At a clothing store in Tampa, Florida, a woman identified only as E realized it was time to leave. She had taken her daughter to pick out a birthday outfit for the girl’s 15th birthday, but felt the salespeople were staring and sizing them up. Worried someone might call immigration, she told her daughter they needed to go. The encounter left the family thinking it might be time to leave the state as well.
E asked that only her first initial be used because she and her husband are undocumented. They disagree about where to go. E wants to return to Guatemala as soon as possible. Her daughter, now in high school, wants to stay in Florida. Her husband, who has lived in the United States for about 20 years, feels it is home.
Still, Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis has pursued some of the nation’s toughest state-level immigration measures, aligning with the Trump administration’s enforcement priorities. The husband escaped arrest when a construction-site raid happened while he was not working. The family knows multiple people who have been deported, including their pastor, and that helped push them to accept an offer from a neighbor to move north to a small Michigan town where, they were told, things are quieter and jobs are available.
There are no precise counts of how many undocumented immigrants are moving within the United States, but demographers and community leaders say internal migration is an important and growing effect of stepped-up enforcement. Matt Brooks, a demographer at Florida State University, says migration to the U.S. often comes in stages: newcomers typically arrive in large metropolitan areas, then relocate to the South or Midwest for work in agriculture or manufacturing, and in some cases move again to towns that appear to be low-profile when it comes to immigration raids.
Brooks points to Mississippi after a 2019 operation that swept food-processing plants near Jackson. The raids prompted many immigrants to leave the state, and migration flows show significantly more people departing than arriving afterward.
The Trump administration has said about 1.6 million immigrants have left the country voluntarily, a figure it presents as evidence of so-called self-deportation. But researchers and community advocates say another consequence is internal relocation: people fleeing enforcement hotspots to communities they perceive as safer.
For some, moves are sudden and desperate. A Salvadoran man identified as R., who is seeking asylum, described leaving Nebraska after a large raid at a meat-packing plant created panic in local immigrant communities. He says he spent a night in his factory parking lot weighing whether to go to work the next day or leave the state. A few days later he drove more than 20 hours to a small North Carolina city a friend recommended as quiet and unlikely to draw enforcement attention. He found work on a roofing crew and reports that life there has been calmer, with fewer Latinos around and, so far, fewer raids.
These relocations are hard to measure, but they are reshaping where immigrant families live and work. Some choose to hunker down where they are; others cross state lines seeking places where enforcement appears less intense. For families like E.’s, the decision to move is not just about jobs or schools but about safety and the hope of keeping their family intact.