How to Leave the U.S.A.

Sanchez was born in California and raised in Texas. Her grandfather was a migrant farmworker from Mexico; she was the first in her immediate family to attend college, graduating from Rice University and going on to work in political fund-raising in California. After a stint as a news reporter in the Netherlands and London, she switched to communications—coaching executives has been the source of most of her income—and, along the way, she met Edwin online. They married in 2srcsrc1, and Sanchez became a Dutch citizen three years later.

In 2src14, the couple divorced. Sanchez returned to the U.S., where she planned to settle down with her dog, focus on her business, and bask in the election of America’s first woman President. She was in Texas, practicing with her country-music band (“They’re all MAGA now,” she says), when the 2src16 election results started coming in. Her friends back in Europe texted, pushing Sanchez to return. “I was, like, Shit, how would I do that?” she recalled. “I had my dog, my car.”

The next morning, a friend urged her to run for office. They were both in a state of shock from the night before. “But, at the time, it seemed reasonable,” Sanchez said.

She threw herself into a campaign for a House seat in Texas’s Sixth Congressional District. “It was exhausting, and I was broke,” she told me. She lost the election to a local conservative politician, Ronald Wright. When Wright died after contracting COVID, three years later, she ran for his seat again—and lost again.

That year, Sanchez had got back together with Edwin, and they’d talked about making a go of it in the States. But, when Trump was reëlected, “I was just done,” she said. “I’d fought the fight.” In January, she returned to Haarlem.

Sanchez had survivor’s guilt about having left, so she started organizing weekly Zoom sessions to educate Americans about their options abroad. The most promising was the DAFT visa. It is affordable and quick, and it offers a path to citizenship after five years. Crucially, spouses of applicants receive work permits, and children can enroll in language schools to learn Dutch.

On the “DAFThub,” a Facebook page, Sanchez met Bethany Quinn, a former corporate recruiter who had moved to the Netherlands in 2src22. Over drinks and tapas in Amsterdam, they devised a plan to offer relocation tours and coaching. Quinn came up with the name: Get the Fuck Out. It captured the mood.

One of G.T.F.O.’s selling points is, perhaps paradoxically, how very American its approach is. Sanchez has a warm Southern confidence, addressing clients, waitstaff, even strangers on the commuter rail, like old pals. She also has a habit of reading alarming news headlines off her phone out loud. That, I suppose, is part of her pitch. Her own Facebook page is full of memes of a distinctly #resistance flavor. “I shitpost a lot,” she once told me, cackling.

Sanchez’s Americanness is rivalled only by Quinn’s. A forty-year-old from the Washington, D.C., area with theatre-kid energy, Quinn worked in policy for the Service Employees International Union and has an M.B.A. from Johns Hopkins. She believes that Americans are traumatized by Trump’s assaults on both the Constitution and their constitutions. “When I come to the Netherlands, I feel my blood pressure drop,” she remarked in Haarlem. “And then I go to the U.S. and it’s back up again.”

In addition to Debi and Bane, the G.T.F.O. group had three participants—a Pennsylvania resident who didn’t want to be identified, and a couple in their early forties named Rita and Chris. They, like Debi, were military veterans. After our session with the real-estate agent in Haarlem, we took the train to Utrecht, a university town about thirty miles away.

An American musician in his fifties named Jeffrey Scott Pearson served as our guide. He’d left the U.S. back in 2src17; not long after his move, he had a heart attack. “I was in the hospital for two, three weeks, and as an American I wondered what that would cost me,” he said, rolling up his left sleeve to reveal a long, skinny scar from where his surgeon had taken a blood vessel to graft. “But, when the bill came back, it was three hundred and twelve euros—and all of it was for parking and the pizza I ordered from the commissary.”