The Deported

Every time Marco G. gets deported, his Ohio-born wife, Leah, takes the kids and follows him to Mexico until they can all get back home.

They can’t stand being apart. They’ve been married for almost 16 years.

After recently being deported for the third time, the family was starting to contemplate another possibility – if it would be possible to settle a while in Mexico. Their US-born kids – Antonio, who is 14, and Sofia, who is 10 – need Mexican papers to enroll in school.

In an interview at the Tamaulipas Institute for Migrants in Nuevo Laredo on June 14, Leah described Marco – the only boyfriend she has ever had – as the “smartest man ever.” She said Marco crossed the US-Mexico border illegally when he was 18, which would have made it nearly impossible for him to get a green card through his wife, especially after his repeated deportations. Whether working with horses in Ohio, managing a huge apartment complex, or repairing Japanese-made motor-building equipment in Michigan, the couple told Human Rights Watch Marco’s US bosses find him invaluable. One employer called him an “excellent employee” and told us he is having a hard time finding his replacement.

Marco was first deported in 2010, after being put on probation for driving while intoxicated. Leah went to bring him home from a bar, where he wasn’t supposed to be, and they quarreled. “Exactly what I was trying to prevent is what happened,” she says. “The police came, and they wouldn’t listen to me saying we were okay. They took him and deported him.”

The second deportation happened in 2013, when they were trying to sell a trailer he had remodeled, to put a down payment on a house; the buyers, whom they had allowed to move in, refused to finish paying and called the police, saying Marco and Leah had assaulted them, which Marco and Leah deny. Marco was deported so quickly he wasn’t able to attend his court date for the assault charge.

The third deportation happened in January 2017. Leah had been driving Marco to work at a Kentucky Derby training track, but he drove himself one day, and police stopped him “for no reason,” she says. They said the warrant on the assault charge showed up, and authorities held him in Claremont County Jail for three months, subpoenaing the complainant. She never showed up, and they turned Marco over to ICE for deportation.

Even harder than overcoming the setback of Marco’s latest deportation has been healing from the trauma of their last stay in Mexico, after Marco’s 2013 deportation. They told us back in his hometown of La Barca, Jalisco, Marco built the family a big house that, along with his foreign-born wife, attracted the attention of a gang. They kidnapped Marco and, to intimidate Leah into paying ransom, fired an automatic-rifle fusillade in front of the house. Cowering inside with her screaming children, Leah called the US consulate in Guadalajara, and within half an hour, the Mexican military arrived. “It was a half hour that lasted a lifetime,” she says. Leah and the children were whisked onto a bus back to the US, not knowing what had become of Marco. A month later, he showed up in Ohio. His relatives in La Barca had given the house, with all its furnishings, to the gang in exchange for his release.

“They’re scared, being back here,” Leah says of their children. “We’re all pretty traumatized.”

The family told us they collect US Social Security payments – for Leah’s Crohn’s disease and Antonio’s blood platelet disorder – but they haven’t been able to find medication since arriving in Mexico. They are hoping to move out of the sweltering cinderblock apartment they rented in Nuevo Laredo and head for Cancun – about as far from La Barca as possible – where they figure Marco will find work.

“He’s more of an American than what some people up there are,” Leah says of Marco, waving a hand northward toward the far side of the Rio Grande, “because he works hard and takes care of his family, and you can’t say that about everybody up there.”

For 18 years, “Alberto Z.” was “getting ahead” in suburban Atlanta: marrying, having kids, and on the salary of a mechanic at a used car dealership, moving up from a trailer to a ranch house and acquiring an SUV and a pickup. One day in mid-June, we found him in the Tamaulipas Institute for Migrants, following his second deportation in three months, trying to get a message through to his wife, “Marta” – and to his son, “Thomas,” who was turning 13 the next day in Georgia.

“I’m going to call Marta and tell her I’m okay, and talk, because, really I don’t know what to do,” Alberto said. “I have houses, mortgages, my taxes in order, three kids born in Georgia… The judge said the only thing that might help me is that if one of them had a chronic disease, I might get a humanitarian visa. But – thank god – none does.”

Alberto left Cuernavaca, Mexico, when he was 21 and hitchhiked up to the United States, knowing nobody. He and Marta, who is also undocumented, met when he was a cook and she was a waitress in a Mexican restaurant in suburban Atlanta. They married, moved to Sugar Hill, and started a family.

