A Mexican Couple in California Plans to Self-Deport—and Leave Their Kids Behind
SOURCE:New Yorker|BY:Jordan Salama
Can undocumented parents elude ICE capture for one more year, until their youngest turns eighteen?
Lily García was ready for her seventeenth-birthday party well before it started. On a late-summer afternoon in San Bernardino, California, the high-school senior stood in the cool shade of her family’s covered back patio, wearing a black tank top and high-waisted jeans. As always, her mother, Rosalinda, had gone all out with the preparations. Traditional multicolored Mexican fabrics were draped across tables and benches. Two men from a party-rentals company were testing the controls for a mechanical bull they’d set up in the back yard. A mini-fridge was stocked with soda, and small bags of Cheetos and Doritos were neatly arranged in a basket. It was two-thirty in the afternoon; her friends weren’t even invited until five. “And that’s ‘Mexican time,’ ” Lily said, smiling, before heading off to her room to double-check her makeup.
At the counter of the family’s outdoor kitchen, Rosalinda was preparing a huge tub of ceviche, chopping shrimp and cucumbers and limes; it had become a signature dish of hers, and she sometimes sold it to neighbors when the family needed extra cash. Her son, José, the oldest of her three children, sat at the head of a long table. “She seems excited,” Rosalinda said to José, in Spanish.
“Yeah,” José replied, in English, a bit distracted. (The family’s names have been changed.) The twenty-eight-year-old, who worked as a scientist at a manufacturing plant in Los Angeles, was studying his laptop screen. He was using Google Maps to look at Mazatlán, a city on the Pacific coast of Mexico. “Mom, do you remember the address of the house where you grew up?” he asked, clicking around.
“I think it was 414 Emiliano Zapata,” Rosalinda said. José typed in the address and turned the computer to show her the Street View. She shook her head. “That’s not it. Try 414 Salvador Allende.” That wasn’t right, either. They went back and forth like this for a while, without success. Then they turned to her cloudy memories of people she’d known as a young girl. Because Rosalinda had left Mazatlán when she was barely seven and was brought to the U.S. by her mother when she was ten, she remembered little about the town.
“Do you remember that woman you used to tell us about?” José asked. “She had a store.”
“La Licha!” Rosalinda said, sounding excited to be sure about something.
“Yessss. I’m gonna try to figure out where her store’s at.”
While José continued searching, Rosalinda said, “I’m going to ask your aunt.” She wiped her hands clean and opened FaceTime on her phone. Her sister—several years older than Rosalinda, who is forty-five—appeared onscreen. She was in Mazatlán. Just a few months earlier, Rosalinda’s sister had moved back to Mexico after living in the U.S. for several decades without legal status. She had long been wary of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and of his promises to carry out the “largest deportation effort in U.S. history.” A few weeks after Trump began his second term, she spotted what she thought were ICE agents in the parking lot of her church, in Las Vegas. She became so terrified of being arrested that she made the painful decision to leave before the situation got worse. “She just didn’t want to live with so much fear,” Rosalinda told me later.
Rosalinda and her husband, Manuel, who are also undocumented, began to consider self-deporting, too. They had migrated to the U.S. as children with their parents. Despite having three U.S.-born children of their own—two of them over the age of twenty-one—neither Manuel nor Rosalinda had ever been able to adjust their legal status. They had both crossed the border without an inspection, rendering them “inadmissible” by the U.S. government; the only potential way around this was to file a specific hardship waiver that would rely on Rosalinda’s mother, Asunción, first getting her papers herself. But Asunción died shortly before her own appointment at a consulate in Mexico, leaving the family with no recourse. “The thing is that we were brought here very young ourselves—it wasn’t our decision,” Rosalinda said. “I didn’t ask for this.”
They began looking for a house in Mazatlán. In May, they bought one, for roughly a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Meanwhile, the number of ICE sightings and arrests in Southern California continued to climb. Federal agents raided Home Depot parking lots where day laborers waited for work, made traffic stops based on race and appearance, and smashed car windows when individuals refused to open their doors. In cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, masked, armed agents waited to arrest migrants, sometimes violently, as they left immigration hearings. It didn’t seem to matter if an individual had a pending asylum case, a U.S.-born dependent, or no criminal record. Once migrants are taken to ICE detention centers, where conditions have been described as inhumane by immigrant-advocacy groups, it can be months before they appear in court; all the while, they are pressured to sign documents authorizing their own deportation.
The Trump Administration has also moved to significantly expand third-country removals—deporting migrants to places other than their country of origin. In perhaps the most high-profile case of the past year, more than two hundred and fifty migrants from Venezuela were sent to a prison in El Salvador that is notorious for brutality and torture. Around the same time, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, released a video that issued a warning to all undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.: “Leave now. If you don’t, we will find you, and we will deport you. You will never return.”
The fear of ICE, and of third-country removals, became so overwhelming that it was all the García family could talk about. They drew the shades in their living room, which faced the street. Rosalinda and Manuel stopped answering the door when they didn’t know who was knocking, and didn’t leave the house except to travel to and from work. (Rosalinda managed apartment buildings for a local company; Manuel was a carpenter specializing in the wood frames of buildings.) Their older daughter, Ana, who still lived at home, took on virtually all errands requiring driving, including grocery shopping. Neighbors, relatives, and friends without papers were all taking similar precautions.
