Political refugees: Why a family fleeing Ron DeSantis’ Florida chose Swarthmore

There was a time when Stacey Patel never planned to move back to Satellite Beach, Fla., the conservative Space Coast town in the shadow of Cape Kennedy’s rockets where she’d gone to high school as a military kid. But a family emergency in the mid-2000s brought her and her California-bred husband Sanjay Patel back to the Sunshine State, and then the couple found a cause: trying to flip a Trump-red county to the Democrats.

“We were so involved and so invested. We had no intention of leaving,” said Stacey Patel, who decided after coming to Philadelphia as a Sen. Bernie Sanders 2016 delegate to run for Brevard County Democratic chair — and ousted the establishment. Her fight with a GOP county commissioner, who made national headlines with a Facebook post saying he’d support abortion in Patel’s case, didn’t change her resolve. Neither did the time right-wingers used weed killer to burn “FU” on the lawn of her neighbor, a Democratic school-board member.

But things did change. In 2019, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis took office and — after the COVID-19 crisis raised his presidential stock — started taking Florida in a shockingly authoritarian direction by clamping down on classroom discussions about race and LGBTQ issues, threatening college academic freedom, treating migrants as pawns, and much more.

In 2021, something even more important happened: the arrival of the Patels’ daughter, Emma.

“I didn’t want her to grow up thinking that was normal,” said Stacey of what Florida has become under DeSantis. “When it was just Sanjay and I, we wanted to fight. We wanted to do our very best to transform Florida and make it a better place. But the cost for a two-year-old is far too high to be able to do that. She cannot live thinking people hate each other like that.”

Today, Emma is a two-and-a-half-year-old whirling dervish as she laughs and brandishes her favorite stuffie, Peppa Pig, around the cozy living room of the 1940s Craftsman-style home where the family moved in May. It sits on a dead end facing a lush, thick forest in Swarthmore, the college town a dozen miles southwest of Philadelphia. The Patels had never been to the Delaware County suburb before April — when they found it on a nationwide search for a more progressive, and less angry, place to raise a kid. They can rattle off the names of others who have fled Florida and bemoan the fact that many more would also like to escape but can’t.

“I think we’re fleeing fascism,” Stacey Patel told me. “I truly think the rule of law has been eroded and that if you are on the wrong side of politics, you can really get yourself in trouble.”

The Patels are on the cutting edge of a remarkable trend as America cleaves apart in the 2020s: the era of the domestic political refugee. As red and blue states move in a diametrically opposed directions — with radically different laws on critical issues like abortion, LGBTQ rights, teaching Black history, or welcoming immigrants — Americans are voting with their moving vans, pulling up stakes over politics. We’ve always been a mobile people, and blue coastal cities have long been full of people born in red states who moved to find like-minded neighbors — but this feels different, more extreme.

And our third-largest state — DeSantis’ Florida — is becoming Ground Zero. Said Stacey Patel: “The very best people are leaving Florida.”

The evidence is mostly anecdotal for now — but the anecdotes are piling up fast. The Tampa Bay Times reported this month that resignations at Florida’s top universities are at a recent record high and that scores of once-sought-after faculty posts are currently vacant, “because,” as one Florida State professor said, “of the perceived anti-higher education atmosphere in the state.” That zeitgeist includes laws aiming to give politicians greater control over campus affairs, a dramatic weakening of tenure, and restrictions on teaching around race and gender.

“It’s not safe here anymore on so many levels,” Carolyne Ali-Khan — who taught social justice in education at the University of North Florida for a dozen years but has left for a small college in upstate New York — told the paper. “It’s not physically safe. It’s not economically safe. It’s not professionally safe. It’s not intellectually safe.” At New College of Florida, the small public liberal-arts school in Sarasota that DeSantis and his allies took over to remake as a beacon of conservative learning, a whopping one-third of the faculty has resigned.

