The Shells of Swannanoa - The Margin

Editor’s note: Sources referred to by first name only are protected by a pseudonym to honor requests for safety, privacy, and anonymity.

After a full day cleaning a local high school in May 2026, Ana hustles through her last tasks so she can arrive early at the local produce market. Ever since September 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene hit the small mountain town where she’s lived for more than 20 years, Ana has relied on the free weekly market, housed in a defunct church, to feed her family. As she enters the sanctuary on that spring day, sunlight filters through stained glass, and at the bottom of one window a pomegranate glows. Ana leaves carrying bags full of vegetables and a loaf of bread.

The high school that Ana cleans became a relief center after the storm. Across the street, all the houses on two separate cul-de-sacs were destroyed. Nearly two years later, Swannanoa, North Carolina, continues to navigate Helene’s aftermath. The storm demolished the mobile home that Ana shared with her husband and then-teenage children. They made it out unscathed, wearing pajamas and the small blanket Ana’s kids grabbed, losing everything else. “El cascarón,” a shell, was all that was left of the home, she said.

“In that moment, our world caved in,” Ana said in Spanish.

There’s a richness in her voice, delicate and deliberate, as her eyes, rimmed with blue eyeliner, fill with tears that gently spill over. 

Ana witnessed her community wash away that week. Mobile homes raced down a river of stormwater like “barquitos,” little boats, she said.

Outside the market, operated by the nonprofit Bounty & Soul, she gestures toward U.S. Highway 70, the road that had transformed into an unrecognizable flood during that fateful week. It cuts through the rural town of Swannanoa as its main thoroughfare, flanked by the eponymous river on one side and Interstate 40 on the other. 

Ana and her husband, hometown sweethearts from Mexico, were among the first immigrant families to establish roots in their pocket of Swannanoa more than two decades ago. In addition to her work as a school custodian, Ana runs her own event decorating business, working extra nights and almost every weekend on weddings, quinceañeras, and other celebrations in her community. Her husband works as a house painter. 

In the aftermath of Helene, the family spent 53 days without potable water,and Ana’s husband was without paid work for a full year. The family moved into their renovated mobile home on the same lot in June 2025. But for them and their fellow immigrant community in these mountains, the economic and emotional impacts of the storm linger profoundly. 

Their mobile home, where they started and raised a family, is one of more than 100 mobile homes parked on the same circular drive. Plots of land are small — about 30 by 80 feet — and neighbors live in compact proximity to each other. Each home is unique, distinguished by an array of colorful flowers and lush cacti that grow along their perimeters. Cats claim different porches, rushing indoors to peek through colorful patterned window curtains. It’s a neighborhood full of long-established immigrant families, mostly Latino, with a few non-immigrant neighbors in the mix.

The park sits near the river. As floodwaters rose, nearly every home in the neighborhood was flooded or severely damaged. Ana’s home sat at the bottom of the hill, and it was completely destroyed.

The map below shows NCEM floodplain extents across different storm scenarios, along with the buildings at risk within each area. Hurricane Helene is classified as a 1,000-year storm event.

North Carolina is home to an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants, according to 2024 data from the Center for Migration Studies and the University of Minnesota. Because many of these community members don’t self-report their legal status, the data remains a rough estimation. The Latino population makes up 6% of Swannanoa’s population, or just over 1,000 people of approximately 17,000 total, as of 2023. 

Tight-knit neighborhoods of immigrants, mainly from Latin America with the majority from Mexico, are scattered across North Carolina’s mountain region. Many of which take the shape of rural mobile home parks. 

Buncombe County data shows that Helene hit single-family and manufactured housing (like mobile homes) the hardest. Combined, these dwellings make up the majority of housing in the town of Swannanoa. According to the county’s property assessor, there are 19,000 mobile homes in Buncombe County. 11,000 of which are fixed in place while the rest are a combination of single- and double-wide manufactured homes not on permanent foundations and other fixtures ranging from airplanes to campers and boats. Most of these homes are owner-occupied, while 28% are inhabited by renters. Swannanoa includes at least 940 mobile homes, which made up 16% of the town’s total occupied housing in 2023.

For many, mobile homes are a pathway to homeownership for working-class people, especially immigrants, who can purchase them with cash and avoid the rental market. In the face of a federally declared climate disaster, mobile homeowners qualify for FEMA aid if they are also U.S. citizens. Undocumented homeowners, however, do not qualify for any type of FEMA financial assistance. 