One day in late spring, the Garcías’ doorbell camera recorded an ICE arrest taking place across the street: several dark trucks encircled a man, and agents pinned him to the ground. The Garcías didn’t know the man or what happened to him. Around the same time, a letter from the National Visa Center, a division of the State Department which handles petitions for immigrant visas, arrived at their door; it made reference to an application they had filed more than a year earlier. “I already knew that the government has my address,” Rosalinda told me. “But in that moment I realized that sooner or later they are going to come door-to-door. Once that letter arrived, I said, ‘I’m leaving.’ ”
Rosalinda wanted to go immediately, like her sister had. But José encouraged his parents to carefully consider their options first. Over the years, the family paid more than eight thousand dollars to various immigration lawyers, most of whom concluded that it would be impossible for them to fix their status without returning to Mexico and waiting out a ten-year reëntry ban; even then, there were no guarantees. It didn’t matter that all three of their children had been born in California and were U.S. citizens. One lawyer brought up a crucial point: Lily was still a minor, so if her parents self-deported she would have to leave with them, unless José or Ana became her legal guardian. In any case, Lily wanted to finish high school in San Bernardino and figure out her plans for college while her parents were still there to provide support.
After a series of dinner-table conversations and texts in the family’s group chat, it was decided: they would wait until Lily turned eighteen. “The only reason why I haven’t left already is Lily,” Rosalinda said. “The other two, they’re already adults, they have their lives and everything. But Lily is just starting out. She’s still”—Rosalinda switched to English—“She’s still a kid.”
“I need that report on my desk A.S.A.P. I spilled some coffee and I can’t find any paper towels.”
Cartoon by Asher Perlman
Lily’s seventeenth-birthday party marked a sombre milestone. This time next year, barring their arrest and deportation, her parents would leave the U.S.—the country where they had grown up, met each other, married, worked, and raised children, all of whom might have to face their adult lives without them nearby.
Rosalinda’s sister suddenly said, “Ah!”—she had remembered the address of the house where they’d lived as small children. It was on Calle Gilberto Ruiz Aldama. José pulled up an image of a modest, light-colored home, set back from a sidewalk and a paved road. “When I left Mazatlán, when I was seven, there was no cement—it was all dirt,” Rosalinda marvelled. She barely recognized the place.
San Bernardino, like much of Southern California, is deeply tied to Mexico and Central America. Long-distance bus companies like Tufesa offer direct service to the Mexican states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Jalisco. Taquerías and carnicerías proliferate amid the region’s massive Amazon and Walmart warehouses, where staffing agencies have long employed low-wage immigrant workers to meet the insatiable demand of the nation’s supply chain. Swap meets—flea markets where venders hawk everything from secondhand clothing and kitchenware to fresh produce and cleaning products—could be mistaken for the mercados in the central plazas of Tepic or Hermosillo. In recent decades, immigrants from such countries as Vietnam, China, and the Philippines have arrived in San Bernardino, but in far smaller numbers. Many businesses greet customers in Spanish first, as nearly seventy per cent of the city’s population is Latino.
Just about everyone I met there had an ICE story: a sighting, a close call, an acquaintance who had been taken. As a result of the collective panic, restaurants saw a steep decline in foot traffic but also an uptick in delivery orders. When school started up in August, parents with papers offered to pick up and drop off the children of families who were in peril. A thirty-five-year-old Mexican American schoolteacher whose parents are undocumented told me that, after she began going to the supermarket for them, she immediately noticed a pattern. “I was taking pictures of different brands and amounts and sizes, texting my mom to ask what exactly she wanted,” the woman said. “Then I looked around and realized that all around us there were other young people doing the same thing—shopping for their parents and sending them pictures because they didn’t know what to get.”
Community organizations across the Inland Empire—the metropolitan region east of Los Angeles that includes industrial, working-class cities like San Bernardino—raced to implement added security at their facilities and to distribute information about the rights that even undocumented people could exercise when encountering a federal agent. On August 16th, during an immigration check in San Bernardino, agents shattered the window of a man’s pickup truck and then opened fire when he drove off. (Days later, government forces swarmed the man’s home and arrested him.) The agents’ gunshots could be heard at a nearby nonprofit community center and garden in the city’s depressed downtown. The center hosted ceramics classes, handicraft workshops, and celebrations for such holidays as Día de los Muertos. “All of that is under threat because of the fear of gathering,” an employee told me. Staff members there had been trained in how to respond if ICE showed up; the center also established designated safe rooms in the building, with limited entrances and windows, where people could hide. As I was shown around, a community leader at the center joked darkly, “These are our Anne Frank rooms.” The safe rooms were stocked with cases of water, and there were also folding chairs and bathrooms, allowing people who needed sanctuary to stay for a while.
