London
CNN
—
Kevin and Jessica Cellura had just 48 hours in December to make an enormous family decision.
The couple, who both work as teachers, had to decide if they should take a job offer to teach in Morocco and leave Asheville, North Carolina, with their two youngest children.
But the Celluras say their decision was made easier by the presidential election results just weeks earlier.
“We will get away from the chaos … I feel like the America as we knew it growing up is slipping away pretty fast,” Jessica Cellura told CNN.
The Celluras are part of a growing stampede of Americans moving or making serious efforts to move abroad — or to obtain the citizenship rights that would allow them to do so.
Tax lawyers and immigration advisers told CNN they have seen an uptick in requests from Americans seeking help with navigating the complex web of guidelines needed to relocate since Donald Trump’s election win.
Jessica, 40, and Kevin, 52, told CNN they are unaffiliated voters. They cast their ballots for Democrat Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, though Kevin voted Republican in the 1990s.
Their problems with the second Trump administration go well beyond the usual policy tussles and fierce disputes.
“I feel like the government that we have is not based in reality. It is based in propaganda,” said Kevin Cellura, citing the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol inspired by Trump’s repeated, false claims that former President Joe Biden had rigged the preceding presidential election.
Trump’s reascension provided the “spark” the couple needed to fulfill a long-standing desire to move overseas, Kevin said. They are set to teach at a school in Morocco’s capital Rabat that follows the American model of education. They have one-way plane tickets on August 10.
Official data from the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada show a surge in the numbers of Americans applying to become citizens in recent months.
More than 1,900 applied for a British passport during the first quarter of 2025, the most since the UK’s Home Office began keeping records in 2004. In Ireland, too, around 4,700 people residing in the United States applied for Irish citizenship based on their ancestry during the same period, according to the country’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade — the highest quarterly figure in a decade.
It is impossible to know the personal stories behind thousands of data points, and the extent to which politics has played a role — if at all. Very often, people can only apply for citizenship after several years living in a country.
Dina Modi, an immigration casework supervisor at Immigration Advice Service, a British firm providing legal assistance to people hoping to move to and from the UK, said her clients rarely relocate over a single reason like politics. She partly attributes the recent rush of Americans seeking British passports to changes in UK tax and immigration laws.
A chunk of people simply need options, according to Modi. They have no concrete plans to move but want the ability to do so quickly. Other immigration advisers have witnessed the same impulse, telling CNN that some Americans view dual citizenship as a sort of insurance against what they perceive to be a deteriorating political landscape at home.
The Celluras, though, are not hesitating to leave. “I’m not going to be a sitting duck. I’m going to figure out our exit strategy,” Jessica recalls thinking after November’s votes were tallied.
Before the build-up to the election, David Lesperance reckons he received a maximum of two inquiries per week from Americans wanting to relocate. Now, the head of Lesperance & Associates, a tax and immigration advisory firm, he fields as many as five per day.
“(The) people who seek me out tend to be the people who feel they’re targets,” he said, noting that his clients tended to be wealthy, with the means to move abroad.
In the days following Trump’s January executive order restricting gender-affirming medical care for young people, Lesperance said he received seven inquiries from parents with a trans child. For these families, he said, America represents a “political wildfire zone,” and “they can smell the smoke more than the average white heterosexual male with a MAGA hat on.”
Melvin Warshaw, an international tax lawyer who sometimes works with Lesperance, said he has also received more inquiries from members of the LGBTQ+ community since the election. Another cadre of his clients are those who worry that America is “fast approaching an oligarchy or an autocracy.”
Fundamentally, both groups believe “their rights are being deprived if they continue to live in the US,” according to Warshaw.
Comedian Rosie O’Donnell offers one high-profile example. O’Donnell, who has traded public jibes with Trump for almost two decades, decamped to Ireland in January with her non-binary child, and is seeking citizenship based on her ancestry.
“When it is safe for all citizens to have equal rights there in America, that’s when we will consider coming back,” she explained in a March posting on TikTok.
Erik Lindsay did not leave America because of Trump per se, but he found that he could no longer stand the country’s deep political divisions.
The 50-year-old screenwriter and novelist said the coronavirus pandemic provided the “catalyst” for his move from Manhattan Beach, California, to Italy in 2020 — a time in America he likened to an “ideological civil war” where people dying “had become politicized.”
But Lindsay’s desire to relocate to his great-grandparents’ birthplace — and where he thus had a claim to citizenship — had been percolating since Trump’s first election in 2016 when he felt his friend group fracturing over politics.
Lindsay has never voted for Trump, but he remembers the vitriolic reaction he received after posting a message on his Instagram account soon after the 2016 election imploring his anti-Trump friends to stay calm and take the long view of American history. “It just got venomous,” he said.
Lindsay recently became an Italian citizen — though only just before the rules changed. Italy, like Britain, has started to tighten rules on who can claim passports and visas. In May, Rome enacted a law removing the route to citizenship through great-grandparents.
Lindsay was lucky with his timing. Now, he can choose to live in Italy, or between Italy and America, at a whim. But life feels lighter in Italy.
“To have any nuance in a conversation with anybody regarding politics that’s an American is impossible,” Lindsay said. “You can do it here.”
