(Headline USA) Michel Bérrios left the United States a few days before the new year, giving President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign for mass deportations a small victory before they even started.
A former leader of a Nicaraguan student riot, Bérrios had been in the U.S. under President Joe Biden’s unprecedented open-border amnesty policies. But Trump’s harsh talk during the 2024 election about reasserting America’s sovereign right to enforce federal immigration laws filled her with anxious memories of hiding from authorities back home.
“I spent five years hiding. I had to change my routine. I had to completely change my life. I stopped visiting my parents, my friends,” Bérrios said of President Daniel Ortega’s crackdown on dissent.
With Trump returning to power, “that uncertainty has returned,” she added.
Open-border activists who have helped to facilitate the flood of state-sanctioned illegal immigration under Biden say a growing number of people to leave the U.S. before Trump takes office on Monday.
There isn’t data on these departures, but history has seen other eras of public backlash that drove out illegal immigrants.
Trump and his allies are counting on this “self-deportation,” the idea that by removing the incentives put in place under Democrat policies, many of those taking advantage of America’s hospitality will find it easier to leave on their own terms.
“Because [the U.S.] is not a Third World country like the ones many of us come from, I thought there would be a different culture here, and it was a rude awakening to realize that you and your family are not welcome,” Bérrios, 31, complained after realizing that the flood of millions of illegals from countries like her own who were unwilling to assimilate or contribute to the culture had effectively made it just like home.
Self-deportation helps Trump to achieve his goals without the government having to spend or do anything in such cases. Trump has long said he wanted to deport millions of illegals but never deported more than 350,000 a year in his first term. Only 41,500 detention beds are funded this year, so carrying out massive deportations has significant logistical hurdles.
“If you wanna self-deport, you should self-deport because, again, we know who you are, and we’re gonna come and find you,” Trump’s incoming border czar, Tom Homan, has said.
Bérrios had been living with her cousin in California, east of San Francisco, working at the front desk of an auto repair shop with Trump supporters, but she knew it was temporary—especially once Trump was elected.
About 1.5 million people who had temporary permission to live and work in the U.S. during Biden’s administration may see that status end soon said Melanie Nezer, vice president for advocacy and external relations at the Women’s Refugee Commission.
“Many, many people are in this situation,” she said.
That includes those who have temporary protected status and others, like Bérrios, who received humanitarian asylum from four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Under Biden’s strategy to create legal pathways to those who cross the border illegally, asylum seekers from those countries can avoid the long lines at the southern border and apply online with a financial sponsor. They must fly to a U.S. airport at their expense.
About 100,000 Nicaraguans have come on two-year permits with eligibility to work since late 2022.
Bérrios arrived in 2023 as the U.S. election campaigns gained momentum. But talk of mass deportations eventually unnerved her. Returning to Nicaragua was not an option, so in December she settled on Ireland, where she had a couple of friends from the student movement.
“I felt like Ireland was a country of opportunity,” she said.
At Dublin’s airport, Bérrios handed her passport to an immigration official and said she was requesting humanitarian protection. She was quizzed on the name of Ireland’s president, answering correctly, and had her photo and fingerprints taken.
She got a government-issued identification card the next morning, valid for a year, and now shares a room with women from Somalia, Egypt and Pakistan in a hotel in a nearby town.
They are free to come and go as they please, and the government pays for her lodging.
Bérrios looks forward to enrolling in school while she waits for her work permit. An in-depth interview about her case should come in eight or nine months and a decision on her asylum request would follow.
If all goes well, she could receive permanent residency in as soon as a year, she said.
Bérrios was buoyant as she marveled at her journey with the self-deportation twist: “You make sacrifices and always hope that things will turn out like you think, maybe not exactly, but pretty close.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