With their three children, the family attended a Pentecostalist church on Sundays, whiled away weekends in the park, and took short family vacations to Savannah, Georgia, or Clearwater, Florida. Their baby, “Natalia,” was born last November, around the same time that the boys – Thomas and “Nelson,” who is 10 – got black belts in mixed martial arts.

Alberto’s job was only ten minutes from their house, but five years ago, on the way home from work, he was stopped at a police checkpoint. The police saw he had no driver’s license – Georgia doesn’t issue them to undocumented immigrants – and detained him for three days, until Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showed up and took him to the detention center in Irwin County, Georgia. “My mortgages, my taxes – everything was in order,” Alberto says. He had a DUI from 2007 but had completed all requirements to put it behind him. His lawyer applied for “cancellation of removal,” which allows some people who have lived in the US for at least 10 years without status and whose US citizen family would suffer “exceptional and unusual hardship” if the person were deported, to remain in the US. While his case was pending, Alberto received a temporary work permit, renewable each year.

In 2016, however, Alberto had his hearing for cancellation and it was denied. When the appeal was denied, he continued to check in, as required by ICE. On February 18, when Alberto checked in, ICE arrested him immediately, detained him in a cell for a couple of weeks, and flew him to Brownsville, Texas, to deport him to Matamoros, Mexico.

In early June, Alberto paid US$7,000 to cross the Rio Grande in a boat and be guided through the desert. After three nights and two days of walking in stifling heat, his group of five separated, and he was left with a fellow migrant who was exhausted and fading. “I had to get him out to the highway,” Alberto says – and that’s where the Border Patrol caught him.

Back in Georgia, the family has been living on Alberto’s savings and the proceeds from selling his pickup. Their church gives out fruit and other food once a week.

“I want to arrange things legally now,” Alberto told us. “It may seem faster to cross illegally, but you can die of dehydration or snakebite.” Unfortunately, under current US law, it will be nearly impossible for Alberto to return to live with his family legally. 

On an inky black night in late May, 29-year-old Rosalinda C. was drifting on the Rio Grande in an inflatable raft, the only woman in a group of 41 migrants. Crossing the desert in the early hours, she nearly stepped on a rattlesnake – “you could only hear them,” she recalls – but kept moving ahead, only to be stopped by Border Patrol after two more days of walking. She spent 25 days in a detention center in Encino, Texas, and then was deported to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Like some 15 percent of Border Patrol deportees, Rosalinda is a parent of US-born citizen children.

“If I try again, supposedly, I’ll get three months,” she told Human Rights Watch in Nuevo Laredo, referring to a warning given her by a Border Patrol officer. “It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’ve got to make it back to my kids,” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek.

Immigration crimes like illegal entry are the single biggest category of cases on the federal criminal docket nationwide, and sweep up large numbers of parents of US citizens.

The US has been home to Rosalinda for as long as she can remember. When she was just 4 years old and her brother Martín was 3, they left Matamoros, Mexico for Georgia. Her parents worked the fields for ten years, picking cucumber, squash, tomatoes, blueberries, peaches, and tobacco all over the south.

Pretty soon, Rosalinda was just plain Linda, speaking English and roaming the playground at her elementary school. She completed middle school but not high school. Eventually, the family began a new life in Corsicana, Texas, where Linda’s dad found work in construction. Her mother stayed home while her brother went to school. Linda married her sweetheart, Abel, who was also Mexican-born. A year later, their first child, Justin, was born in Dallas, where Abel was working in construction. Not long after came Anthony and Axel.

Linda’s peaceful world was rattled soon after Axel was born in 2015. Police stopped her father, Martín Sr., for a broken tail light – and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported him. Back in Matamoros, Martín Sr. was crossing a street to enter a store when gunfire erupted. He was killed in the crossfire.

“I couldn’t even go to his funeral because I couldn’t risk crossing the border and getting separated from my kids,” Linda said. That same year, Abel and Linda’s marriage ended in an amicable divorce. Linda took the kids, moved in with her grieving mother, and went to work repairing phones at Samsung. She worked from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., took the boys out on Saturdays for walks, shopping, or to the movies, and on Sundays, when Abel had the boys, she and her mom cleaned house and did the laundry. The tattoo on Linda’s left arm shows a dove flying up from her mother’s name in cursive: Rosalaura.

Linda wishes she had been able to apply for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which, since 2012, has allowed some undocumented people who entered the United States as children to defer deportation and receive a work permit if they have finished high school. Linda has no criminal convictions that would disqualify her for DACA status; her brother, Martín, Jr., has it. But between the kids and work, Linda was too busy to finish her GED and apply.

