Meet the new American refugees fleeing across state lines for safety

America is on the move. Hundreds of thousands of people are packing up boxes, loading U-Hauls, and shipping out of state in an urgent flight towards safety.

They’re being propelled by hostile political forces bearing down on them because of who they are, what they believe, or for their medical needs.

All are displaced within their own country for reasons they did not choose. They are the new generation of America’s internal refugees – and their ranks are growing by the day.

Here, we profile families who have joined America’s swelling class of internal refugees. They represent just five stories among many others which might have been included: librarians fleeing book bans, professors forced out by ideologically-motivated college education boards, and most recently, the thousands of federal employees fired by the Trump administration.

Such is the tide of coerced dislocation, in the land of the free.

^{The history teacher}

John Dube

Moved from New Hampshire to Vermont to escape school censorship

John Dube, 63, takes great pride in his decades-long public service. He has been a high school history teacher for the past 35 years.

“I encourage an inquiry- and evidence-based approach,” he said. “It’s a mantra of mine: if you have an understanding of the past, you can understand a lot about the present.”

That’s the sensibility he infused into his classroom at Timberlane regional high school in Plaistow, New Hampshire, where he taught for more than 30 years. The town is also where he brought up his two children, living what he described as a “normal, some would say boring, suburban life”.

It stopped being normal around four years ago, when headwinds started to build over what rightwing groups claimed was the victimization of white kids through the teaching of “critical race theory” (CRT). You won’t find CRT mentioned in any of Dube’s courses, and yet it became a battlefield in the culture wars and in his life.

New Hampshire’s anti-CRT measure, HB 2, became law in 2021. It banned the teaching of “divisive concepts” in schools, meaning that teachers would no longer be allowed to discuss race, gender identity or sexual orientation in the classroom. They were explicitly forbidden from promoting ideas suggesting that a person is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive solely based on their race or sex, whether they are aware of it or not.

To aid enforcement, the state set up an online portal where parents and students could snitch on teachers, who could then face possible dismissal or being stripped of their teaching licenses. The culture wars group Moms for Liberty backed that up with a $500 bounty for information.

Dube initially treated the CRT furor lightly, assuming it would quickly flame out. He was astounded when the bill became law (the legislation was blocked by a federal judge last May as unconstitutionally vague, and is now under appeal).

For a start, how could you avoid “divisive concepts” when teaching history, a subject that is divisive by its nature? “History isn’t a science. It’s not like the law of gravity. Why did the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor? You can answer that in many different ways. It’s all in the debate.”

He was also profoundly disturbed by the political intentions behind the law; being a history teacher, he saw the implications immediately. “It’s the old adage: control the past, control the future. It’s how totalitarian regimes take away people’s rights – by literally rewriting history.”

He was angered by the edicts of Orwellian thought police in a state whose motto is “Live free or die”. In that spirit, he added his signature to a nationwide petition called a “pledge to teach the truth”, which vowed to oppose state-sponsored censorship.

Dube added a note explaining why he had signed. It said: “I believe in encouraging my students to think critically.”

The backlash was instant. Granite Grok, a local rightwing website, posted the names of all New Hampshire signatories, and within hours of that Dube received a Facebook message that read: “Whats up homo? I heard your teaching Marxist commie CRT in your classrooms. You can fuck right off you garbage human.”

Dube calmly replied that he would not be intimidated.

Within days, police officers turned up at his house, having been dispatched by the FBI. Dube’s name was circulating on obscure chatrooms frequented by violent militia members. He was urged to install security cameras at home, but when he asked why the police didn’t arrest the perpetrators of the threats, he was told that was impossible on free speech grounds.

“I was like: are you kidding me? My life has been turned upside down in a moment because I pledged to teach the truth, and the police are preaching freedom of speech?”

Over the next few months, the attrition became unbearable for Dube and his wife. They were afraid every time a car drove down their cul-de-sac. It was as if the New Hampshire they had fallen in love with years ago was vanishing.

“It just destroyed it. It wasn’t about partisanship – we’ve been used to Republicans and Democrats arguing forever. It was about a climate being created where you don’t feel safe.”

In the end, they cut their losses. They vacated their home of decades, abandoned family and friends, and headed for the Montpelier area of Vermont.

