In Mexico City, U.S. deportees start a new life

It’s rush hour in Mexico City, and Mauricio López is late for work. His employees have been out since 6 a.m., manning a pair of mobile coffee stands on either side of the neighborhood’s busiest bus terminal. López planned to meet them there at 9, to check in on sales and to shoot a pair of social media videos. It’s 9:05, and López is still several blocks away, dodging taxis and cyclists.

Perhaps it’s his two American visitors’ faults, this journalist and the accompanying photographer. “I’m not used to having people interview me,” López says, feigning humility. Indeed, it’s López who usually does the interviewing: An aspiring TikTok star, he posts multiple videos a week, usually man-on-the-street conversations where he asks Mexicans — in English — how they learned the language. His most-viewed video has nearly 10 million hits; it features a Hispanic man speaking in a thick Southern drawl. “I was in the States the majority of my life, brother,” the man says. “Liberal, Kansas; Austin, Texas; Beaver, Utah …”

López can relate. He was 5 years old when his mother moved him and his two siblings from Mexico to the U.S. They were undocumented. They settled in Durham, North Carolina, close enough to see Duke University’s Gothic spires peeking out from the trees. López learned English and went to public schools; he ate hamburgers and learned the national anthem. He always felt slightly different than the U.S.-born Americans, but he felt it was his home nonetheless.

But in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump took office, López’s older brother was deported. His mother — confronting the reality of staying in the U.S. with López and his sister, but living without her third child — decided to move the rest of the family back, too. The adjustment to Mexico was even more difficult than the move to the U.S., López said. He expected to be embraced by his home country, to fit right in. But he faced ostracism.

“My Spanish wasn’t good,” he recalled. People would ask where he was from, and when he’d say Mexico, they would shake their heads. The government seemed even more skeptical: The process to get el INE — the voting registration card that doubles as official government ID — was dizzying, worsened by the need for official Mexican documents, which they no longer had. “Not from here, not from there,” López said.

As President Donald Trump promises mass deportations across the U.S., López’s story will become more and more common: Individuals who spent most of their lives in the U.S. will be forced to return to their home countries and begin a new life there. Families will have to make the decision between separating or returning together. And many people who came to the U.S. as children will create a new life in a home country they do not remember or recognize.

It’s been eight years since López returned. He slowly created a new life in Mexico City, aided by a community of deportees and returnees. (López makes the distinction between those who are deported and those who willfully return.) He initially put his English skills to work at a call center in the “Little L.A.” neighborhood, an area where many former U.S. residents work and live. Now, he runs his own online English-teaching program, building up a clientele of remote students across Mexico and the U.S.

He’s since left the call center. On the side, he makes his social media videos, providing a space for other deportees and returnees to share their stories. He hopes TikTok will soon allow Mexicans to monetize their content. “Even though I was self-deported, you can make something out of yourself,” he said.

The most demanding job, though, is the coffee business. That’s where he’s guiding us, zigzagging through the backstreets of his neighborhood. He wears sneakers, a red T-shirt and a matching Cleveland Indians baseball cap. At the Hidalgo bus portal, straddling either side of the block, are his two coffee stands: red and blue bicycles, with carts attached to the front, carrying watercoolers, pastries and drink mixes.

His employees greet us with a smile. They’re migrants, too, fleeing gang violence in Guatemala. The man, Eduardo Aldana, is only 20; his partner, Clara Benavides, is 22. They scooped up their two children — ages 2 and 4 — and walked from their home to Mexico City. It took them 45 days, Aldana said. Their plan was to pause and regroup in Mexico City, then go all the way to the U.S. But their short rest stop turned into what they think may be the rest of their life. When the Trump administration paused all asylum entries via the CBP One app, their appointment was canceled.

They found López right as he was starting up his coffee business, and López quickly offered them work. “I get it, because I was a migrant too,” he said. For López, it’s now a smooth-operating machine: He sources all the products, prepares the stands in the morning, and retires them in the evening; Aldana and Benavides man them during the day, from 6 to 10 a.m., then again from 6 to 10 at night. The children tag along, sitting all day in the shade under the bikes.

