New York City. And this ad came on the wall-mounted TV that's always playing there.
It featured Kristi Noem, the U.S.
Secretary of Homeland Security. President Trump has a clear message for those that are in our country illegally. Leave now. If you don't, we will find you and we will deport you. You will never return.
This ad, it caught Jasmine's attention because she spent a lot of time over the last year talking to immigrants with and without legal status who are scrambling to adjust to this moment. People who have seen this coming for a while now. There's one woman in particular who really stuck with her.
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.
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.
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.
What Jasmine was seeing in Florida, it was kind of a foreshadowing of what was to happen around the country. Since President Donald Trump took office, he's taken unprecedented measures to crack down on illegal immigration. And in many places, these measures have instilled a lot of fear. When we come back, a conversation with NPR's Jasmine Garst. Stay with us.
We're back with NPR's immigration reporter, Jasmine Garst. Jasmine, welcome. Hi, Ayesha. So let's head to Fort Myers, Florida. This was a city you visited in the spring of 2024. Why were you down there?
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Chapter 2: How are immigrants in Florida adapting to new laws?
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.
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.
Can you take us to one of those conversations that you witnessed?
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.
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.
on this side of the border. I'm issuing a correction.
See, now you're catering to everybody here.
Yes.
But I'll allow it. Durham is my hometown.
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