North Carolina’s undocumented immigrants bear one of the largest burdens of loss and displacement post-Helene. In interviews with The Margin, immigrants in mobile home parks relayed numerous difficulties, including barriers to FEMA funding, targeting from xenophobic vigilantes, the threat of eviction and an increased federal ICE presence in small-town immigrant enclaves that previously went under the radar. 

While the ground under many homes has long since dried, these hardships persist for many immigrants like Ana almost two years after the storm. 

“I feel like I’m living in a different place,” says Ana.

How FEMA shuts immigrants out of recovery

Commotion woke Hermila Contreras in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene barreled through North Carolina. Contreras’ mobile home sits on the same street where Ana lives, except at the top of the hill. No one knocked on her door (like a firefighter did at Ana’s) to order them to evacuate. So Contreras decided to wait out the storm as water rushed down the hill.

She and her teenage daughter were crouched inside a bedroom when a large tree toppled and crashed through the roof. Rain fell through a gaping hole directly into the kitchen, living room, and the back bedroom as Contreras tried to save important belongings from getting soaked. She looked out the window to see the water rise and rise, engulfing her car. The rain persisted for days. More trees fell, and mobile homes eventually crumbled into the stream of water. Roads became impassable. The family lost power for four months. 

Mobile homes are referred to as “manufactured housing” in federal data terms. Purchasing a double-wide mobile or manufactured home in Swannanoa, N.C., can cost up to $75,000. Additional costs of up to $50,000 can be incurred for moving the structure, preparing a new site, and installation.

Mobile homeowners at parks pay rent for the plot of land where their homes sit. Contreras said her rent is $600 a month, which was due just four days after the storm, on Oct. 1. Even when they own their homes, residents of mobile home parks can get evicted. North Carolina law requires that landlords provide at least 60 days' notice. 

Contreras said she applied for a FEMA offer of $750 three times; The Margin verified that the agency denied her the last time, in November 2025, because her application lacked specific documents including identification and receipts of purchases lost to the storm, including items she’s owned for several years.

Originally from Mexico, Contreras did not yet have legal permanent residency or a driver’s license when she purchased her mobile home 22 years ago and parked it at the Swannanoa park. For this reason, the home was technically in her oldest daughter’s name when Helene hit, though Contreras had paid it off.

Purchasing a mobile home requires a driver’s license, something that does not necessarily apply to standard homeownership. Undocumented immigrants qualify for a driver’s license in only 19 U.S. states, and North Carolina is not one of them. A common workaround is to purchase these homes using a relative or friend’s name, which can complicate applications for FEMA aid.

Contreras obtained permanent residence in the U.S. in 2017. But even a retroactive transfer of the deed in her name after the natural disaster would not qualify her for FEMA assistance. She thinks this discrepancy in paperwork disqualified her for much of the aid she applied for in the early stage of recovery. She even tried to receive aid from Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization, which also told her she did not have the proper documents.

A 2021 report by expert advisors to FEMA cited equity issues with several disaster-relief application processes. The FEMA National Advisory Council ultimately recommended that “alternative forms of documented ownership should also be accepted for instances involving loss of a mobile home.” That recommendation has not been taken.

Like many mixed-status families, Ana said she applied for and received FEMA financial aid through one of her adult, U.S. citizen children. FEMA awarded her family $25,000, meeting only a fraction of their need. Ana estimates total costs for the new home reached $60,000. Her husband didn’t work for a year to oversee the entire project, and did as much as he could himself. They received additional support, such as construction supplies from CORE, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that responds to disasters around the world, now with a team in Swannanoa led by Antonio Garcia, a Salvadoran who immigrated to the U.S. at age 16. Garcia said CORE helped reconstruct 25 mobile homes in Ana’s neighborhood.

As recovery began in the wake of Helene, the end of the month and its various due dates loomed. On Sept. 30, 2024, Contreras said various volunteers who were helping out all day in her neighborhood convened with the on-site park manager, a Spanish-speaking Latino, and a few residents. It wasn’t a planned meeting, but “we took the opportunity to ask about the rent,” she says. That’s when they were told it was still due the very next day.

Through her community and established “confianza,” Contreras connected with community organizer Dulce Mirian Porras-Rosas, who had been advocating for rent forgiveness with a mobile home park in nearby Candler, to no avail. Porras-Rosas told The Margin that she doesn’t personally know of any mobile home park landlord who forgave rent or offered an extension post-Helene.