On April 18, 2017, Linda and her mother were taking Justin to the doctor when the Dallas police stopped her Ford Explorer. “I don’t think I was speeding – I was with my mom and kid – but they said I was going 45 in a 40-mile-an-hour zone.” As Justin cried and begged – “please don’t take my mother!” – they arrested Linda for driving without a license.

After three days in Richardson County Jail – and 25 years of life in the United States – Linda was deported to a country she hadn’t seen since she was 4. “I’d never been deported before,” she said. “I didn’t know Mexico.” But an aunt in Monterrey took her in. For about six weeks, she spoke constantly by phone with her sons, who all missed her. She wanted to bring them down to join her. But Mexico wouldn’t work for her ex, Abel, who is starting a family with another woman, and Linda understands: Mexico and separation from their Dad wouldn’t be good for her American sons, either.

So she paid someone US$2,000 to help smuggle her over the border and on that May night, hiking in her sneakers through a rattlesnake-infested desert, she almost managed to rejoin her family.

When we saw her in Nuevo Laredo, she was buying a bus ticket to go again to her aunt’s in Monterrey. But only for a while, she insisted. Next time, she’s, confident, she will to make it back to her kids.

One night in April, “Marco T.” was driving to his Dallas-area home from his factory job recycling dangerous chemicals, where he had worked for two years. He may have been going too fast. A sheriff pulled him over. Marco was arrested and charged with driving without a license.

But that was only the beginning of troubles for Marco, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Within days of his arrest, Marco was in ICE custody facing deportation from the country he has lived in since 1997. “My family tried to get me an immigration lawyer, but there was no case,” he said. Detained and frustrated, he decided to agree to return to Mexico without a hearing before a judge. 

Now, interviewed in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, Marco shows off his cell phone screen saver, which is a collage of photos with a title in Spanish saying, “the women in my life.” It has photos of his mother, his sisters, his daughter, and his wife.

Marco has three United States-born children – 10- and 14-year-old sons and a 7-year-old daughter – all pretty typical American kids. The eldest wants to play football professionally, and the second wants to join the army like his uncles and cousins on his mother’s side. Marco’s daughter wants to do what her mother does – manage apartments. A photo of the three children he showed a Human Rights Watch researcher has them embracing, the 10-year-old pulling funny faces.

His hands shook a bit and his eyes teared up as he showed off his family. “It hurts,” he said. “Not that they send us back, but that they are separating us from our family.”

At least, Marco said, his wife has a good job that can keep the family going while he deals with the turmoil of deportation. His wife also doesn’t have papers, though she came to the US when she was only a few months old.

Under current US immigration law, there is generally no way for someone who has US citizen children and a long period of noncriminal unauthorized residence to gain legal status.

Marco said he had no prior deportations, and no prior criminal convictions. “It’s just that the government now is very harsh. Sooner or later they will get you for a minor offense. And then the consequence is deportation.”

After serving in the Army in Guam during the 1990s, Sergio H. received an honorable discharge and opened an auto body shop in Dallas. He worked hard all his life, he says, to raise two United States-born children, one of whom is now a pediatrician, the other in business administration. But like many aging veterans, Sergio, now 50, has struggled with drug dependency.

His dependency worsened in 2012, he told us in Nuevo Laredo, and two years later, Sergio was convicted of possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. He received parole after serving two-and-a-half years of a five-year sentence. “I’m clean now,” he says. “The worst thing is that I wasted years of my life.”

Service in the US armed forces is often a pathway to citizenship for people who hold green cards – permanent resident visas – but it didn’t work out that way for Sergio. Green-card status can be revoked for various reasons, including a drug offense. So Sergio went straight from prison to an immigration detention center near Houston. He stayed there eight months, waiting out immigration court hearings.  

Because Sergio’s mother was born in the US, his lawyers explored whether he might in reality be a US citizen. But he didn’t quite fit the criteria; his mother moved to Mexico with her parents when she was too young. His legal options exhausted, Sergio was loaded into a van full of deportees and driven across the border to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

A growing consensus in the US holds that harsh criminal drug laws and policies – including disproportionately severe sentences – are doing more harm than good. For immigrant families, the consequences can be especially devastating. We have found that the US is deporting large numbers of immigrants like Sergio – both permanent residents and the undocumented – for minor or old drug offenses. Many have strong family and community ties to the US, and some – like Sergio – have served in the armed forces.

Even as Sergio completed paperwork in a deportee reception center in Nuevo Laredo, he spoke as though he were still back in the US.

“I was ready to give my life for this country,” he told us. “I still am… it’s my country.”