How undocumented families are navigating the looming threat of ICE

This message comes from Data IQ. AI is everywhere, but companies struggle to prove results. For that, they need people, orchestration, and governance working as one. Data IQ is the platform for AI success, built to bring it all together. Visit D-A-T-A-I-U.com slash NPR. Hey, everyone, you're listening to Code Switch. I'm Bea Parker. And today we have Jasmine Garz to joining us. Jasmine covers immigration on NPR's national desk. Hey, Jasmine. Welcome back to Code Switch. Hey, Parker. Thanks for having me again. All right, 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 Doranil Hurston, but I also think of like Florida man. Okay, true. Um, 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 a crack before letting me into almost always dark living rooms where the curtains were always drawn. They offered me a cafe-cito as they spoke in hushed tones about what's been happening.

That voice you're hearing is of 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 anonymity, 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's going to be something that God wants to do. I don't know. 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 Ron DeSantis, 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 that 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.

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Data IQ. AI agents are transforming how enterprises work. The problem is many operate in secret. The right people rarely know what their agents are doing, if they're doing it right, or that they even exist at all. Dataiku gives companies one place to see, control, and measure every agent across the entire business. Visit dataiku.com slash NPR. That's d-A-T-A-I-U.com slash NPR. This message comes from Amazon Health. Why is it that every visit to the doctor's office requires filling out pages of paperwork? Amazon Health AI is different. With your permission, it can connect you with your health history to get you personalized care fast. Amazon Health AI is here. Health care just got less painful. This message comes from Rosetta Stone, offering an alternative approach to language learning. Moving past rote memorization, the app guides users to intuitively think in a second language using images and contextual audio, mimicking how people acquire speech as children. The platform also includes advanced speech recognition technology that compares a learner's pronunciation directly with native speakers to refine accent precision. Learn more about their new Rosetta Stone Sapphire app at Rosettastone.com. 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. My son is a miracle of God. I was a much, much of a A Fort Lauderdale, where she lives, is about an hour drive from the Everglade Swamp. It's in the middle of summer. It's impossibly hot that time of year. And in the late afternoon, the cicadas scream the loudest. Epsis during her pregnancy, she would lie down in bed in the coolness of the house and close her eyes, imagining her son. She dreamt 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. So 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 kids' music is still on and 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 spoke Spanish, and I could see she hated us, she says. 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. He took the wall. He took and I say to the baby, it's papa, he And 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 said she felt her son's eyes on her as they placed it on her ankle. And I said, baby, it's an ankle monitor. It's okay. She points to her ankle as she tells me this 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. And 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? Presidents 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, like, 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. Meanwhile, on the TV and on social media, F was starting to hear about this new detention facility. Officials are calling it alligator alcatraz. Nicknamed alligator alcatraz. It was run by the state of Florida out in the Everglades swamp, not far from where they'd gone fishing that weekend the last time she saw him. This facility will house 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 would Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem referred to as, quote, the worst scumbags. But Jasmine, even putting aside the problems with describing human beings as scumbags. 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 was 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 Betelow. Well, I mean, she was desperate. She was desperate for help. To be clear, Betelow 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? It's 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 3 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 weren't 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 Cornhusker 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 a drowsiness to the whole house, like the way the curtains were always drawn, the stuffiness, the distant scream of the cicadas, the constant panumbra. It was like... Like forever nap time, opaque, as F. would say. Before I left, I asked F. 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. So 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 going to be okay. I worry if something will happen to her, like something will get her. That's coming up. Stay with us. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Data IQ. AI agents are transforming how enterprises work. The problem is many operate in secret. The right people rarely know what their agents are doing, if they're doing it right, or that they even exist at all. Dataiku gives companies one place to see, control, and measure every agent across the entire business. Visit dataiku.com slash NPR. That's d-A-T-A-I-U.com slash NPR. This message comes from Amazon Health. Why is it that every visit to the doctor's office requires filling out pages of paperwork? Amazon Health AI is different. With your permission, it can connect you with your health history to get you personalized care fast. Amazon Health AI is here. Health care just got less painful. This message comes from Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Stone is designed to make language learning intuitive. It mimics how people naturally acquire speeches children, helping users read, write, and think in a second language. More at rosettastone.com. We've just marked one year since Congress voted to eliminate federal funding for public media. NPR remains committed to informing the public, but a free press doesn't just happen. It's something we need to protect. Without federal funding, we are relying on your support now. Please show your support before the end of the month. Visit plus.npr.org. 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. Encerra, 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-crass 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 centerpieces 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 ginsianitas, 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. I feel frustrated sometimes. I would just feel sad. My mom tell me it's going to be okay. I worry if something will happen to her, like something will give her. 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 Tia sends you on WhatsApp, you know, a 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. 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, like, 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. Aww. running and jogging and heels is very funny to me. Just happy to see you. Yeah. She looked the same, even though she lost a lot of weight. She says her stomach hurts a lot. So on the nervous. She's still got these very reddy 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 Dresher. 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, Em 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. Em'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 Em a message on Facebook. They're here. M's 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. And so she didn't eat at all that day. My bones hurt our cells in. I was scared. I was scared. 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 12. 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 cat. Oh my god, the cat. She held a strand of her hair and in true M style made a joke. I didn't have these white hairs 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. Boring. Because we didn't go anywhere. Kay is 12, 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 a little, for example, an aquarium, or that's, or a casino, or hotels, there's much in migration, we're going to deporting us. My husband had to explain to them, and 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 Elora McCurgy 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 McCurgy say? There are no confirmed reports of ICE raids or ICE enforcement inside of schools. McCurgy 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 to him, 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. About an hour later, and get 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. Nothing happened. And then she laughs and says. I got as cold as a cucumber, though.

That first week of school, Emsa, she did what 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 paperwork 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, I hope 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 at NPR Code Switch. If email is more your thing, ours is Code Switch at npr.org. 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 slash code switch newsletter. And just a reminder that signing up for Code Switch 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 slash code switch. This episode was produced by Javier Lopez. It was edited by Leah Danela, our engineer with Quasi Lee. And a very special thanks to Courtney Stein. And a big shout out to the rest of the code switch massive. Christina Kala, Jess Kung, Dali Mortata, Vireland Williams, and Gene Demby. I'm B.A. Parker. I'm Jasmine Garst. Hydrate. Cguyenza much, chikas. This message comes from Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Stone is designed to make language learning intuitive. It mimics how people naturally acquire speeches children, helping users read, write, and think in a second language. More at rosettastone.com.