Many organizations holding events popular with immigrants stopped publicizing exact locations, instead sharing addresses only with registered attendees. In July, the bishop of the Diocese of San Bernardino, Alberto Rojas, suspended Mass obligations for his parishioners who feared being apprehended by immigration authorities after two arrests on parish property. Such a step is taken only during the most serious of circumstances, such as the height of the_COVID_ pandemic. “Many more people started to come up to me after Mass at the parishes, saying that they were afraid,” Rojas told me. “It’s a very real fear not to know what’s going to happen to your children. And let me be clear—if someone committed a crime, they should go through the system for that crime. I am not encouraging criminals. But this is the Catholic Church. We don’t need people to have documents in order to take care of them. We take care of the poor and the vulnerable no matter what. These are human people.”
When I arrived in San Bernardino, in September, there had been a brief lull in federal activity on the streets. “This is how they get us—when we start to feel comfortable again,” Rosalinda said. Everyone expected enforcement to pick back up. A few days earlier, on September 8th, the U.S. Supreme Court had lifted a federal judge’s prohibition against “indiscriminate” immigration stops in Southern California based on factors like race, ethnicity, language, and type of work—meaning that someone could legally be questioned simply for speaking Spanish in public, having dark skin, or driving a landscaping truck.
Just after dawn on my first morning in town, I drove to an unpaved lot along Highland Avenue, in front of a Home Depot and a Dollar Tree, where day laborers had gathered. Along the south side of the lot, a twenty-five-year-old Salvadoran woman named Lisbeth sold food out of her car. The open trunk of her black Toyota sedan was lined with coolers holding homemade tamales and pupusas, along with salsas and pickled vegetables. A handwritten sign in Spanish listed what else she sold: arroz con leche, agua fresca, soda, Monster, Red Bull. Lisbeth’s sister, who was pregnant, sat in the front seat, holding a large thermos filled with coffee.
“My mother is the one who makes everything—this is her livelihood,” Lisbeth explained. The two sisters had legal status, but their mother did not, and she had been staying home ever since ICE repeatedly raided the lot over the summer. Their mother had been present during one raid, in August; she was sitting in the passenger seat of the car when agents descended on the site. As the day workers fled in every direction, Lisbeth got into the driver’s seat and sped away. “I drove straight home with everything just like this,” Lisbeth said, meaning that she’d left the trunk open, with a white kitchen trash bag hanging from the bumper. Her mother filmed out the window as they escaped, and Lisbeth posted the footage to her TikTok account, in order to warn others in the community. She herself got most of her news about ICE’s presence in the area from TikTok.
As she recounted the story, a gray pickup pulled up to the curb, its dashboard adorned with Catholic imagery and trinkets from Mexico. Two construction workers were in the front, with fountain sodas in the center cup holders. One of them, whom I’ll call Juan, got out to buy tamales for himself and his partner. He was heavyset, wearing a black T-shirt and work jeans. “Would you give me a third tamale so I can feed the pigeons?” he asked. Juan did this many mornings, and Lisbeth obliged, handing over her last tamale, tightly wrapped in aluminum foil. The crinkling sound of foil unwrapping scared the pigeons, which flew to the other side of the dusty lot.
“They’ll come back,” Juan said as he began throwing pieces onto the sidewalk. “Here they come.” The pigeons returned, one by one.
Juan and Lisbeth got to talking about the raids. A friend of his had been captured over the summer and recently got out on bond. (In order to qualify for bond, you cannot have been convicted of certain crimes, and you must convince a judge that you don’t pose a threat to the community.) “They let him go with an ankle monitor,” he said.
Moments later, Juan spotted the man, Francisco Javier García Félix, on the other side of the lot, and brought me over to meet him. Félix, a middle-aged man from Guadalajara with long black hair parted down the middle, clearly had the respect of the other people at the site, whom he called his “colleagues.” The father of seven children—six sons and one daughter, between the ages of ten and twenty, all U.S.-born—he was known endearingly as el Apá, a Mexican nickname that means “Dad.” His youngest boys, elementary schoolers, were playing in the back seat of his pickup; he was on his way to drop them off at school.
“They’re traumatized,” Félix told me in Spanish, making sure the children were out of earshot. His arrest took place during a raid on July 6th, just a few steps from where we were standing, as he walked unwittingly out of the Dollar Tree. He had overstayed his visa for eighteen years. The next day, his oldest son, Michael, set up a GoFundMe page titled “Help ICE got my DAD :(” that raised more than three thousand dollars for the family. During the weeks he was in detention, his family fell behind on their rent and their bills. His daughter did not want to get out of bed. His children submitted letters to a judge as part of his case. “The absence of my father has been devastating towards my everyday life,” Anthony, Félix’s second-oldest child, wrote. “It has impacted so much, like my sleep, mental health and physical health.” Félix’s wife, Yessy, managed to hold everything together while navigating the labyrinthine legal process to fight for his release. Still, he said, there were days when his children ate only rice and beans.
