The Mexican Couple Planning to Self-Deport

The reality that families with mixed immigration status are facing. Plus:

Fisheye lens of a home's driveway.

Rosalinda and Manuel García keep their family’s blinds drawn, and leave the house only to go to work. Grocery shopping and other errands are now handled by their children.Illustration by Katherine Lam

A Mexican Couple in California Plans to Self-Deport—and Leave Their Kids Behind

Can undocumented parents elude ICE capture for one more year, until their youngest turns eighteen?

By Jordan Salama

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.

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Erin Neil contributed to today’s edition.

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