Dusk was descending on Clyde, North Carolina, when I pulled into the driveway. It was one of the final days of August, and there was a slight chill in the air. The chirps of crickets welcomed me as I examined the property. At first, the one-story house looked unremarkable. Then I noticed the telltale signs: cracked glass windows, a door strewed on the roof, a muddy chair lodged in the yard’s only tree.
A year ago, floodwaters engulfed the home. Helene had left its mark.
The Category 4 hurricane killed at least 250 people, the deadliest in the mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago. Among its survivors, one group has been facing unique challenges: immigrants. Since 1990, North Carolina’s immigrant population has increased eightfold, but most have settled in the state’s urban centers. In the rural mountain regions, immigrants have less access to support networks, complicating recovery efforts. The process has only grown more arduous under President Donald Trump, who has reshaped federal policy in ways that make immigrants more vulnerable during emergencies.
“There always has been a lack of care and priority for immigrant communities, particularly those that are undocumented, without legal status,” said Michael Méndez, an associate professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the vulnerability of undocumented immigrants during disasters. “Under the current political climate, that reality is amplified. The cruelty and the intentional guiding of policies to hurt these communities, even when there is a disaster like a hurricane or some other type of climactic event, is unbearable.”
In western North Carolina, many immigrants are relying on each other and local organizations like UNIDXS, which introduced me to the homeowners I was meeting.
The couple met me at their old home in Clyde, which has been uninhabited since the floods came. I stepped inside to find the interior gutted, in part by thieves who stole their wiring after the flood. The husband wore a gray baseball cap and cargo pants. Caramel highlights framed his wife’s face – it’s a modern style, what my friends call a “money piece.” The couple remains undocumented, so they asked that we not publish their names or show their faces.
After they purchased their casita in 2014, it had become the stage for piñata parties in the courtyard and First Communion photoshoots before the fireplace. On this day, the 41-year-old mother of five pulled out her phone to show me photos. These pixels are all she has left. Now the family lives in a three-bedroom mobile home.
“It’s sad when we drive by,” she told me in Spanish. “This was our home.”
Helene was the family’s second flood in three years. The first time, they applied for Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, aid through their now 17-year-old son, a U.S. citizen. After Helene, they received an $85,000 flood insurance payment, an amount they say only covers one-third the value of the house. To help pay off their mortgage, the couple is torn between rebuilding and renting or selling the house as-is.
Not every family received aid. One 44-year-old single mom I met applied twice through her daughter, a U.S. citizen. She said FEMA denied both requests.
Other immigrant families are too scared or tired to apply. Without papers or children who are U.S. citizens, many others simply can’t.
“I’m scared,” the woman from Clyde said by telephone in a follow-up call. “The president doesn’t want anyone who’s not legal here. I wouldn’t ask the government for help again if another flood happened.”
Helene’s climate change-fueled devastation
Even before Helene arrived on September 27, 2024, the skies were gray and rainy.
When it came, the storm dumped 20 to 30 inches of rain on North Carolina’s mountainous temperate rain forest. Soil loosened, unleashing over 2,000 landslides. At least 63 streams and rivers surged to record-breaking levels across Southern Appalachia. The Pigeon River, some 500 feet away from the Clyde home, swelled to a record-breaking 27 feet.
“It was kind of a freak storm,” said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist with Yale Climate Connections. “It was something unprecedented in human memory and human history. Unusually deadly and unusually damaging.”
The National Weather Service reported that the amount of rain the region received over three days had less than a one in 1,000 chance of occurring in a year. However, climate change is making these events more common as polluters keep burning oil, gas, and coal, the main drivers of the planet’s heating. Researchers at World Weather Attribution found that climate change made the three-day rains 70% more likely. Such devastating inland flooding can now be expected to occur about once every 70 years.
Climate change also increased the storm’s wind speeds by 10 mph, according to researchers at the nonprofit Climate Central. In Yancey County, North Carolina, wind speeds reached 106 mph, strong enough to destroy mobile homes, which make up 11.3% of all housing units in the state.
In Clyde, the 44-year-old mom who was denied FEMA assistance was living in a mobile home with her citizen daughter when the storm hit. She’s missing a few front teeth, and her cheekbones sit high on her face. Her brown bangs reach down to her round cheeks. She’s undocumented and didn’t want her name published.
She bought her home in 2014, spending the next 10 years renovating it for herself and her 13-year-old daughter, a strong student who wears rectangular glasses and aspires to be a heart surgeon. The mother replaced the rundown roof, walls, floors, and cabinets. She purchased a stove and a clothes dryer.
“Everything was new,” she said in Spanish.
Then Helene unraveled everything.
The pair slept in their car for four days before moving to a friend’s house for the next six months. She relied on torta sales, fast food earnings, and charity to rebuild, going door to door, a cardboard box in hand, asking neighbors for donations.
“Sometimes, people are very cruel, but there are also good people,” she said in Spanish.
In the months since the storm, her home has been elevated by six feet, a $7,000 expense. The walls and wiring needed to be replaced. But the foundation remains exposed, and the porch is still gone. And since a bout with COVID, she has had trouble walking up and down stairs, but she hasn’t yet replaced the ramp that helped her get in and out of her home.
“I have had a lot of health problems, recently, in my feet, but I go to work every day,” she said. “It is very difficult for me.” She said there are days when she asks her daughter if they should move to Mexico. “You know what she says? ‘No, because I want to study,’” she said.
A ‘chilling impact’
The president once said he wants to dismantle FEMA entirely. More recently, the White House has said it is happy with a rebrand.
