Up First from NPR - Fear and Dreaming in the USA

Episode Date: April 6, 2025

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

I'm Ayesha 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 Garz 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 Maddie.

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. 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 Maddie, 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. And in many places, these measures have instilled a lot of fear. When we come back, a conversation with NPR's Jasmine Gargst, stay with us. This message comes from Wyse, the app for doing things in other currencies, sending or spending money abroad. Hidden fees may be taking a cut. With Wyse, you can convert between up to 40 currencies at the mid-market exchange rate. Visit wyze.com, TNCs apply.

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We're back with NPR's immigration reporter, Jasmine Garst. Jasmine, welcome. Hi, Aisha. So let's head to Fort Myers, Florida. This was a city you visited in the spring of 2024. Why were you down there? 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 reiteros, like everywhere I went there were posters or little business cards offering reites. And reite is a word that comes from ride, like car ride. 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. But instead, I met a lot of church ladies. Now, if you can imagine 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. 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. So tell me about her. Yeah, so Maddie is a resident of the US. 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. 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, to some of the women who are here without legal status. She started taking people to the supermarket to get food. Then she started taking kids to school, and it became like this little mini business. 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. 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. They're going to turn this into a ghost town. Is Fort Myers unique or is this something that's happening throughout Florida? 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 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.

Have you gone to other states and seen similar situations where people are fleeing or staying out of sight? You know, I spent a lot of time in Springfield, Ohio, where the rising xenophobia and lies, just outright lies about Haitian immigrants, 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. 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. 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. 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 hard-working people to which I asked. Do you worry that they're going to get deported? Like the mass deportation? I, you know, I, no, I don't worry about that. I think, I think they'll, they will facilitate those who are here to work, either with the green cards or the other exemptions that already exist in the immigration laws, so that the folks that are here to work probably are going to be allowed to continue to work. I think, I mean, what they've said so far is the folks they're going after are the

criminals with criminal histories. And I'm not sure anybody has a real objection to that. I think things are going to calm down. Do you think he, Trump, I mean, I'm assuming you voted for him. I did. Do you think he is like what we need. Like he's a solution. I think he can be if he stopped doing stupid tweets. Which I think he's done pretty well on.

And before he says anything stupid, take a deep breath and maybe think. Think it through. What do you like about him? Well, I think he's a changemaker, he's a businessman, and I like that. And we should just remind everybody, you were talking to all of these people before Trump had even taken office,

you know, at this point. But I imagine that you probably heard something different from many of the immigrants in Nebraska, or did you? So, you know, it's interesting, and it's worth noting that across the country, many immigrants who have become US 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 and it is common knowledge that many of them work in the meat packing 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 and the light. I've never seen light like that before. It's just eerie and stunning 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. And I was kind of freaking out about that because like, 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 Reynita, little queen. Um, now if you can imagine like this secret tropical bubble in the middle of this frozen industrial tundra. That's Reynita. 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, 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. hear me out, is that nostalgia was the secret ingredient. 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. Right now people have a lot of fear. They prefer to be at home rather than going out. Do you feel that now, in this moment? Yeah, people don't want to go out to eat anymore, not even to go dancing. Like the young people who used to go out to eat anymore, not even to go dancing. Like the young people who used to come out to dance, even if it was just to come for

a drink. They don't come out anymore because they are afraid that they will get caught. They prefer to just stay at home. 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. Well, I always pray to God that I don't have to close here and go back to work at the factory. The factories are difficult. The entire shift is standing in the same place. Every day I came back home with my shoulders

and so much pain from lifting those big pieces of pork. Yeah, 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. God willing, she's going to be a lawyer. And then she asked me this question. She says, you know what I always think to myself? Oh my God, why wasn't I born here? Why didn't I born here?

Or why didn't I go to school here to be able to speak English like white people? Because I mean, if I knew how to speak English, I would have already eaten this country up. If I had good English, right? Perhaps my daughter will have the opportunity to achieve her dream, her American dream, because she was born here. I tell her, you are already flying. You are going to get what you want. She's going to be what we could not be.

The dream of your child being able to have those opportunities that you didn't have. I didn't get to do these things, but you, my child, my offspring, maybe not, maybe it's my grandchildren, but you're going to do it. That is very American as well. Yeah. And I think that there's 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, maybe less difficult than it was back home, but that the reason you're doing this is actually

for your kids. 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? 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 Bertha dreams about for her daughter really hard. So you were already starting to see this extreme fear, this kind of almost a paralysis in Nebraska in the lead up to Trump's inauguration.

I know you were in Illinois soon after Trump actually took office. What were you seeing and hearing there? 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? 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. Yeah, 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. 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. When we come back, people waiting in line at a food bank express their own feelings of disorientation and fear. Stay with us. You have your job, but you also have a life. And you're not just one thing. Neither is the Here and Now Anytime podcast. Every weekday, we break down the biggest story of the day and something else, like a new

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So, Jasmine, when you were in Waukegan, Illinois in January, you went to a food bank hosted by a church in a Latino community. What was the mood like there? 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 coffee. And I think I remember her hat because there was something very

youthful and quirky about it. 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 and she told me she had not been to the doctor. She hadn't been going to the doctor for fear of crackdowns in 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. now. Yeah, it was like watching a health crisis really unfold in that moment. 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 US 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 maybe someday they can come back. They are US 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. Well, 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 non-profit organization called Siembra NC. It's an immigrant workers rights organization and one of the members, José, 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 US 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 miss showing a correction. See, now you're catering to everybody here. Yes. But I'll allow it. Durham is my hometown. Oh, really?

So I'll allow it. Oh, wow. Okay. I didn't know that. Okay. Yeah. So I miss showing 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. Oh, no, I couldn't sleep. She's saying, know during the day I'd be so tired 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 US, 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, 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 get hurt. And he advised her to take the kids to get their US passport. 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. You mentioned Jose, her husband, is involved in activism. How does that fit into this climate of fear? 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. 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 Elle. We're dropping her last name because, you know, she's concerned about repercussions for her activism. She's an immigrant from Mexico and in her free time she volunteers to talk to US-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? 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. 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. 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. One day, very soon, it is what I most desire. Jasmine, thank you so much for joining us today and for all of your reporting. Thanks for having me. Correspondent Jasmine Garst is with NPR's immigration team. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo

and was edited by Jenny Schmidt and Leona Simstrom. The mix engineer for this episode was Quacey Lee. Fact checking for this episode was done by Katie Doggart. The Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. We always love hearing from you, so feel free to reach out to us at thesundaystory at npr.org. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. Up First is back in your feed tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend. Do you remember when discovering a new artist felt like finding buried treasure? At All Songs Considered, NPR's music recommendation podcast, we put that kind of magic back into

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