Félix was first sent to a detention center in Los Angeles for a week, before being transferred to an ICE processing facility in the neighboring city of Adelanto. Félix described it as a “warehouse” with close to four hundred detainees in his building alone and more than a thousand at the facility in total. Immigrants detained there have complained about cold temperatures and a lack of blankets. In August, CoreCivic, the second-largest for-profit prison company in the U.S., reopened a former state prison as an ICE detention center in the nearby Mojave Desert town of California City; with more than twenty-five hundred beds, it is the state’s newest and largest immigrant-detention facility. On November 12th, seven detainees represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and other legal-aid groups filed a federal class-action lawsuit against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, alleging “dire” and “inhumane” conditions at the California City facility. “Sewage bubbles up from the shower drains,” the complaint reads. “People are locked in concrete cells the size of a parking space for hours on end, and officers threaten them with violence and solitary confinement. Food is paltry and people go hungry. Temperatures are frigid; those who cannot afford to buy sweatshirts from the exorbitantly priced commissary suffer in the cold, some wearing socks on their arms as makeshift sleeves. Friends and family members who travel to the Mojave Desert to see their loved ones must do so across heavy glass; people detained at California City cannot touch or hug their children. The facility sharply limits access to lawyers, leaving people bewildered and largely incommunicado.”
By definition, immigrant-detention centers like those in Adelanto and California City deal with civil, not criminal, offenders—living in the U.S. without authorization is a civil offense, not unlike parking illegally. And yet, according to the A.C.L.U., the conditions in such facilities are sometimes even worse than those in prisons. (Crossing the border illegally, as opposed to overstaying a legal visa, is a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by a fine, up to six months in prison, or both; it rises to the level of a felony only once someone who has already been deported, or denied admission, attempts to reënter the country illegally.)
After forty-four days, with help from a local immigrant-rights organization and the Mexican consulate, Félix was released on a five-thousand-dollar bond. He told me that he had just been relieved of his ankle monitor; now immigration authorities were monitoring his phone to insure, among other things, that he would not attempt to work. Félix spoke warmly of the hundreds of other immigrants he met in detention. “There were Arabs, Chinese, Africans, people from every part of the world,” he said. “Many of the people I met did not deserve to be in there. Many of them didn’t do anything wrong, but they’re now separated from their families.” They were told to sign documents that would authorize their rapid removal without a court hearing. The message was “Until you sign, you can’t leave.”
Félix understood that he was the fortunate exception. He made an initial court appearance in November; he now awaits a second court date, in January, before a judge in Santa Ana. Even so, the situation had shattered his life. “This is family destruction, economic destruction,” he said. “And, if they send me back to Mexico, it’s practically a forced divorce. Undocumented people are being terrorized.”
Everywhere Félix went, he carried a clear plastic pocket folder containing his Mexican passport and all of his other documentation, in case he was stopped again. On a small piece of paper, he had scribbled down an English phrase that his son had taught him—one that captured a strange sadness he’d felt since his release. “Survivor’s guilt,” he said, reading it aloud before switching back to Spanish. “Like when a plane crashes and you’re the only one who lives.”
As the sun set behind the desert hills, Lily’s guests began arriving. The teen-agers greeted her parents one by one; a Spotify playlist featuring Travis Scott and Rauw Alejandro played while the guests took turns on the mechanical bull. I sat at a smallish round table off to the side, eating dinner with Lily’s parents and her older brother and sister. Rosalinda and Manuel always spoke in Spanish with their kids, whose work, school, and social lives existed largely in English. The siblings, who joked that they were “no sabo” kids—an improper conjugation of “I don’t know”—switched back and forth between English and Spanish as they responded, knowing that their parents could understand both languages even though nobody in the family considered themselves to be perfectly bilingual.
Whereas Rosalinda seemed to immediately open up with everyone she met, Manuel—four years her senior, with a thick black mustache—was deeply reticent. He was friendly but spoke only in short bursts. He worked for a construction company that built mostly schools and other government-owned buildings. The irony of this was not lost on his family. “It’s, like, ‘You don’t want me, but you want me to build your buildings,’ right?” José told me later. But Manuel’s job, which he had been working at for the past ten years, paid reasonably well and gave him health care.
In the past few years, the family had become solidly middle class for the first time. “We’re comfortable,” José said. The mechanical bull, which cost a few hundred dollars to rent, was certainly a flourish. The Garcías had bought their home, in 2011, for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and now it was worth almost three times as much. Despite these gains, the family’s ability to pay for college was unquestionably dependent on scholarships and other aid. Now that Rosalinda and Manuel were expecting to live in Mexico starting next year, Ana was claiming Lily as a financial dependent so that Lily would still be eligible for in-state tuition and federal financial aid.
At one point, José and his father went to the driveway and started unscrewing the California license plates from one of their several cars, a silver Hyundai S.U.V. I learned that they had just agreed to sell it to Carvana, the online used-car dealer. “It’s not easy to import a car into Mexico,” Rosalinda explained, as she watched them. “Better to keep the savings and buy a car there.” She had begun researching prices in Mazatlán and determined that she could buy a decent used car there for about six thousand dollars.
The family had been discussing which of their possessions would go with them to Mexico and which could be sold. Rosalinda and Manuel had conversations with their children that parents in their forties would not usually have. José told me, “My mom started asking me, what stuff in the house do I want as herencias?”—an inheritance. They planned to send Manuel’s tools and a few boxes of kitchen items to Mazatlán. There were also a few sentimental belongings that Rosalinda planned to take, including a collection of shot glasses that her children had bought for her on trips to various cities around the world. (Rosalinda, who had lived in San Bernardino almost exclusively since she was brought to the U.S., had hardly ever been outside of California and Nevada.)
