How undocumented families are navigating the looming threat of ICE

How could your favorite NPR podcast get any better? Well, what if it had bonus features such as extended interviews and zero sponsor breaks? There is a remarkably easy way to turn that fantasy into reality. It's called NPR Plus. You get perks across more than 25 NPR podcasts while supporting the teams that make them. Make great podcasts even greater by visiting plus.NPR.org. Hey everyone, you're listening to Code Switch. I'm B.A. Parker. And today we have Jasmine Gars joining us. Jasmine covers immigration on NPR's national desk. Hey Jasmine, welcome back to Code Switch. Hey Parker, thanks for having me again. So what do you have for us today? So Parker, what do you think of when you think of Florida? I mean, it depends. It's so big. Florida, I think of Disney World and I think of Zornill Hurston. But I also think of like Florida, man. Okay, true. I went to none of those Florida's this summer. Instead, I spent the summer knocking on the doors of people who opened them just to crack before letting me into almost always dark living rooms where the curtains were always drawn. They offered me a cafecito as they spoke in hush tones about what's been happening. That voice you're hearing is a woman I spent a lot of time with. We're referring to her by her initial F because she and her husband, like most people in this episode who asked for an enmity, are undocumented and they're very scared of the current crackdown. She's from Guatemala, her husband is from El Salvador and one of the first things she told me from her dimly-lit room was, I don't doubt God, but I don't always understand God. And she says she's been thinking this ever since the time her husband disappeared. If you want to know what the future of immigration enforcement looks like, I think you should look to Florida. Under the leadership of Republican Governor Randy Santis, Florida has promised to be at the forefront of the nation's immigration crackdown. And the state has passed some of the most severe immigration laws in the country, forbidding undocumented people from having driver's license, deploying highway patrol for immigration policing, and for at least a year making it a crime of human trafficking to drive an undocumented person into the state. And this has pushed a lot of immigrant communities into hiding over the summer. I think many people outside of the state have a feel for what has been happening, but not at the level of detail. I think what's happening right now is we're seeing on social media these images, these videos, these photos, they contain this really explosive violence, it's on the news, it's on social media, it's in your face. But there's another shift that's happening in our country. And that's happening behind closed doors, it's happening in conversations that families are having. And what I want to do today is tell you about that silent shift. All right Jasmine, take it away. This message comes from Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive an up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit Wise.com, tease and seize apply. This is our glass. On this American life, we look for stories that are surprising and you won't hear anywhere else. Like for example, this one astronaut who went to the moon, you know what he's not into? Space. Was it cool to float around weightless? No, no, no. This American life, tiny expected stories, wherever you get your podcasts. Valentine's Day is coming up and the perfect gift for the NPR lover in your life is waiting at the NPR shop. From cozy sweaters and mugs made for slow mornings to our tiny desk hoodie, there's something for every NPR fan. Each purchase supports public media and the journalism you love. Find something meaningful at shopNPR.org. On Planet Money, we have covered a lot of topics. Like just try searching something on the internet and adding planet money to the end of it. Terrific prices, Planet Money, that's an episode. Stop sign war, Planet Money, that too. Alaska Halibut Derby, Planet Money. If you can ask it, we have probably answered it. Planet Money. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go back to F's house. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to that very low-lit living room. In a corner, there was something I see a lot in houses as I travel that state. There were stacks of water bottles, canned food, baby supplies. Like most folks I spoke to in F's situation. She was trying to leave the house as little as possible. She and her husband have been here for about 20 years. She asked that I not say the name of her baby boy, but I can tell you that as per her explanation, it means God is merciful and she says she thinks about this often lately. The couple tried to get pregnant for 12 years. She says 12 years. There were three miscarriages. And then it happened. She finally got pregnant about a year ago. She saw it as a miracle. A Fort Lauderdale, where she lives, is about an hour drive from the Everglades swamp. It's in the middle of summer. It's impossibly hot that time of year. And in the late afternoon, the cicada screamed loudest. F says during her pregnancy, she would lie down in bed and the