For almost two years, Contreras has been living with flood damage and a hole in her roof that neighbors helped cover with tarp. Contreras was out of work for months—ironically, her job is in construction. Today, visible signs of black mold have appeared along the ceiling, which has been temporarily patched. 

Fortunately, Porras-Rosas connected Contreras to resources, which eventually led to a successful application with Renew NC, the state’s revamped 2025 home recovery program. Contreras expects a new mobile home by December.

Evacuations and evictions 

Porras-Rosas, who lives in a mobile home in Asheville, has spent years in community activism throughout the Carolina mountain region. She co-founded the Asheville group Semilla de Vida, an organization that began as a way to teach and promote food justice. When the storm hit, the group took action. In a mostly immigrant neighborhood, they distributed generators, water, food, and tools. Organizers also raised and distributed $9,000 in immediate rental and relocation assistance following Helene, money collected from neighbors and friends.

Buncombe County never implemented a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures despite persistent advocacy from community leaders and housing advocates. In March 2025, a group of state senators introduced Senate Bill 395, the Disaster Relief Eviction Moratorium Act, in the North Carolina Legislature. The bill stalled after going to committee and has not come up for a vote. 

While the federal government can administer programs to prevent evictions through HUD policies and, in some instances, federal aid, the eviction process itself is largely governed by state and local policy. Moreover, there is no federal mandate to disclose eviction data.

“Finding more detailed data on other characteristics, like country of origin, income, or immigration status, can be almost impossible,” said Juan Pablo Garnham, communication and policy engagement manager for The Eviction Lab at Princeton University. This means the actual scale of Helene's displacement of North Carolina's immigrant communities is impossible to track, since these communities typically don't qualify for federal disaster assistance.

When demographic information is documented in eviction court records, a court clerk typically enters it manually or a tenant self-reports, making the data neither systematic nor reliable. Even outside of climate disasters, Black and Latina women are more likely to be evicted than their male counterparts. For Latina women specifically, the risk of eviction is approximately 9% higher than it is for Latino men. 

“On top of that,” said Garnham, “we know that there are a large number of people who experience evictions informally and avoid going to court. Local experts and anecdotal experiences point in the same direction that undocumented tenants tend to be part of this group, and it’s extremely difficult to quantify their experiences.”

Burdened with back rent and the looming possibility of eviction, many Swannanoa renters and mobile homeowners sought help from Swannanoa Communities Together, the organization founded by a group of local women in Helene’s wake.

“What we have witnessed here in Swannanoa, starting in the immediate aftermath of the storm, is people who were displaced by the storm, who were living in their cars or tents or RVs, or sometimes if they could get a motel,” said Beth Trigg, co-founder of Swannanoa Communities Together.

To date, Trigg said they have provided almost $1.1 million in financial assistance to almost 1,000 households from October 2024 to May 2026. 

Paulina, who chose to only use her first name, is one of two bilingual Latina leaders at Swannanoa Communities Together. Before the storm, she and her family rented a large swath of land in Swannanoa on a tall hill. At first, only a couple of mobile homes occupied the land. One belonged to Paulina, where she lived with her family, and the other was occupied by the landowner. 

Over the next decade, Paulina slowly purchased more mobile homes to rent out to community members, while she managed leasing the land. By 2024, she collected rent from six households, the majority Latino, some including her family members.

In the early morning of Sept. 27, 2024, at the first sign of danger, Paulina began knocking on her tenants’ doors, every single one.

“We woke up the last family at 2 a.m.,” she said, in Spanish, of the last home they alerted. Within an hour, the two families evacuated to a nearby hotel together. Paulina recalls the electricity going out at 4 a.m, and that by the time the sun came up, everything had flooded. Paulina’s home and all of the mobile homes up on the hill where she lived had been destroyed.

Two weeks later, bouncing from shelter to shelter, Paulina and her team at Swannanoa Communities Together began receiving calls from people desperate to find help paying rent. It dawned on her that, as a landlord, she never collected rent. Neither did the landowner from whom she leased the rental plots.

“There was absolutely nothing left,” she said in Spanish. “How are you going to charge rent?”

When North Carolina mobile home parks evict residents, a landlord or management company can eventually obtain a writ of possession, which could result in the landlord possessing  the property until the debt is paid.  

“If you get evicted from a mobile home park, you will have to choose from the least bad of three options,” said Garnham of The Eviction Lab. “Abandon your property outright, sell it for pennies on the dollar, or try to move it to another location.”