The danger under DeSantis feels even more urgent for many families in the LGBTQ community, especially for transgender youth. Florida’s transgender advocates have launched Transit Underground to offer transportation and temporary housing for those fleeing the state, which under DeSantis has banned gender-affirming health care for under-18-year-olds. “We just low grade don’t feel safe,” Arlo Dennis, a transgender adult looking to get his family out of Florida this month as a raft of new anti-LGBTQ laws take effect, told the Washington Post.

Even harder to track has been the rapid outflow of immigrants taking place this year after DeSantis signed a crackdown targeting undocumented workers. In a state where immigrants comprised 26% of the labor force in 2018, when DeSantis was first elected, employers are now struggling to find workers in key industries like construction and large-scale farming. Construction worker David Guerra told NBC News he abruptly closed his side business and loaded his household of 10 people and all their belongings into two trucks and a car for an uncertain future in Maryland, because “they don’t want us here.”

Florida isn’t alone, and as America heads into yet another presidential election split bitterly down the middle, this recent surge in interstate political refugees is clearly a two-way highway. A recent Washington Post story on the phenomenon quoted not just progressives fleeing the red states that have all but banned abortion or passed anti-LGBTQ laws, but also conservatives moving away from high taxes or the homelessness crisis in states like California, for the blood-red Mountain West. One retired Los Angeles police officer told the Post he finally felt safe flying the pro-cop Thin Blue Line flag now that he’s moved to a suburb of Boise.

» READ MORE: The barely hidden fascism of Ron DeSantis makes a Pa. pit stop on a race to ’24

The two waves crash in Florida, a warm-weather magnet for retirees — aided by its low taxes that appeal to older folks not sending kids to underfunded schools. Migration into the Sunshine State surged amid “the Great Resignation” of the peak pandemic. Some newcomers undoubtedly were also drawn by DeSantis’ aggressive open-for-business COVID-19 policies. In 2021, more people moved into Florida than any other state, some 674,740. But a lot of folks — 469,577 — moved away that same year. And that was before the tsunami of right-wing laws, not to mention epic, hard-to-tolerate heat waves and a steep spike in insurance costs, with many large insurers spooked by the climate-change risks.

The Space Coast newspaper, Florida Today, recently profiled three families fleeing Florida for political reasons. They included Wendy Johnson and Peter Chunka, who abandoned their “dream home” in Melbourne Beach because of fears for the 18-year-old transgender foster child the couple adopted, and Eli Logan, a Florida native and nurse practitioner who recently moved with her family to Athens, Ga., because “DeSantis went after all the things that I believe in.”

The third family was Stacey and Sanjay Patel.

The Patels had long been drawn toward Democratic politics. Sanjay recalled in 2012 having a yard sign for Barack Obama at their home in GOP-leaning Satellite Beach, and a carload of passing youths harassing him, calling him a “sand-[n-word].” But that kind of harassment only seemed to get their backs up.

Despite their very different backgrounds, both Stacey and Sanjay gravitated toward progressive politics. Sanjay, 46 — whose Indian parents brought him, undocumented, to America by way of Germany, and who earned a degree at UCLA ahead of a career mostly in project management — said he believes in an American Dream for immigrant families like his. Stacey, 49 — whose education included grad school at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon, and was once a consultant for Deloitte — said her views were molded by growing up without much money as her dad moved around for the Army. “For me, I was born into a family that was poor and I became what I consider affluent — and being able to look at the world from both of those lenses, it is radically unfair,” she said.

Bernie Sanders’ left-wing 2016 presidential run flipped a switch. When Sanjay — who was Florida state field director for Sanders — and Stacey came to Philadelphia for the Democratic National Convention as delegates, the Vermont senator told them, “You have to build power. You have to go into your own communities.”

The Patels went all out. Stacey estimated that she and the small army of volunteers she recruited in taking over the Brevard County Democrats in 2017 would go on to ring as many as a half million doorbells. Winning partisan elections in an increasingly pro-Trump county was almost impossible, but they tried anyway. In 2018, Sanjay challenged GOP U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus, and got 39.5%; he also lost for county commissioner in 2020.