Regardless of the semantics, the agency has changed rapidly in the months since Trump took office. Tech mogul Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts resulted in the agency’s workforce shrinking by about 20%. The administration has attempted to divert billions of grant dollars initially allocated for disaster preparedness toward disaster response. Twenty states sued, so the money is in limbo while the courts sort it out.
The Republican tax law enacted in July is redirecting federal dollars toward building detention facilities and hiring more U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, officers to keep up with the administration’s promise to deport thousands of immigrants every month. On Trump’s first day in office, he rescinded a policy that kept ICE officers out of sensitive areas, like schools, churches, and emergency shelters.
“We are already starting to see it have a chilling impact on immigrants, mixed-status households, even legal permanent residents seeking emergency assistance and aid because we can no longer give them a guarantee that there will not be enforcement actions at aid distribution sites, at emergency rally points, at disaster shelters, etc.,” said Ahmed Gaya, director of climate and migration for the pro-immigrant rights group National Partnership for New Americans, where he leads the organization’s Climate Justice Collaborative.
Gaya points to the recent ICE detainment of two wildland firefighters in Washington state who were arrested in the middle of fighting a fire: “That previously would have been prohibited by the sensitive locations guidance,” he said.
Under Trump, FEMA has also pressured grantees by threatening to withhold funds from organizations that have helped undocumented immigrants. After 20 states sued, however, the administration clarified that disaster relief grants would be exempt. In a statement to Yale Climate Connections, FEMA ignored specific questions and wrote: “FEMA is focused on providing aid and assistance to American citizens following emergencies and natural disasters. FEMA will follow all applicable law in regard to illegal aliens requesting assistance. DHS urges all illegal aliens present in the United States to self-deport home using the CBP Home App.”
Advocates are worried that FEMA will now share applicants’ information with ICE. Both agencies are housed under the Department of Homeland Security. And FEMA forms explicitly name ICE as a department with which it might share applicants’ information.
Kasey Valentine, a community health worker serving rural Appalachia who works closely with immigrant groups, said she is now hesitant to direct any mixed-status households to FEMA for immediate needs like food and housing. She prefers to point them to mutual aid, where community members come together to help one another through formal nonprofits or informal organizing.
Sarah Hirsch, a translator and educator at community group UNIDXS, said she has heard concern from community members whom she encouraged to apply for FEMA aid last fall, before Trump took office.
“I have some guilt about that,” she said. “When it all happened, I thought, ‘OK, let’s get you some money! You deserve it just like anybody else!’ And I was maybe naive.”
Support in their mother tongue
UNIDXS, whose name is a gender-neutral version of the Spanish word for “united,” was founded in 2021 to offer GED and English classes to the area’s Spanish-speaking community members, as well as interpretation and transportation services. In November 2024, UNIDXS organized an event to connect 20 families with FEMA officers that enabled disaster survivors to ask questions in Spanish.
Helene was the organization’s first experience responding to a disaster.
“We didn’t even have an office back then,” said Executive Director Ricardo Bello, referring to September 2024.
He wasn’t planning to step in – until his team informed him that some immigrant enclaves were still waiting on help a month after the storm. They brainstormed a list of what families must need as winter approached: coats, heaters, blankets, generators, food, cash. When they began distributing items, many told the group that theirs was the first to offer them help.
The organization estimates it provided 350 hours of interpretation to assist families with FEMA and gave aid to some 900 families, including $30,000 in cash donations. The group has since secured a bodega, or warehouse, where they distribute food, clothing, medicine, and more twice a week. It’s also become their space for classes and events.
Their contributions continue: Bello introduced me to all the families I met during my four days in western North Carolina. I’d follow him in my rental, sometimes driving an hour to meet with the most remote households. We’d be out until 9 p.m. most days, but he didn’t leave any family without first handing them gift cards, a box of fresh food, or clothing.
“UNIDXS was born out of the needs of the community, a community abandoned without resources, a community abused for not speaking the language or understanding the system,” Bello said in Spanish. Clean cut, he was wearing his signature green UNIDXS polo shirt as we sat for a late dinner at a Waffle House.
In March, he took on a second role as president of the Smoky Mountain Long-Term Recovery Group, a nonprofit founded in Helene’s aftermath to help coordinate community groups across seven counties to help people rebuild and prepare for the next storm. UNIDXS recently joined the MANNA FoodBank network to provide fresh and canned food to the community twice a week.
None of this means people don’t still need help. One evening, we went to visit Angela Ocampo, a 59-year-old undocumented cancer survivor who lost her mobile home during Helene.
We sat for a time in her new home, a mobile unit she’s renting. She had worried about applying for FEMA assistance through her youngest son, a U.S. citizen, but she risked it and received $60,000. She has since used a portion to remove her teeth, which had been damaged by her chemo treatments.
She’s also saving money to cover rent and an emergency cash fund in the event that ICE picks her up. She said she hopes to retire in Mexico on her own accord but said she’s unsure of when that dream will come to pass.
“I struggle to get out of bed,” she said.
Bello and I spent two hours with Ocampo. The next evening, after a full day of meetings, he met me to do it all over again with a different family, a continuation of nonstop work since Helene.
Bello knows it’s only going to pick up. In July, the state legislature passed HB 318, which will require local sheriffs to cooperate with ICE starting in October. Since Trump entered office, ICE has arrested 2.5 times more people than last year in North Carolina, the majority of whom have no criminal record.
It’s a new world a year after Helene. What – or whom – will be the cost?
Reporting for this story made possible in part by a grant from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.
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