In September 2025, Ruby Mora, a 34-year-old from Pennsylvania, packed her bags and moved to the Netherlands with her husband. As a neurodivergent Puerto Rican-Mexican woman, she didn’t feel safe in Trump’s America anymore. A community effort helped her finance the relocation and she also secured a visa called DAFT (Dutch-American Friendship Treaty), allowing her to live and work in the Netherlands as a self-employed entrepreneur. While she is just starting to feel settled today, nearly a year later, she never would have expected the complicated and challenging emotions that would surface after the move — and how long they’d last.
“The biggest emotion for me has to be grief, but specifically migratory grief,” Mora said. “And the other major feeling is the guilt; it’s just been this heavy guilt that is like, why should I get to be here and not my loved ones, not my friends, or colleagues?”