The transition has been tough. Dube traded in his job as a respected long-time history teacher for a role as substitute. He still feels unsettled, like the internal refugee he has become.

He thinks of the past – of the Von Trapp family of Sound of Music fame, who established their lodge in Stowe, Vermont, just 20 miles from his current home, having fled Austria shortly after the Nazi annexation. And he worries about the future. The New Hampshire model of educational intolerance is rapidly spreading nationwide: Donald Trump recently signed an executive order that seeks to impose the same ban on “divisive” history on the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum and education complex.

“America is a flawed country. We’ve made tremendous mistakes,” Dube said. “But we’ve always tried to learn from those mistakes to become better. That’s the America that I’ve spent my life teaching about – and this is not that America.”

^{The patient and her physician}

Kayla Smith and Kylie Cooper

Left Idaho for Washington and Minnesota to flee a strict abortion ban

Kayla Smith can pinpoint the exact moment she knew she had to leave. It was early in her third pregnancy, and she was scared.

Her first pregnancy had been difficult. She’d had severe pre-eclampsia – high blood pressure that can be life-threatening – and her daughter Addison had been born at 33 weeks. Her second pregnancy had ended tragically when she lost her son at 21 weeks due to a fatal heart defect.

Now it was third time lucky, and Smith was seeking reassurance from her doctor. Would she and her baby be OK?

The physician looked at her and said: “Idaho is not a safe place to be pregnant right now.” Then, as the devastating truth sank in, he added: “If you were my daughter, I’d have told you not to get pregnant in this state.”

There was little to discuss after that. “That pretty much sealed the deal for us,” Smith said.

The number of people internally displaced by anti-abortion laws is startling. A recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research of 13 states with strict abortion bans found that, between them, they are losing 36,000 residents every three months. Separate research released this month by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research revealed that one in five people planning to have children within the next decade have moved state, or know someone who has done so, to escape abortion restrictions.

Idaho has one of the most coldly unbending abortion bans; the state’s Defense of Life Act is an almost total prohibition.

The ban deeply affected how Smith’s second pregnancy unfolded. Two days after the state’s so-called “trigger law” became active, her baby – a boy she and her husband James had already named Brooks – was diagnosed with such a serious cardiac condition that they were told he was unlikely to survive beyond birth.

Were Smith to develop complications, her doctors told her they could not protect her: they would only be able to intervene if she were in mortal danger, by which point it might be too late. (The law only makes exception for rape, incest and where a doctor can affirmatively prove they acted to prevent the pregnant woman’s death – a concept that is so vaguely worded that it encourages doctors to wait until patients become sicker to avoid being prosecuted.)

So the Smiths took out a $16,000 personal loan to cover the costs of the procedure, travelled across state lines into neighboring Washington and, grieving their son, had a medically induced termination.

Afterwards, they returned home, and eventually tried for another baby. They weren’t yet ready to give up on Idaho. Kayla, 33, had moved there for college, and James, one year her junior, had been to school and trained as a pharmacist in the state. By the time of their third pregnancy, James had been promoted to pharmacy manager, Kayla was caring for Addison at home, and they had built their own home. They were living the Idaho dream.

But soon, the couple found themselves locked into a repetitive conversation. “We had it nightly for months,” Kayla said, “and we always came to the same decision – we probably need to leave.”

Part of the motivation was discovering that they were expecting another girl, Nora. They started wondering what it would be like raising Addison and Nora in a state that would offer them no bodily autonomy. They knew too that in this third pregnancy, Smith’s life was potentially at risk given her history of pre-eclampsia.

And so, in September 2023, the Smith family joined the ranks of America’s internal refugees. They relocated permanently to Washington state, where Kayla gave birth to Nora 16 months ago.

They were not alone. Kylie Cooper was the physician specializing in high-risk pregnancies who gave the Smiths the devastating news about their son Brooks’ fetal abnormalities. Smith was the first patient Cooper saw after the Idaho trigger law kicked in.

Under the law, doctors face up to five years in prison if they perform abortions not covered by exceptions. The onus of proof is on them – they must be able to convince a jury that termination was necessary to save the mother’s life, an exceptionally hard standard to meet given often nuanced medical decisions and the vague terminology of Idaho’s abortion ban.