Their push saw more success in nonpartisan municipal and school board elections. Jennifer Jenkins, a self-described progressive and the Patels’ friend and neighbor, shocked Brevard in 2020 by ousting a far-right county school board member, Tina Descovich. Descovich responded by co-founding Moms for Liberty, the extremist group that has made headlines by taking its book-banning, anti-LGBTQ campaign national. Meanwhile, Jenkins saw protesters constantly surround her house — shouting things like, “If you thought January 6 was bad, wait until you see what we have for you!”. She was falsely reported to state officials for child abuse and investigated, and demonstrators burned that “FU” into her lawn.

Not surprisingly, the vitriol spread to the Patels, who with Jenkins were now the county’s most visible Democrats. In the most notorious episode, in 2019, Republican county commissioner Bryan Lober wrote on Facebook: “I’m not typically a big abortion proponent but in Patel’s case, I might look the other way as I can only imagine what a scourge of humanity (and on our economy) her offspring would prove to be given that her litter would likely be raised with an entitlement mentality, zero work ethic and taught the hypocritically racist and sexist position that the white man is evil.”

For a time, the threats and intimidation only made the Patels fight harder. But things looked different at the turn of the decade. Stacey threw herself into a less overtly political effort, a COVID-inspired group called Mutual Aid Brevard that seeks to help struggling families and has grown to 18,000 members. Then came their daughter, Emma.

“As a parent, when you’re in that kind of environment, you have to look at it through the eyes of a kid,” Sanjay said. And the Patels did not like the things — book bans, classrooms becoming uncomfortable for LGBTQ kids or children of color — they were now seeing in Florida. They quietly began looking for more progressive-minded places to raise Emma, initially focusing on Asheville, N.C., before they decided its public schools didn’t measure up.

They also looked at Burlington, Vt. — near a relative, but too cold for these Satellite Beach residents — before an online article recommended the Philadelphia suburb of Ardmore. When they visited the Main Line, they picked up a country-club vibe that wasn’t for them. But another house they checked out, on a leafy dead-end street in Swarthmore, 20 minutes south, was completely different.

“We drove into Swarthmore and there are just trees,” Stacey recalled of visiting the borough best known for ultra-liberal Swarthmore College. “There is art at people’s houses, like a bottle fence. There was just enough funk.” It was April and flowers were beginning to bloom. Emma picked dandelions in the front yard before the family explored the open-space forest right behind the two-story home.

The Patels moved to Pennsylvania a month later and haven’t looked back. They’ve been stunned to meet and form friendships with most of their immediate neighbors while setting up play-dates for Emma — things that never happened during their time in “individualistic” Florida. Sanjay laughed that he’s only met one Republican so far in Swarthmore, who invited him over for a drink. That’s on top of affordable home insurance, after the Patels’ carrier had dropped them in Florida. Even with uncertainty — Sanjay hasn’t begun to hunt for a job, and Emma won’t start pre-school until next year — he calls their new life “idyllic,” and his wife agrees.

“We’re supposed to be here,” Stacey said. “We don’t why yet. But this is where we’re supposed to be.”

It’s a happy new beginning for a family of three, but no one should call this “a feel-good story.” The Patels are well aware that their relative affluence gave them options that others — working-class LGBTQ kids, Black families feeling prejudice in the classroom or their polling places, migrant farm workers — might not have. The notion of a state government adopting “cruelty-is-the-point” policies to demonize and drive away large segments of its own people is unconscionable. The world has seen this before, when people were driven from their homes by politics. It did not end well.

Stacey, Sanjay and Emma Patel are political refugees within their own country, and they know it. “My folks immigrated to this country to find better opportunity for their children,” Sanjay told me. “We had to leave Florida to make sure we could provide those same opportunities for our child.”

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