According to an analysis of county court records by NC Eviction Watchdog, a project of the North Carolina Tenants Union, at least 391 evictions for mobile homes were filed in western North Carolina since Helene.

Another tricky reality for mobile homeowners is forced displacement due to the sale of the mobile home park land, often to developers. Dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a federal eviction moratorium, some park owners selling their property would give residents a few months to find a new place for their homes. This type of upheaval continues today for hundreds of families in mobile home parks across the state.

In March 2025, three state senators proposed Senate Bill 518, the Mobile Home Park Act, to better protect mobile homeowners. The bill was referred to committee, but did not come up for a vote. As a housing reform bill, it would provide stronger protection for tenants and require park owners to register with the North Carolina Human Rights Commission. Owners would have to comply with health and safety rules while adhering to new standards that limit rent increases.

‘The house of my dreams is gone’

Monica, a fast food worker, and her husband, who works landscaping jobs, felt excited when they found a beautiful home that they could afford in 2014. For 10 years, the homeowners grew their family on a quiet, friendly street. Five children grew up there, where they played on the swing set in the backyard, hanging piñatas from a large oak tree on their birthdays. The brick house boasts a secluded courtyard entrance leading into a cabin-like interior that, before the storm, warmed the home in natural wood paneled walls, floors, and ceilings. 

Today, the home has been gutted down to the wooden studs. After Helene, people cut the electricity and stripped the copper. The now-naked interior is a sight the family thought they would never see. In 2021, Tropical Storm Fred battered and flooded the home. Monica and her family lost all of their belongings. They worked to prevent similar disasters in the future by raising all of their power outlets by six inches. FEMA flood insurance, which the undocumented couple secured after Fred through one of their children who is a citizen, was also running out, with only two months left of coverage. Following Helene, Monica said they did not qualify for further FEMA aid, like the buyout,  due to previous assistance they’d received.

FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program purchases flood-damaged properties from homeowners for up to 75% of the costs, with the remaining portion typically being funded by state or local governments. Properties are assessed at pre-disaster market value and are restricted by limits to future development in flood-prone areas. However, an undocumented immigrant homeowner cannot apply for this type of buyout.

The family needs funds to raise their home off the ground, Monica said, an expensive effort they cannot afford on their own. And they are still paying a mortgage on a home they cannot live in.

Monica walks out of the house, stepping over a wooden door that she does not recognize, splayed out in the yard, “carried by the water” from a stranger’s home. She rounds the corner to find her Knock Out roses in full bloom, creating a luminous reflection in a large puddle of water on the street.      

                                      ***

The storm hit the same year that President Donald Trump was elected for a second term. 

Historically, undocumented immigrants have been wary of federal disaster relief because FEMA is housed under the Dept. of Homeland Security, which includes both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. After any natural disaster in the U.S., it is common for Border Patrol agents to be deployed to assist in recovery. A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Margin that agents were on the ground in western North Carolina after Helene. 

“For us [as immigrants] it’s a double whammy,” said Porras-Rosas in Spanish. “We’re living in really complicated times. It’s immoral, this corner they have us backed into. And it’s unnecessary.”

Reports of militia groups in the immediate aftermath of Helene became a snapshot in international media of the compounding crises of disaster recovery, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Locally, they amplified fear, especially in immigrant communities. These militias seemed to track far-right criticism toward federal aid. 

In 2021, the Biden administration designated places for disaster or emergency response as “protected areas,” where immigration agents would not engage in enforcement actions. However, in January 2025, the Trump administration rescinded that policy, the clearest indication that disaster victims might potentially become enforcement targets. ICE can use what it calls “common sense enforcement” in sensitive locations where those operations were previously prohibited. This previously required a judicial warrant but advocates warned that now enforcement can happen without one, instead only needing an administrative order by the agency

Reports of intimidation continue. In a video obtained by The Margin, a traffic cone with a U.S. Border Patrol ballcap was placed outside of a predominantly Latino mobile home park in Buncombe County in May. CBP told The Margin that they were not in Buncombe County in May 2026. 

It’s an image that feels symbolic. In June of this year, North Carolina passed a law, known as "North Carolina Border Protection Act,” that requires the state highway patrol and the Department of Public Safety to collaborate with ICE, which killed two more people in the U.S. in July. Neither person was who the agency was looking for. The legislation also effectively ends any sanctuary policies in the state. The bill passed after the state House of Representatives overrode Governor Stein’s veto. 