“I felt tremendous fear and sadness for my patients, as my ability to help them had been taken away. And I felt fear for myself, like I had a target on my back,” Cooper told the Guardian.

Cooper, her husband and two young children left Idaho in April 2023 and now live in Minnesota. Six of Idaho’s initial nine maternal fetal medicine specialists have abandoned the state or retired since the abortion ban, with almost one in four of all OB-GYNs leaving.

“To have to move state to be able to practice medicine … I did not expect that in modern-day America,” Cooper said.

The Smiths’ own displacement has cost them dear. In the move to Washington, where they now live in Olympia, James lost his manager’s position. “I had a reputation in Idaho, and now I’ve got to prove myself all over again.” They gave up the house they owned and are renting again, at a premium. To make up the difference, Kayla has gone back to work, which she regrets, as she spends less time with their daughters.

Addison, now four, keeps asking where all the snow has gone. She used to love stepping out of their old Idaho home into the winter whiteness.

Along with three other women who were also forced to leave Idaho to get abortions necessary to safeguard their lives, Smith joined a lawsuit against the state brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights. The suit sought to widen the ban’s exceptions to cover fatal fetal diagnoses such as her son’s.

A state court ruled last week that medical exceptions to the ban should be broadened to allow women like Smith who have a health condition or pregnancy complication that puts their own life at risk to obtain abortion care. However, the judge did not go so far as to include pregnant women with lethal fetal conditions who are not in danger themselves, leaving them still in a bind in which they must either carry a doomed pregnancy against their will or flee the state.

Despite this partial victory, Smith can feel the mood darkening across the US. Some 18 states have imposed total abortion bans or restrictions on terminations beyond 12 weeks of pregnancy. At the federal level, Trump has issued an executive order undoing his predecessor Joe Biden’s efforts to preserve access to reproductive care.

In 32 years, James Smith has never been outside the US. Nor has he ever possessed a passport. Now he is applying for one for himself, and for his two girls. “If things keep going south, I’d rather be prepared.”

^{The mom of a trans teen}

Anonymous

Moving her trans daughter from Texas to a west coast state for her protection

Sandra, the mother of a 15-year-old trans girl, has also started to probe the logistics of leaving the US. She spends evenings researching how to migrate to other countries, and the various health systems they would encounter.

Several of the families who belong to an online community frequented by Sandra have already gone. One family went to Canada, another to Uruguay, a third to New Zealand.

For Sandra, 41, though, dreams of leaving the country are not for now. She has a more pressing task: to get her daughter to safety by ushering her out of Texas and resettling her on the west coast (it is an indication of the extent of her fears that she asked the Guardian not to specify their new state, and Sandra is a pseudonym, also at her request).

Sandra has, with the help of a friend, set up a GoFundMe page to cover some of the costs of relocation. It has reached $6,000 – a fraction of the at least $20,000 she estimates will be needed to move the family and the small business they run to a safe haven.

It will be worth it, she thinks, if it buys them and their teenager security and peace of mind. She expressed the urgency of this moment for families like hers when we first exchanged emails.

“We are refugees and many of us are in hiding,” she wrote to me. “It’s immense and lonely.”

Sandra’s “kiddo”, as she calls her child, identified as a girl from as young as four. They had been at a family gathering with cousins, and in the car on the way home the child began sobbing, imploring her parents to stop calling her a boy.

In the more than 10 years since then, Marie (also not her real name) has never wavered in her gender identification. Through on-going therapy, medical visits, and parentally- and medically approved hormonal treatment, she has been categoric that she is a girl. She’s done so while insisting on her privacy, eschewing becoming a poster child of the transgender cause. She wants minimum fuss.

Sandra and Marie’s father have followed Marie’s lead. In the decade since the meltdown in the car, Sandra has told nobody that her child is trans: to her friends and acquaintances, Sandra presents as a regular mom to a regular teenaged girl.

But then the political climate turned against them. The more the Texas legislature has fallen under the grip of Trump’s Maga Republicans, the more trans families have become the subject of their ire.

By 2021, Texas had introduced 40 anti-trans bills, vastly more than any other state. Since then, the bombardment has only intensified. In 2022 the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, ordered officials to investigate trans families for child abuse. The move – a direct threat to Sandra and her family – is currently on hold pending appeal.