coolness of the house and close her eyes imagining her son. She drummed him up before he even arrived. I imagined him beautiful, but I could never picture his face. And when he finally did arrive, the family would go out a lot, sometimes to the swamp lands in the Everglades to go fishing. On this one trip back in June, while F's husband was fishing for perch, she took a break to breastfeed in her car. And this is where she was when her husband got approached by a fish and wildlife officer asking for his fishing license. And then the officer asked for his driver's license. Now undocumented immigrants can't have driver's licenses in Florida. So the wildlife officer called ICE agents. This is a video she took of that interaction. She took it from the car. You can see she's kind of like hiding the phone near the bottom of the window. The kid's music is still on and it's it's strange, you know, watching the footage of ICE agents showing up to the tune of children's songs. She told me that the wildlife officer who called the ICE agents was a Latina. I'm tells me this every single time we speak, a pale Latina like you, she says, pointing at me. She was white, but she said, ICE arrived. She said she watched the agents talking to her husband. The whole family got detained by immigration officials that day. They were taken to a local jail where she was separated from her husband. She said she would tell the baby we're going to get out of here soon, but she says she was panicked. She's diabetic. She'd been nursing the baby and didn't have enough water. To drink. She said she felt weak. As she retells it, that's when she heard a knock on the wall. I told the baby that's your father. She says they kept tapping on the wall back and forth for the next eight hours. She knows it was him because she caught a glimpse of him in the adjacent cell as she was released later that night. This was the last time she saw her husband. Before she was let go, authorities put an ankle monitor on her. She says she felt her son's eyes on her as they placed it on her ankle. I said baby, it's an ankle monitor. It's okay. She points to her ankle as she tells me the story. She's wearing very cute crocs, the kind with like little charms on them. A watermelon, a jolly rancher. You almost like don't see that there's an ankle monitor. At the jail, authorities told her she has three months to leave the country, but what no one would tell her was where her husband had been taken. He disappeared, she says. She uses this word to describe her fear. I turned opaque. Jasmine, I often hear about these family separations and they always seem so terrifying. Although we got to say this isn't necessarily a new practice when it comes to immigration enforcement, right? President Obama and Biden also did this, though I feel like it didn't make quite as many headlines during their administrations. But is there something that makes what's happening now different from other administrations or even Trump's first term? Well, I would say a sort of impunity. I mean during this current Trump term, unlike in others, government officials have said very clearly, having an American citizen child does not protect undocumented immigrants from deportation. In fact, we've seen American citizens themselves getting detained. But you know, beyond family separations, what I keep encountering in my reporting is disappearances. Days, sometimes even weeks in which a family does not know where their loved one is. And going back to F for the next three days after her release, F says she called immigration officials scoured the federal immigration detention website, but she could not find her husband. And meanwhile, on the TV and on social media, F was starting to hear about this new detention facility. Officials are calling it alligator alcatraz. Aligator Alcatraz. It was run by the state of Florida and in the Everglades swamp, not far from where they'd gone fishing that weekend. The last time she saw him. This facility will have some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet. The facility was close to a rarely used airfield with tents and caged cells for up to 5,000 migrant detainees. And it was built in a matter of days, very hastily by the state of Florida to hold with homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, referred to as "the worst scum bags." But Jasmine, even putting aside the problems with describing human beings as scum bags, the people being sent to alligator alcatraz were largely not people who had committed particularly vicious crimes, right? Right. So according to DHS statistics, 53% of immigration detainees had either pending charges or a conviction. And the rest had no criminal record. And you know, I should clarify, even for those who do have criminal convictions, being held without proper food, air, water, or full-on disappearances, this is not how we have agreed to treat people in detention in this country. So is F's husband taken to alligator alcatraz? That was her fear. She would turn on the TV and see talk of a facility so secure, no criminal could possibly break out of it. And she says she would think about her husband. A man in his late 40s, who owns a landscaping business, who's