The next day, when I came by the house, the Hyundai was gone, as was a large outdoor sofa that some of Lily’s high-school friends had been sitting on just twelve hours earlier. “I gave it to the guy who I rented the mechanical bull from,” Rosalinda told me. The day after that, some of the living-room furniture was missing. “Soon the table will be gone, too. Poco a poco . . .” Rosalinda made a slow, sweeping motion with her hands. I asked why the family had already started cleaning out the house, given that they weren’t planning to depart for another year. “A year will go by like that,” she said. José added, quietly, “They want to have as much in order as possible, in case they have to leave in a hurry.”
When I first met Rosalinda and Manuel, they said that they had mostly withheld from friends the fact that they planned to go back to Mexico. “It’s just easier for them to convince themselves to leave if other people aren’t begging them to stay,” José explained at the time. The oldest and most financially stable of the three siblings, José would manage most of his parents’ assets in the U.S. once they were gone. His sisters had agreed to this; José had got married a year earlier, at twenty-seven, and both he and his wife, also a scientist, had well-paying careers. In order to afford his parents’ house in Mazatlán, José took out a two-hundred-thousand-dollar home-equity line of credit on the San Bernardino house, which was already in his name because of the difficulties that undocumented Americans face when trying to qualify for mortgages. Once Rosalinda and Manuel were gone, José and his wife planned to move in and commute to Los Angeles—about two hours each way. They would rent out part of the house to a tenant and send the rental income, roughly twelve hundred dollars per month, to Rosalinda and Manuel in Mazatlán. “They say that you can live more comfortably in Mexico with a thousand dollars, going out once or twice a week to eat,” Rosalinda assured me, though the tone of her voice suggested that she wasn’t entirely convinced. Her sister, who used to work in fast-food restaurants in the U.S., had mostly retired by the time she moved back to Mazatlán, but she eventually planned to sell birria in order to stay afloat.
A huge pile of wood planks and beams sat in the driveway, much of which was covered by a low metal roof. “Before my dad leaves, he’s going to fix a bunch of things around the house, because it’s what he knows how to do,” José said. Ever since his parents purchased their home, his father had expanded and customized it, converting it from a two-bedroom into a three-bedroom house with an accessory apartment. Now he would make one final renovation so that José and his wife would feel more at home there. José pointed to the metal panels over our heads. “We’re going to replace the roof of the house and take down all of this, too. My mom likes the shade, but my wife loves the sun. So once we’re living here . . .”
He trailed off. It was rare for him to get emotional. José constantly cracked jokes and teased his sisters, and he addressed difficult conversations with candor and seeming ease. Perhaps there simply wasn’t much time for reflection: as the oldest child, José had long occupied the role of the family’s chief operations officer, navigating two languages, two younger sisters, two parents, and a great deal of responsibility and risk. His response to the turmoil of the past months was to quietly and efficiently tackle one challenge at a time.
“He died doing what he loved—correcting the way I pronounce certain words.”
Cartoon by Ali Solomon
Social scientists say that it is common for the children of immigrants, especially the eldest, to take on responsibilities typically handled by adults. “I get a variation of this story every day,” Carola Suárez-Orozco, a psychologist and a professor-in-residence at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me. She is best known for her research on the psychology of immigration, particularly in children and adolescents. Suárez-Orozco said that the concept of “parentification” in developmental psychology refers to a child taking on some of the roles of a parent in their family system. Often, she noted, children experience parentification in the context of mental illness or substance abuse. “But I noticed many years ago that you would see it in immigrant families—not because of psychological pathology but because immigrant parents didn’t speak the language, or because they are working multiple jobs and are not actually present.”
The children of immigrants often find themselves providing translation help for their parents, or helping them navigate complex systems such as health care, schools, and legal processes. “There is absolutely a tremendous amount of skill sets that these kids and young people develop,” Suárez-Orozco continued. “There is also an emotional undertow and a price that is paid.” She explained that today’s anti-immigrant policies “project the very real possibility that a parent may disappear at any given moment and also project that you—the child—don’t really belong in this society. You’ll never really have a place. You’re an American citizen, but you don’t really belong.”
José admitted that he had not been unscathed. “I started seeing a therapist when all of this started happening with my parents,” he told me the night of the birthday party. We had moved indoors to the kitchen island, where Rosalinda was brewing coffee. Manuel had retired to the living-room couch to watch a Dodgers game. “My therapist said that one of the reasons that I am maybe being very nonchalant about everything is because I have a kind of P.T.S.D.”
The García family had lived for years with a latent fear of being separated. As José grew up, he recognized that certain family habits, rules, and behaviors had been shaped by this fear. Rosalinda offered an example. “We never wanted to turn on the light inside the car when we drove at night, because we were worried that the police would see us inside and pull us over,” she said. As a result, José came to believe that it was illegal to drive with the light on.
The realization that his family was fundamentally different because his parents lacked papers became clearer when he entered middle school. He recalled a few instances, before he had a cell phone, of becoming “gripped with fear” when his mother went to the store and stayed out longer than expected. His parents decided to give him driving lessons in a parking lot before he was old enough for a learner’s permit—in case something happened to them and he had to drive his sisters to a relative’s house. In 2010, their home was broken into, but Manuel refused to call the police. José realized that he and his sisters all shared a long-standing terror of police officers.
