Two years ago, I was looking at property in Puerto Vallarta to invest. That idea shifted, watching Project 2025 move from a policy document to active governance, and asking what my son’s education would look like inside of it. One year ago I planned this trip to Mérida.
Project 2025 is a 30-chapter blueprint for restructuring the federal government, produced by over 100 conservative organizations. Four days into his second term, two-thirds of Trump’s executive actions mirrored proposals from it. It targets the Department of Education, civil service protections, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ protections, and it proposes a centralization of executive power more aggressive than anything attempted in modern governance. I’ve read enough of it to understand the intent, and I can’t unread it as a parent.
The push for federal control over curriculum, stripping funding from schools that teach history correctly, removing books, and constraining what teachers can say is happening now. I want my son to grow up being able to think, to question, to encounter ideas that challenge him. What’s being built in American education is moving in the opposite direction, and it’s not moving slowly.
But it’s not only education. The country is being reshaped in ways that make it actively less safe for people who are already vulnerable, and the speed of it is stunning.
On reproductive rights: as of 2025, thirteen states have total abortion bans and another six restrict abortion to six weeks or earlier, meaning nearly a third of the U.S. population lives under severely restrictive reproductive policy. Women in states with abortion bans are nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or postpartum than women in states where abortion is legal. While maternal mortality decreased 21% in states with abortion access between 2022 and 2023, it rose in ban states. Roughly 62.7 million women and girls currently live under state abortion bans. This is not a fringe policy position becoming law. This is law, and women are dying because of it.
On LGBTQ+ protections: on his first day back in office, Trump rescinded all federal nondiscrimination protections based on gender identity and sexual orientation, dissolved the White House Gender Policy Council, and redefined sex as strictly binary at the federal level. Within days, agencies were ordered to block gender-affirming care for anyone under 19. At least $125 million in LGBTQ+ academic research funding was eliminated. Nondiscrimination workplace protections covering roughly 14,000 transgender federal employees and over 100,000 LGBTQ employees of federal contractors were revoked. These are not proposals. They happened.
On immigration: the administration revoked protections that had previously kept ICE agents out of sensitive locations, including courthouses and domestic violence shelters. ICE agents now stake out immigration courts and arrest survivors who came to testify against their abusers. A woman trying to secure a restraining order walked out of a courtroom and was immediately detained by unidentified agents. Illinois passed a law to stop this from happening in their state. ICE has violated it at least four times. When the institutions designed to protect the most vulnerable people are weaponized against them instead, that is not a country moving toward safety. That is a country moving away from it, deliberately.
I have a son. I’m also a woman. And I’m watching a government dismantle, piece by piece, the infrastructure that was supposed to protect both of us.
Almost everyone who hears we’re seriously considering a move asks “but is it safe?” That fear is not irrational. People have left parts of Mexico for real reasons, and those reasons are valid. What is not accurate is applying the conditions of the most violent regions to an entire country of 130 million people. Nobody asks if it’s safe to move to Chicago by asking about Mississippi. Mexico is not a monolith, and Yucatán is not Tamaulipas.
Meanwhile the U.S. has the highest rate of gun deaths of any comparable country by a significant margin, and active shooter drills are now a standard part of my son’s school year. That question, whether it’s safe to raise a kid here, never seems to come up about the United States, even as it probably should.
Mérida ranks as the second safest city in the entire Americas, behind only Quebec City, Canada, according to CEOWorld Magazine. It places ahead of every major U.S. city on that list. Yucatán is one of only two Mexican states that holds a U.S. State Department Level 1 travel advisory, the same designation given to Iceland, Portugal, and Denmark. I’ve spent two years in expat communities talking to people who actually live here, many of whom we’ve now met in person. The picture that emerges is not the picture American news coverage paints, and American news coverage has a financial incentive to keep it that way. Fear keeps people inside the borders where their labor, their consumer spending, and their tax dollars stay put.
The U.S. State Department estimates 1.6 million Americans live in Mexico, the largest population of U.S. citizens of any country in the world. More people left the U.S. than arrived in 2025, the first time that has happened since the 1970s. At least 180,000 Americans relocated abroad that year alone. Formal citizenship renunciations jumped 48% in 2024, with a global backlog for renunciation appointments now exceeding 30,000 cases. Renouncing citizenship is not something you do in a panic. The people behind these numbers have been planning this.
The business that makes all of this financially viable for us is location-independent by design. That was a deliberate structural choice made with this possibility in mind. I’m a business operations expert who has spent years helping service business owners build systems that run without them, and at some point I had to apply that thinking to my own life.
This week we are touring schools, walking neighborhoods, looking at real estate, meeting with an immigration attorney, and visiting hospitals with specific questions. We have another trip scheduled one year from now, to continue vetting the idea. We are doing the research that lets us make a real decision rather than a reactive one.
If you’re somewhere in this same research, whether a year in or just starting to wonder if it’s possible, I am here.