On July 26, sheriffs in Caldwell County, 65 miles east of Buncombe County confirmed collaboration with ICE and the U.S. Forest Service at a checkpoint at Wilson Creek park. The federal immigration enforcement operation resulted in the ICE arrest of 13 people.

Housing on the horizon

There are parts of Swannanoa that feel forgotten. Down the road from Ana and Contreras’ mobile home park, several residential cul-de-sacs are dotted with houses that remain desolate. Large X’s are graffitied on the garage doors and remaining siding. Homes are surrounded by overgrown brush and wildflowers.

Along U.S. Highway 70, a bright yellow sign stapled to a telephone pole beckons for the post office to return in thick black handwriting: “USPS WHERE ARE YOU.” Blocks of empty parking lots are surrounded by locked fences. A lot off the highway was home to the original Athens Pizza, operated by the same family for more than two decades. The business was renamed Athens Grille and has since moved into a smaller gas station alcove. Another lot housed the ACE Hardware, formerly a well-equipped store for construction workers, landscapers and homeowners, now void of any sign that a building once stood there.

If you drive too fast, perched beside the parking lot of a former beauty salon, you might miss a makeshift roadside marquee exclaiming “WE CAN DO IT! SI SE PUEDE.” Upon opening the door to the inconspicuous building, people are met with cozy couches and armchairs, big smiles, and lively chatter in Spanish and English. 

Swannanoa Communities Together transformed the space as their hub, with the intention of being a comfortable and communal haven for people seeking resources. A small food pantry in the back offers fresh produce and packaged foods, along with baby formula, diapers, and general toiletries. The bathroom is stocked with free menstrual products and pregnancy tests. 

Trigg helped found the multi-racial and multilingual organization with other women who had already been working in the community. Many have backgrounds organizing around the myriad issues in local policy, while others are specifically trained through economic justice models.

Other community members shouldered new roles in service of their neighbors. They are translators and interpreters, drivers and case managers who checked on families and helped neighbors navigate assistance systems. With local government agencies and nonprofits offering little Spanish-language information during immediate recovery operations, bilingual volunteers became translators and conduits for recovery information.

“Many stepped forward because they knew official information might not reach everyone or that some families might feel afraid or uncertain about asking for help,” said Carmen Ybarra, director of systems and engagement at Swannanoa Communities Together, via email.

One thing that instantly became clear to these advocates post-Helene is that current aid models limit access through eligibility requirements. As residents of Swannanoa Valley, the team knew that not everyone could show proof of a formal income, provide a Social Security number, present a credit history, or pass a criminal background check. Swannanoa Communities Together, thus, offers assistance to anyone who walks through the door. Folks get help paying bills, rent (even back rent) and more.

But the number one priority continues to be housing. And the long-term sustainability of future affordable housing plans presented by local governments makes Trigg and her cohort wary.

“We can help people by ensuring that they have a roof over their head for emergencies, but the actual transition from that to housing stability is really challenging and takes a long time, even with support from us, because of the lack of low-barrier affordable rental housing,” said Trigg. From 2019 to 2023, the median gross rent increased 58%, from $908 per month to $1,438 for a three-bedroom unit. 

Buncombe County is considering public feedback until August 15, for what’s dubbed the Swannanoa Small Area Plan, its proposal for the town’s future as part of the county’s 2043 Comprehensive Plan. A steering committee that Trigg served on met this year to assess the terms. Initial plans focused heavily on tourism and building out areas in Swannanoa that have already begun to transform. One strip includes a coffee shop, a now-closed brewery, and a food store.

Separate from the official steering committee, the women of Swannanoa Communities Together said they submitted a list of recommendations to the county with suggested revisions to the plan and solutions. The group included a five-year moratorium on short-term rentals like Airbnb, and an emphasis on affordable housing. 

On June 15 in a public session, the county agreed to explore a moratorium on short-term rentals. The motion received almost unanimous support from the steering committee.

Ybarra’s mission is to continue bringing Latino residents and other residents of color into the conversations around recovery and its decision-making process. Her work prioritizes “access, trust, dignity, and making complicated systems understandable.”

“Swannanoa’s recovery should not be judged only by repaired buildings, new development, or rising property values. It should be judged by whether the people who were here before Helene are still able to call it home,” Ybarra said.

***

Your donation supports in-depth reporting, data analysis, data visualizations, and original photography. Join us in the fight for environmental justice by contributing today — every dollar helps us tell the stories of the people and communities who have been and are currently experiencing injustice.