In this context, misbehavior was almost inconceivable for the García children. “My parents told me from a very young age that they were going to get their papers through me,” José said. “And I told myself that I cannot get in trouble with the law—forever.” When he went to college, at U.C. Santa Barbara, he once hosted a noisy gathering in his dorm room; when someone complained, he panicked until he got one of his roommates to take the blame. When a string of bad financial decisions led to the repossession of Ana’s car, José gave his sister the money she needed to get it back. “There was a big push for me and my siblings to be model citizens,” he said. “We didn’t want to have a single blemish that could prevent them from getting papers.”
The papers, of course, never panned out. Yet the hypervigilance remained, and all three children agreed that their previous anxieties were nothing compared with the state-sponsored intimidation they faced now. The speed with which their parents’ life in America unravelled had been dizzying. On Father’s Day, the family went camping near Bakersfield, about three hours north, and a white truck with a government logo pulled into the site. “Our hearts just froze with fear in that moment—you have no idea,” José said. “But it was just a park ranger.”
Ana, who is twenty-five and worked as a teller at Citibank, was the only family member truly familiar with life in Mazatlán. She flew there to see relatives in 2023, and on the trip she met a local man who became her boyfriend. Now she travelled there frequently, in part to be with him. When Rosalinda and Manuel decided to buy a place in Mazatlán, Ana offered to tour homes on their behalf. And her parents, who had hardly any idea what awaited them across the border, were grateful when Ana announced that she would move with them. She hoped to be able to transfer to a Citi-affiliated bank in the area. If that didn’t work, she would look for a remote job. Ana told me that she couldn’t imagine staying in California when her parents wouldn’t be able to visit for a decade or more. “Mom, you and I will have our coffee every morning and gossip about the neighbors,” Ana told her, almost longingly. “That’s how we’re going to be: ‘¿Viste a qué hora volvió la vecina?’ ”—“ ‘Did you notice how late the neighbor came home?’ ”
The whole family worried about Lily. José said that she had responded to the trauma of the past few months by withdrawing. Rosalinda agreed, telling me, “The other day, she said, ‘Mom, I don’t want to hear about your house in Mexico anymore. I don’t care!’ ” At the same time, Lily took on more hours at her part-time job—working the cash register and washing dishes at a Mexican restaurant—and, with a view to building her résumé, she joined more extracurricular activities at her high school, including Mexican folk dancing. She had no idea what her future would look like after she graduated, and she wanted to position herself for success. Over the summer, José, who is eleven years her senior, had taken her on a driving tour of California colleges; she wanted to study psychology. He hoped that she could move into a dorm and have the same kind of campus experience that he’d had, though he admitted that everything would depend on the cost. José was prepared to assist however he could. He’d either help finance her housing fees or save a room for her in the San Bernardino house, in case she needed to commute. He promised his parents that he would look out for Lily. “They put up with everything that comes with being undocumented, and for so long,” he said. “This is the least I could do for them.”
When I spoke with Lily alone, several days after her birthday party, I asked her what she thought about her parents’ decision. “I feel like I’m a deadline,” Lily said. “I don’t want to hold them back.” It bothered her that her parents were risking the terror of detention or a third-country removal in order to watch over her for one more year. Lily was the only person who described what her parents were doing as “fleeing the country.”
When the ICE raids began, Lily was in the middle of her junior year, a time when most American high schoolers start to think about whether they will take the SAT, apply to college or vocational training, or enter the workforce. Lily, who always planned ahead, chose to take a psychology elective, which would strengthen her college applications. She hoped to get a graduate degree one day. “I always wanted to do something with the brain, because I realized that childhood really shapes the way that you are, especially at the adolescent age,” she said. In addition to being curious about clinical work, she was interested in forensic psychology and the criminal-justice system. “I really like giving people a hear-me-out,” she explained. “I want to give people a chance to say why they’re accused of something, or why they might be going through a certain thing. I want to give people a voice. I like when people have that sense of feeling comfortable, and of belonging, maybe because—well, I’m not saying my mom didn’t give that to me, but it’s not something I grew up with. In a typical Mexican household, it’s just not like that. We don’t talk about things.”
Lately, Lily had begun to consider how her studies in psychology were informing her relationship with her family and the ordeal they were going through. “Growing up, I didn’t really know anything about the”—she brought her voice down to a whisper—“about the ICE situation and stuff. But now that I’m reflecting on it I’m really starting to understand my mom.” She was trying to exercise greater patience with her mother during arguments or difficult conversations; she now noticed that her father often grew uncomfortable when he was asked something personal. “I want to help other people who are like that,” she said.
At one point, I asked her whether she thought her parents were making the right choice. “I think they should go,” she said, without hesitation, and then she paused. “But it’s not that easy. This is their home.” Of course, she meant that it was her home, too—she’d never imagined a future in which she didn’t live in the U.S. Lily had grown up after the family had overcome the most difficult financial hardships that they had faced in America. The paths forged by her brother and her sister gave Lily confidence and a clear sense of the opportunities that awaited her if she worked hard. None of her plans involved moving to Mexico with her parents—not even to study, which was initially discussed as a possibility. Lily’s life was here.