active in the church, he goes fishing, and she had a feeling that he'd been sent there. But wherever he was, she knew she needed to find him. So she contacted a Florida immigration lawyer named Jeff Batelow. Well, I mean, she was desperate. She was desperate first for help. To be clear, Batelow doesn't represent F or her husband, but at the time he agreed to help try and, you know, at least locate the guy. So how did he go about that? Well, he tried to call a bunch of numbers, and eventually he got to the Florida Attorney General's office, and he asked for a number for alligator alcatraz. And the operator was silent for a moment. And she kind of froze for a second and said, "Sir, I don't have a number for alligator alcatraz." Like, I couldn't believe it. I was like, what are we in Russia? What is this? Like, you don't have a number for a facility where the government of the state of Florida is housing immigrants? After four days of hearing nothing, nothing. For four days, F gets a call at three a.m. It was her husband. He was, in fact, exactly where she had feared he'd be. He said it was horrible. She says the electricity goes out, and so does the air conditioning, the heat becomes suffocating. There's not enough water, so they can only shower once a week. And this was happening this past summer, but were they supposed to close alligator alcatraz? You know, I think a lot of people think that, and I think it's because in August, alligator alcatraz was ordered closed by a federal court. And then, shortly thereafter, a federal appeals court said it could remain open. The Trump administration has praised the facility and said it's a blueprint for other detention centers in the country. Similar centers have been announced nationwide further north in Florida, the so-called deportation depot in Indiana. A center nicknamed the Speedway Slammer in Nebraska, a place dubbed the Corn Husker clink. In any case, back to F. A few months ago, her husband was moved out of alligator alcatraz. He's in Texas now awaiting deportation. And she says she's planning on leaving the country. As soon as it happens, she says she's out. She keeps saying this thing. She says this country that I desired so much. She repeats it a couple of times and then she sort of trails off. She's been taking medication for the anxiety. And you know, Parker, that's something that like people rarely talk about. Like the sheer amount of women who I have met who are taking medication to calm their nerves because something like this happened to them. I mean, yeah, they're in a constant state of panic. That's understandable. Yeah, so she's taking this medication. It makes her a little sleepy. In fact, there was like, like a drowsiness to the whole house. Like the way the curtains were always drawn, the stuffiness, the distance cream of the cicadas, the constant penumbra. It was like, like forever nap time opaque as F would say. Before I left, I asked this pretty heavy question that was on my mind, which is would she ever consider leaving her boy here with family? You know, he is an American citizen and she has a sister who is legally in the U.S. And she said, no, she said she was done. She said when she was pregnant with that boy and she would lie down and dream him up, she told him. I always want to be with you. She had a lot of American dreams back then. And he is the only one that came true. When we come back, Jasmine drives to Marilyn and speaks with a mom who is taking unusual steps to keep her kids safe. My mom tell me it's gonna be okay. I worry too something will happen to her like something will get her. That's coming up. Stay with us. This week on Consider This, it's called an AI spiral. When a person communicating with an AI chatbot loses touch with reality. When I thought I was communicating with the digital God, I got dopamine from every prompt. Artificial intelligence, human consequences. This week on Consider This, listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you ever feel like no matter how many hours of sleep you got, you're still fatigued. We have to be able to differentiate sleep from the different ways that we can rest. On the life kit podcast, the seven types of rest and why each one is important to living a full, healthy life. Listen to the life kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. On the through line podcast from NPR, the former slaveholder who took on the KKK and won. It became more and more and more militant as time went on. Listen to through line in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Parker. Jasmine. Code switch. And we're back talking about how the Trump administration's immigration policies have upended the lives of immigrant moms and their families and how they're planning for an uncertain future in this country. Here's Jasmine again. The kids say this summer was the summer of nothing, but it was boring as hell. Nothing happened, nothing at all. We didn't go anywhere. One mother in Maryland told me she quietly lost her mind this summer. We spent it locked down, she says, we didn't go out. The weather was bad the day I drove down there to the southern part of the state where rivers and creeks criss-crossed the land. It was late