The following year, lawmakers banned puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans kids, forcing Sandra to go out of state at great expense to find care for her daughter.

In this year’s legislative session, no fewer than 125 anti-trans bills have been introduced, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker, covering almost every aspect of a trans person’s life. In March, arguably the most insidious bill so far was tabled, HB 3817. It would effectively criminalize being transgender, by creating a new state felony of “gender identity fraud”.

“If that were to pass, someone could arrest my teenager and she would have a felony on her record for the rest of her life,” Sandra said.

That the state is bearing down on her family is hard enough. But what has amplified the terror is how the hostility has spread out from the Texas capitol in Austin into the community. Parents in schools near their home have demanded to be notified of any trans students who might be sharing bathrooms with their children – effectively baying for the outing of kids like Marie.

Sandra had hoped they might have another three or four years in Texas, long enough for Marie to complete high school. But as Trump’s attacks on trans people have come thick and fast, the family is nowscrambling to get the teenager out by the end of summer.

The blitz of federal actions has left Sandra angry, sad and confused. She keeps asking herself: why should the US president, who has the world to worry about, be focused on her family?

“We’re just a regular American family doing the laundry, buying groceries, making sure the kid does homework. To have the president obsess on us is bizarre, and very intrusive.”

It’s as though the world has steadily closed in on them, Sandra said. Asked how that felt, she replied: “I imagine it’s what it’s like being surrounded by a wildfire.”

^{The climate evacuee}

Amanda McPhillips

Quit California for New York to escape the fires

It was 4.30am and Amanda McPhillips had already taken her four egg-laying chickens out of the yard and into the bathtub for their protection. She had a bag with all her essentials – passports, birth certificates – packed by the door.

Despite the assiduous preparations, she still wasn’t ready for the apocalyptic scene outside.

“The air was deep orange. All of a sudden the evacuation zone on my phone was all around us. I was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t good. We should go.’”

That was the start of McPhillips’s journey into displacement. In 2022, more than half a million people fled their homes in the US as a result of environmental disasters, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. The statistics do not reveal how many permanently relocated, but they do indicate the scale of human upheaval.

Look at it one way, and McPhillips, 45, was one of the lucky ones.

Her rented home in Pasadena remained standing in January’s devastating Los Angeles fires, while more than 6,000 homes in neighboring Altadena were wiped out. But the smoke damage to their house was intense, and it was within a few hundred yards of the burn area which threatened the family’s long-term health.

What really did it, though, was that her six-year-old son’s elementary school burned to the ground. McPhillips was shocked by how profoundly that affected them.

“I hadn’t realised how much of an anchor a school is with small kids. Our whole life revolved around it – pick-up and drop-off, play dates, extracurricular activities. Everything.”

Today, McPhillips and her kids find themselves almost 3,000 miles away, sheltered in the East Hamptons hamlet of Amagansett on Long Island, New York. The contrast could not be more stark.

Charred embers have been replaced by immaculate white fences, sparkling shingle houses, and topiary. A short drive away from McPhillips’s current home, Main Street offers day spas, organic restaurants and gourmet delis; the Atlantic Ocean is about 200 yards from their door.

McPhillips’s friend from her years working in the New York TV industry offered her use of a vacant beach house as a temporary refuge. There is a public elementary school close by, with only 16 students per class.

McPhillips is well aware of her good fortune. “I’m extremely privileged; I know that. People have been so kind. I’ve had a soft landing, and I have choices.” And yet, being an internally displaced person is not easy. Anything stable in her life is gone, shattered along with the school that held it together.

“I feel so disheveled, so discombobulated. It’s like there’s no North Star for recovery – I don’t know where we’ll be in five months, let alone five years.”

Unlike the other internal refugees profiled here, McPhillips has not been forced to relocate because of who she is or what she does. But the way she sees it, she shares with the others the fact that her life has been torn apart as a result of human failings, and worse.

“We haven’t fled violence or political oppression, but we have been displaced by decades of failure to deal with climate change. And the climate stuff is the scariest, because you cannot reverse it. You cannot go back and fix it.”

Trump’s actions since returning to the White House have supercharged her anxieties. He blamed the LA fires on local Democratic politicians, and is presiding over a massive rollback of regulations that will hamper the fight against rising temperatures and put hundreds of thousands of lives at risk.