And yet there was a feeling among all three siblings that their country had betrayed them. Lily became anxious whenever her phone signalled a new text or phone call; if she went to school and nobody was there to pick her up at the end of the day, her mind leaped to the worst-case scenario. She didn’t tell most of her friends what her family was going through—only the one or two who came by the house and noticed how much it was changing. “The other reason I haven’t told a lot of people is because, the first time I tried, they started crying,” she said. At home, Lily showed me a painting that she had made in art class: a portrait of her father, with his characteristic Mexican mustache, except that half of his face was that of an alien, and behind him the stripes of the American flag took on the dark-brown color of the border fence.
Lily had just broken up with her first serious boyfriend, whom she’d started dating when she was fourteen. Their relationship became especially strained after ICE intensified its activities, because his parents—who were citizens and whom Lily called “whitewashed Mexicans”—had voted for Trump. “I tried to explain to them what we go through, that there are so many things we can’t do or couldn’t do because of my parents’ status,” she said. “And they were just quiet. They said they were sorry that I was dealing with all that. But I don’t think they changed their beliefs.” She said of her ex, “It’s just, like, a level of understanding of my experience that he doesn’t have. Empathy, you know?”
A few nights earlier, José had told me that he was having similar tensions with his own in-laws. Like his parents, they had entered the U.S. illegally; unlike his parents, they had successfully adjusted their status. His father-in-law voted for Trump in 2024, and, despite the raids, he still supported many of the Administration’s policies. “I always say, ‘Once a Mexican starts making more than fifty thousand dollars, they become a Republican,’ ” José quipped, though I could hear the discomfort in his voice. “I’m definitely a centrist, more than my wife would like me to admit.” José’s wife, Irene, whose politics are more left-leaning, told me that some of her mother’s siblings and one of her own half siblings did not have legal status. “It’s a kind of disassociation, like, ‘If it’s not happening to me, it’s not my problem,’ ” Irene said. “But then I’m, like, ‘You guys came here undocumented, too!’ ”
Rosalinda knew that the events of the past months had shaken her children. For their benefit, she tried to put on a brave front. With a sad smile, she told me that she took solace in the fact that, if she succeeded in her plan to leave, it would at least be somewhat on her own terms. She tried to focus on the positive changes that would come with the move: because she and Manuel would have full legal status in Mexico, they could live without worry, and they could also travel almost anywhere. Rosalinda dreamed of seeing Italy, Costa Rica, and the Yucatán Peninsula. “After all, I need to know my own country first,” she said.
She showed me videos of the house in Mazatlán, which had been gut-renovated before they purchased it. The house had two stories, clean white walls, a courtyard, and enough rooms to accommodate all the kids during the holidays. She noted with pride that, whereas her husband had always worked on the San Bernardino home himself, in Mexico they could afford to hire others to do upkeep and renovations. She had already paid a mason from Ciudad Juárez, near the Texas border, to travel to Mazatlán and build a bedroom addition and a kitchen island—more common in American than in Mexican homes—so that the place would feel more Californian. The mason had charged her less than five thousand dollars. “He stayed in Mazatlán and worked on my house for three months!” Rosalinda said, grinning.
“You are still a little overweight. Although some of that is probably the badger.”
Cartoon by Edward Steed
But everything Rosalinda knew about the house and its construction projects came through her iPhone or through Ana’s visits. And her broader perceptions of Mexico had been shaped over the years by the kind of longing for a homeland that never really fades. In this respect, Rosalinda was honest with herself: it was hard not to feel like she lacked control over her future. The youngest of ten siblings, she had moved around a lot with her mother in her early years, mostly between Mazatlán and Tepic, a city in the nearby Mexican state of Nayarit. Her mother brought her to California in 1991, because one of Rosalinda’s sisters had followed a boyfriend there; they crossed the border on the beach in Tijuana, slipping under a fence in the sand. Rosalinda attended middle school in San Bernardino for two years before her mother took her back to Mexico, fearing that she had become friends with troubled kids. Rosalinda had already begun to adjust and learn English. “I didn’t want to go back,” she recalled. “I was comfortable here.”
In 1995, after a couple of years in Mexico, her mother heard that one of Rosalinda’s brothers was getting into trouble in the States and decided that she needed to live closer to him. Rosalinda wanted to stay, but her mother ignored her pleas, saying, “Pack your bag, because tomorrow we’re leaving early.” It took them three attempts before they were able to sneak across the border, with the help of smugglers, who drove them to San Bernardino. During the ride, one of the men groped Rosalinda, who was fourteen. “There was nothing I could do—I couldn’t scream or anything,” Rosalinda said, wiping away tears. “I just had to stay silent. After that, I told my mother, ‘You do whatever you want, but I am _never_crossing again. That’s it, I’m finished.’ ” Two years later, as a high schooler in San Bernardino, she met Manuel and became pregnant with José.
