--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday story from Up First.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Every Sunday, we do something special. We go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Not too long ago, NPR's immigration correspondent Jasmine Garst was at the laundromat in her predominantly Latino neighborhood in New York City.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: People who have seen this coming for a while now.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: There's one woman in particular who really stuck with her.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And I'm hanging out with this woman. She's this older church lady. Her name is Mari.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And she says this thing to me about a popular Sunday market, in the city.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And these days, I think a lot about what she said.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So what now, she asked me.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Everyone is gone.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: On Sunday mornings out here, there used to be cars, and now there's nothing.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They call it a ghost town.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They're going to turn us into a ghost town.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And suddenly this fear had taken hold and people told me they were scared.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They were scared to go to the hospital, scared to go to school.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She was helping out some of these immigrants who didn't have legal status.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: What Jasmine was seeing in Florida, it was kind of a foreshadowing of what was to happen around the country.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Since President Donald Trump took office, he's taken unprecedented measures to crack down on illegal immigration.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And in many places, these measures have instilled a lot of fear.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: When we come back, a conversation with NPR's Jasmine Garst, stay with us.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Welcome back to Up First.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We're back with NPR's immigration reporter, Jasmine Garst.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Jasmine, welcome.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Hi, Aisha.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So let's head to Fort Myers, Florida. This was a city you visited in the spring of 2024.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Why were you down there?
--:-- Jasmine Garst: Yeah, so I was working on a story about the fear in the immigrant communities because of these new Florida laws and policies.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And I kept hearing about something called raiteros.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Like everywhere I went, there were posters or little business cards offering raites.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And raite is a word that comes from ride, like car ride.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Basically, when the new rules targeting immigrants without legal status went into effect in Florida, people started to get scared, especially scared of driving.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And and so this kind of underground transportation system took off.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Um 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 the cut off denim and the trucker hat.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And one of them was this woman, Mari.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She's the one I spoke to in the trailer park.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And she'd been driving people in part to make a little extra money.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You know, she offered kind of like a cheap Uber service, but also because she was really, really worried about the whole situation.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I mean, like, these are her friends and her neighbors who are very scared.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So tell me about her.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah. So Mari is a resident of the U.S. She's here legally with papers.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She's originally from Mexico.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And for a long time, she was married to an American guy.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They're now separated.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And she says that he was abusive.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So she started attending this domestic violence support group.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So she started offering rides, raides, to some of the women who are here without legal status.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She started taking people to the supermarket to get food.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And then she started taking kids to school and it became like this little mini business.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And she's saying, I've never seen anything like it.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Imagine being so scared of going to get food for your kids.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It broke my soul.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And then Mari told me that pretty soon people started heading further north to places that were friendlier to immigrants.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And so Mari kind of graduated to the interstate.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She does these long overnight trips, transporting entire families trying to get out of Florida.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And all of these people picking up and leaving, that's what Mari was referring to when she told me.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They're going to turn this into a ghost town.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Is Fort Myers unique or is this something that happening throughout Florida
--:-- Jasmine Garst: I found that it was happening throughout Florida
--:-- Jasmine Garst: I found a widespread fear particularly in agricultural areas
--:-- Jasmine Garst: I spent a lot of time in central Florida in like a park called Plant City, where a lot of workers had just picked up and left north.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Have you gone to other states and seen similar situations where people are fleeing or staying out of sight
--:-- Jasmine Garst: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And that's gotten so much coverage.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So I want to tell you a different story today about my trip to Nebraska in late December of last year.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Now, Nebraska has a huge labor shortage.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Nonetheless, the state overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And one of those people who told me that was a rancher I met.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: His name is Tim Thompson of North Platte.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: He drove me around his property.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It was dusk.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It's a small property.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: There were a lot of deer.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And as we sat there in his pickup truck watching the deer, I asked him about the workers and the beef plants.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And Rancher Tim told me he really appreciates them and that they're very hardworking people, to which I asked.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Do you worry that they're going to get deported?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Like the mass deportation?
--:-- Jasmine Garst: I, you know, I, no, I don't worry about that.
--:-- Jasmine Garst: I think 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.
--:-- Jasmine Garst: I think, I mean, what they've said so far is the folks they're going after are the criminals with criminal histories.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And I'm not sure anybody has a real objection to that.
--:-- Jasmine Garst: I think things are going to calm down.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Do you think he, Trump, I mean, I'm assuming you voted for him.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I did.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Do you think he is, like, what we need?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Like, he's a solution.