When she’s at her lowest, McPhillips starts to think that it’s all futile. “It feels overwhelming, as though there’s nothing you can do. So many people are hurting, and yet there’s nothing that will change Trump’s mind.”

Now she is on borrowed time. She and her boys will have to leave their Amagansett refuge in June ahead of the summer Hamptons rush.

Where will she go? She could go back to LA, but the city is still reeling. She’s so sensitized to environmental disasters now that wherever they moved would have to be safe from the effects of the climate crisis. But where is such a place?

“I met an extreme climate expert soon after the fires and I asked him where it would be safe to live,” she said. “He said he had identified two counties in Vermont as the safest in the US. Two months later, both counties were devastated by flooding.”

^{The scientist}

Kristy Lewis

Abandoned Florida for Rhode Island for academic freedom

McPhillips’s craving for reliable information on where to shelter from the climate crisis faces another challenge: even the scientists who produce such intelligence are now being displaced by hostile forces.

Five years ago Kristy Lewis, 47, was a climate scientist at the top of her game, running an oceanography lab under her own name at a prestigious public university in Florida. She was researching how to mitigate the effects of sea-level rise on the most vulnerable coastal populations – a subject particularly pertinent to Florida, the state with the longest coastline in the contiguous US.

Ever since she was little, Lewis had dreamed about becoming a marine biologist. She’d spent her summers snorkeling off the coast of Florida, fishing from her dad’s boat. “They just couldn’t get me out of the water,” she said.

Fast forward to 2019 and she was heading the “Lewis Lab of Applied Coastal Ecology” at the University of Central Florida. She raised $8m in research funds, leading a team of six graduate research students.

Then Ron DeSantis was elected Republican governor of Florida. Almost immediately, he began to shift how the state approached climate disasters: he would invest in adapting to the consequences of sea-level rise, but would not address the root causes.

“The idea of ‘climate change’ has become politicised,” DeSantis said in April 2019. “My environmental policy is just to try to do things that benefit Floridians.”

The rhetorical chill soon began to affect Lewis. She was disturbed when the state allowed students to record their professors’ lectures without consent, and inform on them if they showed signs of political “bias”.

“There was a clear and imminent risk. I was talking to students about complex topics like climate change, and it was unnerving to think that someone might record me because they thought I was doing them harm. For me, climate change isn’t a political issue – I know it is real because I have the data.”

What most upset her was the effect on her scientific research. About 40% of her lab’s income came from state funding, which put it in danger as climate crisis denialism spread.

As a queer person, she was also dismayed by the introduction of the “don’t say gay” bill, which banned classroom discussion on sexual orientation or gender identity. And as the chair of the College of Sciences’ diversity, equity and inclusion committee, she was disheartened by the clampdown on DEI initiatives – especially as a female scientist in a predominantly male scientific world.

She would hear colleagues talk about the need to change the vocabulary they used. They should drop “climate crisis” and use “environmental change” instead.

“It became exhausting to think about the politics all the time. It was a big distraction from my science, not knowing what was going to happen next. I just wanted to do my job.”

She left Florida in 2023, along with five other professors in UCF’s College of Sciences who also departed that year. It was just in the nick of time. A few months after she left, DeSantis signed into law HB 1645 erasing the phrase “climate change” from state statutes.

Like McPhillips, Lewis is profoundly conscious of how she was one of the fortunate ones. “I left because I felt an attack on my personal and professional self, and that was not OK with me. Not everyone has that privilege – many have no option but to stay.”

She has landed well. She is rebuilding her Lewis Lab within the University of Rhode Island’s school of oceanography, a hallowed place from which in 1985 Bob Ballard discovered the wreck of the Titanic.

But she, too, has paid a price. The relocation itself cost her $14,000. Her team of researchers has been splintered, and she is having to reassemble it slowly over time.

The move set her back three years in her bid for a tenured academic position. That matters, as without tenure she is more exposed to the icy winds that blow.

Those winds are certainly blowing now. This month, she received a letter from the Trump administration informing her that two federal grants she had already been awarded for research into offshore wind energy, amounting to $1.5m, had been cancelled.

They no longer met “funding priorities”, she was told.

Lewis fled Florida to escape the attack on her science. Now there is nowhere left to hide.

Source: US Politics - theguardian.com