Undocumented Workers Are Choosing to Self-Deport

Amid fears of ICE raids and audits, some have been quietly forced out of the jobs that brought them here.

- Paula Aceves

Day laborers wait for work outside the Southampton 7-Eleven.

IN THE SPRING OF 2023, Alejandra became the last of her family to arrive out East. Alejandra’s mother, a housekeeper, and her sister, a server in a restaurant, had been working in the Hamptons for four years since leaving Ecuador; her aunt and uncle for five; their parents and cousins more than 20. She has more family here, she says, than in Ecuador.

Alejandra arrived just in time for the summer boom. The Hamptons was a safe, comfortable place, her family told her, but expensive. Like her mother, she began cleaning houses. She was shocked that, within two days, she was able to find work. The first woman who employed her was exacting, she says, and yelled at the housekeepers to go faster, to reclean areas they had already finished. Alejandra remembered the woman’s face, perpetually twisted in anger. “I almost wanted to go back to Ecuador,” she says, “if that was how I was going to be treated.” (Like many people in this story, Alejandra’s name has been changed to protect her identity.)

But she didn’t go back. She, along with her husband and two sons, found a small rental in Hampton Bays, a more affordable area west of the Hamptons’ ritzier hamlets, which is home to a number of the Latin American immigrants who have become a mainstay of the local workforce. Alejandra’s husband, like her uncle and cousins, took up carpentry. It took them eight months, but they saved up enough to hire a lawyer to file an application for asylum. They enrolled their older son in the local school. They couldn't afford to go out much, but even the offseason work was regular enough that they felt secure.