Czech lives in limbo: Trump’s immigration crackdown reaches expats in US

One evening, Klára Moldová and a friend attended a Czech theater performance in Chicago. The following day, she learned through his text messages that he had been deported to Czechia.

Immigration agents had detained him outside his home as he headed to work, Moldová told ČTK. According to her account, he had no opportunity to collect his belongings. Back in his apartment, his cat still needed feeding.

“They simply sent him to Czechia in what he was wearing,” she said. Moldová took care of the animal, which remains in the United States. Her friend’s abrupt departure illustrates how President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is reaching Czech communities, including people who have built lives in America while lacking legal immigration status.

Moldová runs the T. G. Masaryk Czech School in Cicero, a Chicago suburb with deep Czech roots. Czech immigrants began settling there in the early 20th century, leaving businesses and institutions that connected successive generations to their homeland.

Today, the school’s role includes teaching Czech to expatriates’ children and adults. But some families have stopped attending because they fear being checked and detained on the journey, Moldová told ČTK.

She said her deported friend lacked the documents needed to remain legally in the United States. She also described another Czech family who, frightened by the possibility of enforcement action, presented themselves to authorities to leave the country.

These are personal accounts rather than a measure of how many Czech nationals have been affected. Nevertheless, independent reporting suggests the changes Moldová sees are part of a wider disruption to immigrant life.

In an Oct. 21 report, Chicago public broadcaster WBEZ described residents moving work, shopping and errands into nighttime hours to reduce their perceived risk of encountering immigration agents. Its analysis with the Chicago Sun-Times, using data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, identified 1,560 ICE arrests in Cook County from the beginning of 2026 through the first week of August.

Research published by the Urban Institute on Oct. 14 also documented consequences for children. In 34 interviews with parents from Latino mixed-status families in Chicago and Charlotte, nearly half reported keeping children home from school for at least a few days because of enforcement concerns.

The small qualitative study is not representative of all immigrant families. It does, however, describe a similar pattern of disrupted schooling, altered transportation and reduced participation in public life.

In Connecticut, Czech technology worker Věra Dvořák told ČTK that anxiety has also made immigration status harder to discuss within Czech and Slovak circles.

She knows mothers who overstayed their permitted stays and now face a painful dilemma: their children and daily lives are in America, while visiting relatives in Czechia could jeopardize their ability to return.

Dvořák and Moldová also pointed to immigrants’ role in childcare, cleaning, gardening and other services. In their experience, the workers facing uncertainty are often the same people on whom households depend.

The legal consequences require more nuance than a blanket statement that deportation always brings a minimum 10-year ban.

The Czech consulate in Chicago distinguishes between a visa’s validity and the period a traveler is authorized to remain in the United States. A visa that remains valid for years does not authorize an uninterrupted stay for that entire period.

Its guidance on US entry and overstays warns that exceeding an authorized stay can lead to detention, removal and restrictions on returning. US immigration law contains three- and 10-year unlawful-presence bars, depending on the circumstances; removal can also carry separate consequences. Individual cases depend on immigration history and applicable exceptions, rather than nationality alone.

The administration presents enforcement as necessary to uphold immigration law and protect public safety. When it launched Chicago’s Operation Midway Blitz in September 2025, the Department of Homeland Security emphasized people without legal permission to remain who had criminal records.

That argument resonates with some Czech Americans. Vít Miller, a retired electrical engineer in Minnesota who left communist Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, considers immigration enforcement one of Trump’s successes.

A country needs recognized borders, he told ČTK. While expressing discomfort with actions involving children, he supported removing people with violent criminal records. Miller received asylum after leaving Czechoslovakia and later became a US citizen.

Slovak-born New York immigration lawyer Lucia Kollárová sees a troubling divide between that earlier refugee experience and attitudes toward people seeking protection today.

She told ČTK she knows Czechs and Slovaks who received asylum after fleeing communism but now oppose immigration. Kollárová agrees that the system needs reform and supports removing people who commit crimes, while emphasizing that many undocumented residents are raising children, working and paying taxes.

For Moldová, the consequences are already tangible: absent families, a friend suddenly across the Atlantic, and an apartment whose occupant could not return even to feed his cat. The question reaches beyond who may enter America to what happens to the lives already established there.