--:-- Jasmine Garst: I think he can be if he stopped doing stupid tweets, which I think he's done pretty well on.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And before he says anything stupid, take a deep breath and maybe think.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Think it through.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: What do you like about him?
--:-- Jasmine Garst: Well, I think he's a changemaker.
--:-- Jasmine Garst: He's a businessman, and I like that.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But I imagine that you probably heard something different from many of the immigrants in Nebraska, or did you
--:-- Jasmine Garst: So, you know, it's interesting, and it's worth noting that across the country, many immigrants who have become U.S. citizens appear to have shifted towards President Trump in 2024.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I mean, Trump may have, in fact, won the immigrant vote, or at least split it 50-50.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But in Nebraska, by many estimates, there's about 40,000 immigrants without legal status, and it is common knowledge that many of them work in the meatpacking plants.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And a lot of people I spoke to told me they were really afraid.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I spent a lot of my time in Fremont, Nebraska.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Let me paint a picture for you.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Nebraska has so many of these meatpacking towns.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Picture this.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It's the Great Plains, right?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So it's just really flat.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And the light, I've never seen light like that before.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It's just eerie and stunning.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And in that flatness, you see these factory towns with their billowing smokestacks, and you can see them on the horizon.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Sometimes you can smell them too long before you get there.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And so I got to Fremont to this meatpacking city and it was empty.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And I was kind of freaking out about that because like, you know, I'm a reporter.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm in town to talk to people and everyone is locked in their homes.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So I ended up going to this bar downtown.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It's called Reinita, Little Queen.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Now, if you can imagine like this secret tropical bubble in the middle of this frozen industrial tundra, that's Reinita.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: There were tropical flowers hanging everywhere and like this really loud, festive music.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But the place was totally empty.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It was like a deserted tropical island in the tundra.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I ended up speaking to the owner, Berta Guintero.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And she told me she built this place to seem like home, like Antigua, Guatemala.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Now, Berta has legal status.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And Aisha, I've got to say, she brought me some of the best pupusas I have ever eaten in my life.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The best ever.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And it's in Nebraska.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm prepared to go on record saying that those were the best pupusas I've ever had on this side of the Americas.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And my theory, hear me out, is that nostalgia was the secret ingredient.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Like these pupusas could only have been created in the nostalgia of an industrial town in the Great Plains in winter.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So anyway, I sat down with Bertha Quintero and we talked about fear, fear and dreams.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That's the title, I guess, of this chapter, fear and dreaming in Nebraska.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Right now, people have a lot of fear.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They prefer to be at home rather than going out.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah, people don't want to go out to eat anymore, not even to go dancing.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Like the young people who used to come out to dance, even if it was just to come for a drink.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They don't come out anymore because they are afraid that they will get caught.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They prefer to just stay at home.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Well, I always pray to God that I don't have to close here and go back to work at the factory.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The factories are difficult the entire shift standing in the same place every day
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I came back home with my shoulders in so much pain from lifting those big pieces of pork
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She was rubbing her shoulders as she told me this.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: God willing, she's going to be a lawyer.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And then she asked me this question.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She says, you know what I always think to myself?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Oh my God, why wasn't I born here?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Or why didn't I go to school here to be able to speak English by white people?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Because I mean, if I knew how to speak English, I would have already eaten this country up.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: If I had good English, right?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Perhaps my daughter will have the opportunity to achieve her dream, her American dream, because she was born here.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I tell her, you are already flying.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You are going to get what you want.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She's going to be what we could not be.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The dream of your child being able to have those opportunities that you didn't have.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That is very, that is very American as well.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And I think that there's like this idea that the immigrant dream is for the immigrant themselves.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But I've never met an immigrant that has the dream for themselves.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And you know, there's been so many policy changes that it's become hard to see the forest for the trees.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Like, where are we heading?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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 Berta dreams about for her daughter really hard.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I know you were in Illinois soon after Trump actually took office.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: What were you seeing and hearing there
--:-- Jasmine Garst: Yeah, so the Chicago area was one of the first places the Trump administration targeted for immigration raids.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So I wanted to be there.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It was late January of this year.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And, you know, I've often described covering immigration right now.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Like, do you remember that early scene?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yes, I do remember that.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Like, that's how it feels to be covering immigration right now.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And that feeling, that started when I went to the city of Waukegan, which is right by Chicago.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The feeling that life had suddenly moved underground.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I mean, people weren't accessing basic services like food pantries or medical services.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And people were actually starting to hide in their own houses.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: When we come back, people waiting in line at a food bank express their own feelings of disorientation and fear.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Stay with us.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Welcome back to Up First.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We're back with NPR's immigration reporter, Jasmine Garst.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So Jasmine, when you were in Waukegan, Illinois in January, you went to a food bank hosted by a church in a Latino community.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: What was the mood like there