August hurricane season and tropical storm Aaron had led to coastal flooding warnings up and down the mid-Atlantic. I kept kind of eyeing the water nervously every time I crossed a bridge. I was going to check in with a family I wrote about earlier this year for a story about self deportation. Now self deportation is one of the center pieces of the Trump administration's immigration policy. The message from the government has been take your kids with you. They can always come back as adults. But back when we first met last winter, this mother in Maryland told me very firmly she would under no circumstances self deport with her children. My children were born here. She says they are American citizens. This mother asked that I refer to her as M. M and her husband live in a pretty rural area of Maryland and they are both from Guatemala. They're also both undocumented. M's husband desperately wants to self deport. He is really out there in the world every day working as a landscaper. And he's quite worried about being detained and taken to a detention center. And he says she just doesn't understand that it's not the same for her. She works from home making pinatas and party favors for Guinsanillas, weddings, birthdays. The couple fights about this constantly. The kids see it and it gives them bad anxiety. Back in the winter when we first met her youngest daughter, her seven-year-old, first initial L, had a cold. She kept having to be sent home from school. The real reason was because she was having panic attacks. After we met that one time, M and I stayed in touch. She would send me WhatsApp messages almost every day, you know, pictures of her pinatas and stuff your theosons on WhatsApp, you know, daily blessing, softly lit images of flowers or kittens or kittens inside flowers with some motivational quote. And I'd ask about the kids. How is everyone doing? Has the family made any decisions? And then around the beginning of summer, radio silence. After a few weeks of not hearing anything from M, I reached out. I could tell my messages hadn't even gone through. I started to wonder if maybe M or her husband got arrested, deported, or maybe they finally agreed to leave to self-deport. It was strange that I hadn't heard from her, but this has sort of become a constant in my life as an immigration reporter. For the last few months, on a regular basis, I will have an extraordinarily intimate conversation with a complete stranger. Or someone will find my phone number and call me from inside a detention center and they will tell me their worst fear, their desperation. They will ask me what I know as if I know and then that person will just vanish. It's like my WhatsApp is filled with ghosts. So yeah, over the summer, when I stopped hearing from them, I decided to go check in on this family. And as I drove to Southern Maryland in the storm, I was really unsure of what I was going to find. But as I approached the driveway, someone drew the curtain and these four faces pressed up against the window and it was M and the kids and they immediately bolted out, smiling and running to say hello. Even though she was wearing not-platform shoes, she was wearing wedges, which was kind of hilarious because people running and jogging and heels is very funny. Just happy to see you. She looked the same, even though she's lost all her weight. She says her stomach hurts a lot. So I know her nevios. She still got these very ready cheeks and she laughs at everything. She has an infectious, raspy laughter. She's always dressed really cute. You know, she reminds me of a little like Fran dresser. It sometimes it throws me off. Like she'll be talking about how she had to hide in her house all summer and it really affected her psychologically. And then once we were inside the house, M apologized for going silent. She explained that her phone broke earlier this summer and she just couldn't afford to buy a new one. The party planning business, it's not going very well. She says people Latino immigrants in particular aren't doing a lot of celebrating lately. M's husband still wants to go back to Guatemala. Earlier this summer, he was at work at a landscaping job when ICE agents showed up. He went to his car to lay low and he sent M a message on Facebook. They're here. I'm seven-year-old Elle explains. One day, when they were working, ICE came there. How did you know about that? Because our dad sent us a message. And how did that make you feel? Sad. I'm so shouldn't eat at all that day. My bones hurt from the anxiety. We locked ourselves in. I was scared. And that event sent the family into a sort of lockdown for the entire summer, hence the summer of nothing. The family was stuck indoors in their small trailer home for three whole summer months. With four children, ages one to twelve. As M and I talk, her youngest boy has climbed on top of the laundry machine and is throwing out about a hundred give or take plastic Easter eggs onto the floor. The baby she's rocking is unbeknownst to her, pointing a very large bottle of glue at me, like directly at my face. And then her seven-year-old walks in, holding an upside-down cap. She held a strand of her hair, and in true M style, made a joke. I didn't have these white hair as last time we met. Did I? It's not all jokes. The eldest kid, Kay, says this summer was actually incredibly boring. