For Many US Immigrants from Mexico, There's No Other 'Home' to Go Back to Leon Krauze - The Washington Post
go to original November 25, 2016

Maria Perez talks about her struggles as a DACA recipient whose parents are undocumented, and how President Obama's executive action on immigration would improve her family's life. (Ashleigh Joplin and Matthew Bush/The Washington Post)

The real goal behind President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed draconian measures against the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States is not forceful expulsion, but mass self-deportation: to make life so wretched and untenable that immigrants have no choice but to uproot, returning to their countries of origin, unwelcoming as they might be.

And they will be unwelcoming. In the past eight years, many immigrants who have been deported during the Obama administration’s record-setting removal of 2.5 million people have struggled with re-assimilation once they’re sent out of the United States. Some have tried to begin life anew in cities they no longer recognize and that offer no opportunities or respite. Others haven’t been as lucky.

Five years ago in Tijuana, I met a woman named Mayra. A single mother of two young girls, she had been deported from Utah after police caught her driving with the headlights out. She explained that she was just running a quick errand, trying to fetch a lemonade for her youngest daughter, who suffered from a chronic renal ailment. Mayra found no sympathy. She was deported to Mexico without her U.S.-born daughters. She tried to reconnect with her family in the state of Guerrero, along Mexico’s Pacific coast, but almost a decade had gone by, and Mayra found no friendly faces. Rather than respect her plight, her relatives — who had frowned upon her decision to emigrate in the first place — rejected her almost immediately.

Mayra then headed to Tijuana, where she tried to make her way back into the United States and regain custody of her daughters. She tried to appeal to the Mexican government, but its endless bureaucratic maze was of no help. Mayra became desperate. By the time I met her, she had been deported twice more and was living in a shelter. Her daughters, she said, where up for adoption back in Utah.

Stories like Mayra’s would become the norm if Trump follows through on his promise to deport millions of immigrants and make life impossible for millions more. No group would face a harder time than the “dreamers,” young men and women brought to the United States as kids, without their knowledge or consent. For the millions of undocumented immigrants who emigrated of their own volition as adults, their countries remain a vivid memory; bonds are still vibrant, if distant. Many of these immigrants recall the sights and sounds of their homelands; the family that remained, parents, wives, children who can serve as emotional anchors to a life that, for all practical purposes, has been left behind.

Read the rest at The Washington Post

Related: Poll Shows Mexicans Very Negative on Trump, But Back Talks with Him (Reuters)

Related: Surge of Immigrant Families Rivals Numbers of 2014 in South Texas (San Antonio Express-News)

Related: ‘Race Is at the Bottom of His Immigration Policy’: CounterSpin Interview with Kica Matos on Trump and Deportation (Fair.org)

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!