--:-- Jasmine Garst: Um it was like a mix of somber and frenzy
--:-- Jasmine Garst: There's this one woman I remember especially a young Honduran woman her name is Rosa
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You know what I remember?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She was wearing an enormous slinky winter hat.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It was like the color of coffee.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And I think I remember her hat because there was something very youthful and quirky about it.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And she asked that we withhold her last name because she's really scared of deportation.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She said she was just spending her time at home.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She just wouldn't go outside out of fear of being deported.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And she told me she had not been to the doctor.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She hadn't been going to the doctor for fear of crackdowns in hospitals.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And that if things continued this way, she wasn't sure she'd go back to the doctor.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And I asked, well, how are you going to give birth?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And she said, it's in God's hands now.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah, it was like watching a health crisis really unfold in that moment.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I want us to get out of here.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: As in go back to her home country
--:-- Jasmine Garst: Yes right
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That was the first time someone said that to me.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: In fact the pastor who was in charge of the food bank told me that she been getting a lot of these inquiries
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: How do I get my kids a passport in case I want to leave?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So that, you know, maybe someday they can come back.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They are U.S. citizens.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So, you know, I don't know.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Well, can you take us to one of those conversations that you witnessed
--:-- Jasmine Garst: Yeah, so early this year, I went to the city of Durham, North Carolina.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Now, North Carolina is estimated to have over 300,000 people living in the state without legal status.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I was there to spend time with this nonprofit organization called Siembra NC.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It's an immigrant workers' rights organization, and one of the members, Jose, invited me over for dinner.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So Jose 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They have two small kids both are U.S. citizens.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And I do want to issue a correction on my earlier reporting.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Jose and his wife invited me to eat chicken pupusas, homemade chicken pupusas.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And those were actually the best pupusas I've ever had on this side of the border.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm issuing a correction.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So we sat there having dinner and we started having this really intimate conversation.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And Jose's wife she asked that we use her first initial only S.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And she said when the election happened she's saying you 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But then at night, she couldn't sleep.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She had really bad insomnia, and so did her husband.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So they would talk all night about leaving the U.S.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Maybe we need to get out of here.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And in one of those insomniac nights, she called her father up.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: He lives in Las Vegas.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: He has legal immigration status.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And S. says she told her dad.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm driving out there.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm driving to Vegas because if we get deported, you can get the kids quick.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And S's dad talked her out of it.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: He said, listen, it's a 30 plus hour drive.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You guys get hurt.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And he advised her to take the kids to get their U.S. passport.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And then if you get taken or if you decide to leave to self-deport, at least they have passports.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That's exactly what they did.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But for now, are they staying put
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: For now, they're staying put.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But they told me it is an ongoing conversation.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You mentioned Jose, her husband, is involved in activism.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: How does that fit into this climate of fear
--:-- Jasmine Garst: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: 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.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And so on this really sunny spring day, this group Siembra, they were out canvassing in this trailer park.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And my dinner host, Jose, was there.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And at this canvassing event, I met one of the activists.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Her name is Elle.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We're dropping her last name because, you know, she's concerned about repercussions for her activism.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: She's an immigrant from Mexico.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And in her free time, she volunteers to talk to U.S.-born children of immigrants about going to college.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So I'm like following her around as she's knocking on people's doors.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It's the most important thing, she said, that they go to school.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They have to go to school.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And she said, yeah, times are very scary.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But you know what's really scary?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Just last Friday, she says, I was knocking on doors just like this.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I was trying to get kids to fill out college financial aid applications.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And these kids told me they didn't want to.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Because what if asking for financial aid makes their parents, who are undocumented, a target?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I don't want us to just be people who clean and wash dishes.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I want us to move forward.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I want us to be doctors and teachers, to be great.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You know, when I go to a hospital, she says, and I see a doctor, and he's a Latino, I feel this joy.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I think we're going to make it to the top.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: One day, very soon, it is what I most desire.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Jasmine, thank you so much for joining us today and for all of your reporting.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Correspondent Jasmine Garst is with NPR's immigration team.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and was edited by Jenny Schmidt and Liana Simstrom.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The mix engineer for this episode was Kwaesi Lee.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Fact-checking for this episode was done by Katie Doggart.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We always love hearing from you, so feel free to reach out to us at thesundaystory at npr.org.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Up First is back in your feed tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.
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