1 in 5 Latino Voters Has Considered Leaving the U.S. — Therapists Explain What It's Costing Them

Mixed-status families brace for possible deportation and family separation amid immigration crackdown. (Photo for illustration purposes). Getty Images

The Briefing:

18% of Latino voters — nearly 1 in 5 — say they or someone in their immediate circle has seriously considered leaving the United States over the past two years, according to the NBC News/Telemundo poll of 800 registered Latino voters conducted September 21–28, 2026.
31% say they or a family member began carrying identification documents out of fear of ICE enforcement.
27% personally know someone who has been deported or detained by immigration authorities in the last two years.
Mental health clinicians nationwide are documenting a surge in anxiety, hypervigilance, and what therapists call anticipatory grief — the psychological toll of rehearsing a departure that may never come.

The number is a single digit — 18 — and it surfaced in a NBC News/Telemundo poll released October 4, 2026. But for the therapists embedded in Latino communities across the country, it is not a data point. It is a portrait of their waiting rooms.

Nearly one in five Latino voters says they or someone close to them has seriously weighed leaving the United States over the past two years, driven by fear of immigration enforcement. The finding, drawn from 800 registered Latino voters surveyed September 21–28, sits inside a broader collapse of support for President Trump among Latino communities — but it belongs to a different category entirely. It is not a political preference. It is a psychological one.

A Number That Lives in Therapy Rooms

The NBC News/Telemundo survey documented a sharp political reversal: only 27% of Latino voters now approve of President Trump, while 65% hold a negative view of ICE. Yet the emigration figure operates on a different register entirely. It reveals a community actively interrogating whether life in the United States remains a workable proposition.

"What we are seeing are elevated levels of anxiety, hypervigilance, and panic attacks in individuals and families, especially those in mixed-status households," said Hector Ayala, co-chair of the Latino Behavioral Health Coalition, whose Hispanic Community Counseling Services provides outpatient behavioral health care to roughly 4,000 clients across North Philadelphia. He described a child who had begun hiding every time a siren passed outside the apartment window — the sound rewired in the child's mind as a signal for an imminent ICE operation.

That response is not an isolated case. It is a documented clinical pattern that behavioral health providers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and the Rio Grande Valley are tracking with growing urgency.

The Psychology of Weighing a Departure

Researchers have a name for the emotional condition the poll places in numerical form: anticipatory grief. Families who have not left — and may never leave — are already mourning the potential unraveling of the lives they spent years, sometimes decades, assembling.

That condition connects directly to what family therapist Pauline Boss has called ambiguous loss — a form of grief that forms without resolution because the circumstances generating it remain permanently unresolved. A 2026 analysis from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley described immigrant families caught in this state as suspended between possibility and uncertainty, living inside unanswered fear rather than grief over something that has already happened. For Latino families weighing emigration, that suspension begins long before any decision — in kitchen-table conversations, in half-spoken fears, in the "what if" calculations that slowly erode a household's sense of stability over weeks and months.

A May 2026 review published in the Journal of Counseling & Development found that fear of deportation produces clinically measurable anxiety and somatic distress not only in undocumented individuals, but in U.S.-born members of mixed-status families — second-generation children raised here, absorbing a fear that technically does not belong to them.

U.S. Border Patrol Takes Immigrants Into Custody At Arizona-Mexico Border — YUMA, ARIZONA - DECEMBER 07: An immigrant from Uzbekistan waits with others from many countries to be taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico border on December 07, 2021 in Yuma, Arizona. They had come with their families through a nearby gap in the border wall in previous days to seek political asylum in the United States. In many cases women and children were transported to processing facilities first. Border Patrol detention facilities in Yuma were overwhelmed with thousands of new arrivals, with many families trying to reach U.S. soil before the court-ordered re-implementation of the Trump-era Remain in Mexico policy. The policy requires asylum seekers to stay in Mexico for the duration of their U.S. immigration court process. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

The Silence Compounding the Crisis

Behavioral health providers working inside Latino communities describe a structural barrier that makes the crisis especially difficult to address: the patients who most need help are often the least willing to seek it.

A 2026 study in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health found that Latino immigrants routinely cancel or skip mental health appointments out of concern that sharing personal information through official settings could expose them or their families to enforcement action. The result is a psychological emergency that deepens in silence — households in acute distress with no diagnosis and no pathway to care.

Sophia Pages, head of behavioral health at Zócalo Health — a tech-enabled primary care organization in Los Angeles built to serve Latino patients on Medicaid — runs standardized anxiety and depression screenings on every patient who comes through the door. The numbers she gathered made the picture clear: immigration enforcement, she told NPR, is "functioning as a real-time public health stressor" in the communities her team serves, with measurable spikes in symptoms during periods of intensified raid activity.

When Belonging Becomes the Question

The emigration conversation now taking shape inside Latino households is not logistical at its core. Clinicians describe it as an identity rupture — a forced reopening of settled questions about place, culture, and belonging that many families had spent years quietly resolving.

Weighing a departure is less like planning a move and more like grieving a prior version of oneself. The process pulls back into view unresolved questions about language, loyalty, and civic identity — negotiations immigrants and their U.S.-born children believed they had completed, reopened again under pressure and without warning.

The NBC News/Telemundo poll also found that 17% of Latino voters were considering not casting their ballot in person this November, worried about encountering immigration enforcement near polling locations — the same psychological imprint playing out across contexts: a community pulling back from public life under the weight of chronic, ambient threat.

What no survey can fully capture is what follows that retreat — in underfunded clinics, in late-night conversations at kitchen tables, in the quiet after children fall asleep. The 18% who gave voice to the thought of leaving represent a far larger group still carrying that question privately, in rooms no pollster has yet reached.