As a couple, Rosalinda and Manuel had sometimes contemplated returning to Mexico. But only once, more than fifteen years ago, did they come close, after a particularly humiliating experience of trying to sign up their young children for Medicaid. Rosalinda told me, “The woman who worked there made me feel so bad that I came back sobbing, and I said, ‘I don’t want to live in this country anymore.’ ” But when she and Manuel asked José, who was twelve at the time, if he wanted to move to Mexico, he begged them to keep the family in America. “And they respected my wishes,” José told me, recalling the conversation. “They listened.”
About half of the Garcías’ extended family now lived in Southern California. The other half, in Mexico, Rosalinda knew largely by name only. Until recently, she and her husband had a vibrant social life in San Bernardino. For many years, she regularly attended an evangelical church, and she still went to exercise classes with friends she’d made there. Manuel, for all his shyness, had been a regular on a recreational baseball team.
Rosalinda hadn’t forgotten her youthful promise to never cross the border again. It felt surreal to be returning to Mexico, which, after her three decades in America, seemed like a construction of her imagination. “We are afraid, because we’re moving to a place that we don’t remember,” she told me, sighing. “I guess that’s just how it goes.”
On weekends, the family liked to unwind at a nearby R.V. park and private campground where they had been members for years. There were campsites for tents and trailers, rental cabins, barbecue grills, two lakes, and three swimming pools. It had long been Rosalinda’s favorite place, and now it had the additional appeal of being private property. “It’s all fenced in, so it’s one of the few places outdoors where ICE can’t just show up,” José explained. Last spring, when the raids in San Bernardino hit their peak, Rosalinda camped there for two weeks. “I slept in a tent close to the showers so that I would be more comfortable,” she said.
One Saturday afternoon, Rosalinda, Ana, José, Irene, and I piled into their black Tahoe and drove to the campground. In the car, Rosalinda wanted me to listen to one of her favorite norteños—a type of Mexican folk song that heavily features the accordion. “It’s the one I’m going to listen to when I leave the United States,” she explained. The song was called “El Mojado Acaudalado,” or “The Wealthy Wetback,” reclaiming a slur that dates from the early twentieth century and refers to Mexican immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally by crossing the Rio Grande. The song’s narrator is a migrant who has saved up money while working in the U.S. and is finally returning to his homeland. Rosalinda sang along to every word:
Me está esperando México lindo por eso mismo me voy a ir Soy el mojado acaudalado pero en mi tierra quiero morir
Beautiful Mexico
is waiting for me
and for that same reason
I’m going to leave
I’m the wealthy wetback
but I want to die
in my homeland
“Exactly,” she said, nodding as the track finished. José said that the song depressed him.
The narrator emphasizes that his birthplace is his true home and that all along his plan has been to return there. Did Rosalinda really feel the same? It was clear that she proudly considered herself a Mexican living in America—but, with all her American customs, there was no knowing how locals in Mexico would view her or how well she would adjust. José told me later, “I think my mom does feel more Mexican than American, perhaps because she knows that America won’t accept her.” He paused. “Now, if this country accepted her, I’m sure that tone would change dramatically.”
José drove the Tahoe past the warehouses and strip malls of the Inland Empire and turned onto a road that climbed into the San Bernardino National Forest. Back in the city, it had been smoggy and hot. But, as we gained altitude, the air cleared and cooled.
We arrived at the campground gates, where Rosalinda shared her membership number and we all received entry bracelets. José parked beside one of the lakes, which was stocked with trout, for fishing. Rosalinda suggested that we all take a walk. “I like to be around all the people,” she said. Many campers were from surrounding towns, but others had come from far away. Many had flat-screen TVs set up outside their trailers so that they could watch a fight between Canelo Álvarez, a Mexican boxer, and Terence Crawford, an American one. We stopped for a while at a small pavilion where a cover band called Suavé was playing nineteen-eighties dance-floor classics. Rosalinda happily bounced along.
We reached a quiet, wooded area beside a clear creek. “I want to hug a tree,” José said, and he wrapped his arms around a large trunk. The rest of us set out folding chairs in a patch of grass. Rosalinda reached into her bag and fished out some pears and oranges, which she passed around. The conversation drifted to what they called their America Bucket List—trips and experiences they wanted to have together before Rosalinda and Manuel left. A few weeks earlier, José had taken his father to a Dodgers game and surprised him with their first-ever seats behind home plate. The family planned to drive to Yosemite in a few months. For a while, they had also talked about walking the glass bridge over the Grand Canyon; then they found out that some Arizona police departments had agreed to share information with ICE.
Yet, of all the places in America, it was this peaceful, ordinary campground that loomed largest in Rosalinda’s dreams. She had long imagined bringing her future grandchildren here for “grandparents’ weekends.” Now she grew emotional with the awareness that this would likely never happen. We sat in a circle by the creek and watched the sun dip behind the hills. A hawk took up a perch in a nearby tree.
Later that evening, on the car ride home, Rosalinda quietly asked Ana, “Do you think that every country has mountains and streams like this?”
Ana didn’t answer, and Rosalinda turned to me. “The other day, I was telling my children that, almost all my life, I’ve lived surrounded by these mountains,” she said. “I see them every day. But only now that I’m leaving I’ve started to think about how much I’m going to miss them.” ♦