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. You're boring because we didn't go anywhere. Kay is twelve, and you can really like hear her adolescence simmering. This summer, she was selected to go to a STEM summer camp for kids who are interested in science. Her parents pulled her out. They told her the family had to hunker down. All summer activities were canceled. My husband had to explain to them. M says, "You are U.S. citizens, but we are not. If we take you to the aquarium to the pool, we could get detained. We could get deported." Without looking at her mom, Kay says she's excited about school starting again. But I was filled with questions. Like, "What if immigration agents come for me while my kids are in school or as I'm picking them up?" And, "Can immigration agents go into the school?" Can they ask my kids about our legal status? I heard concerns like this from a lot of parents. "Oh, can they?" I actually reached out to Ylora McCurge to ask about this. She's a professor of law at Columbia Law School, and also the director of the immigration rights clinic at the school. And what do McCurge say? "There are no confirmed reports of ICE raids or ICE enforcements inside of schools." McCurge says she understands the fear, though, because almost as soon as President Trump took office, in January, these previously designated locations like schools and churches and hospitals were deemed no longer off limits for immigration enforcement. But she clarifies that agents, and this is really important, agents need a warrant to go into a school. Parents and children cannot be asked about their immigration status by the school. However, just a few weeks ago, in Chicago, a teacher, you might have seen this, Parker, was chased by armed immigration officers into the preschool she works at. DHS said they weren't targeting the school itself, but you can see how the lines for many parents and students feel blurry. So, back then, her kids started school in the fall, like kids all over the country. And then, a few days later, I got this audio message from her. She had a phone again. She's standing about a block away from the school bus stop. The Sheriff's Department is there. She has to pick the kids up, but she's scared. But an hour later, I got another out of breath message. They made it home. "I froze," she says. She grabbed the kids and they ran back home. "It's okay now," she repeats. "It's okay. Nothing happened." And then she laughs and says, "I got as cold as a cucumber, though." That first week of school, I'm so she did wait a lot of parents across America did. She caught up on her sleep. And then, she did something a lot of parents never consider doing. She reached out to a friend who is an American citizen and started the paper work to give emergency guardianship. In case she or her husband get picked up by ice. And that's our show. But this Saturday, you'll hear the second part of this episode, where we talk to a mom who's taking on this role of emergency guardian. You're just kind of like, "Man, we don't have to go through with this." Not because we wouldn't gladly welcome this kid into our home, but because the impetus for doing that would be something horrible. You can follow us on Instagram @NPRCodeSwitch. If email is more your thing, ours is [email protected]. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to this code switch newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter. Just a reminder that signing up for CodeSwitch Plus is a great way to support our show and public media. And you'll get to listen to every episode sponsor free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/codeSwitch. This episode was produced by Javier Lopez. It was edited by Leah Danella, our engineer with Quesi Lee. And a very special thanks to Courtney Stein. And a big shout out to the rest of the CodeSwitch Massive, Christina College, Jessica, Dalian Mortada, Villain Williams, and Jean Dimby. I'm B.A. Parker. I'm Jasmine Garst. Hydrate. Quince a motor tigose. It is hard to get a house. Getting that down payment together? Brutal. You shipped off to Djibouti to afford a down payment for a house? Yes sir. 100%. On planning money, the high price of housing. What the Trump administration is trying to do about it? And will it work? On Weight Weight, don't tell me it's not so much we get to talk to celebrities. It's that we get to talk to celebrities about other celebrities like we did with actor Nathan Lane. I remember having to tell George C Scott that I was leaving the show to do this musical. And he said to me, you're leaving me to do a magic show? Listen to Weight Weight in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Sources and methods is NPR's national security podcast when world news changes by the hour. We help you zoom out to understand shifting alliances, global flashpoints and what is really happening in places like Iran, Venezuela, Greenland. Our reporters on the ground connect the dots to explain a world order changing beneath their feet. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.