In some ways, the company is comforting — López, Aldana, Benavides, all migrants, all trying to find a home in a place they didn’t choose to be. “A lot of people come back and don’t want to be seen with the deportee community,” López said. “We’re looked down upon.”

That community is harder to find now than it once was. Little L.A., the once-bustling community of U.S. deportees in the heart of the city, largely dispersed during the pandemic; many of the call centers that employed English speakers moved to remote work and closed their office space.

But as the U.S. ramps up its deportation regime, such communities could again blossom. Mexico City is gearing up for a wave of U.S. deportees in the coming years. And across the Americas, Little L.As and Little Houstons and Little New Yorks could sprout up, composed of deportees and returnees.

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Wherever they are, López wants to access them. “My TikTok, my videos, are to show that you can come back here and make a life,” he said. People ask him, he said, if he’d like to move back to the states. “I’m like, no. This is home now,” he said.

“This is the life of someone who has struggled, but is making a life for himself.” He paused. “I want to show Dreamers and deportees that they can do it, too, if they give Mexico a chance.”

The arrival

Over the past decade and a half, Mexico has absorbed a massive wave of repatriation. More than 4 million Mexican citizens have been deported from the U.S. since 2009. Even more of their family members, like Carmen and her children, willingly returned alongside them.

The Mexican government is anticipating that figure to balloon under Trump. Last month, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced the “Mexico Embraces You” program, a repatriation initiative for U.S. deportees that provides immediate resources, like shelters and prepaid cards to help them travel back to their hometowns.

But it hasn’t always been that way. For years, Mexican deportees have received aid not from the government, but from an ad hoc network of volunteers and nonprofits. Maria Dolores Unzueta Reyes is among them. Slender, gray-haired and sporting stylish turquoise glasses, Reyes heads an organization that welcomes deportees home — even though she never lived in the U.S. “It never interested me,” she said, even though her brother has been in Chicago for 30 years. He’s the one that pulled her into the work.

In 2016, Reyes’ brother heard that the U.S. government was sending flights full of deportees to Mexico City. They knew that deportation flights would arrive daily to the border, but arrivals in Mexico City — 500 miles south — surprised them. Reyes went to investigate. At the Mexico City airport, she found no one that knew anything about it. At the National Migration Institute, however, government officials confirmed that deportation flights were arriving. They agreed to alert Reyes when new flights were planned.

When the first flight arrived, Reyes and another woman arrived to welcome the deported Mexicans home. At the next flight, a few others came. Eventually, the welcome group — which they dubbed Comunidad en Retorno, or “Community in Return” — grew to two dozen volunteers. They wait on the far side of customs, watching as the deportees — some of them handcuffed — file through. Reyes and her fellow volunteers hug them and take down their contact information. They offer assistance in finding a place to stay or connecting with family.

One of those places, Casa de los Amigos, is anticipating an uptick in arrivals now that Trump has begun his deportation regime. “We don’t know if or when they will arrive here, but we will be prepared,” said Miguel Angel Lomeli Avalos, the director of the shelter. A Quaker-run organization, Casa de los Amigos offers short-term housing to women and children as they arrive in Mexico.

The first goal is to help deportees connect with family. If that is not an option, though, Casa de los Amigos steps in. “Many people have family here,” Lomeli Avalos said. “If they don’t have family, we’re here to help during those first moments.”

Reyes sees her organization as larger than just providing first-step assistance to migrants. “There is a prejudice in Mexico against those who return here,” she said. “We have to change that.” Coming back to Mexico, she explained, is often viewed as failure, while remaining in the U.S. — and accruing citizenship or financial wealth — is viewed as success.

Often, the situation is much more complicated, she noted. In 2021, Comunidad en Retorno partnered with an anthropologist from Loyola University Chicago to survey over 300 individuals who returned to Mexico City after living in the U.S. A majority of them had been in the U.S. for over 15 years. Most of them are barred from reentering the U.S. for 10 or more years. And almost all of them are separated from their families: 66% live apart from their children, and 86% have children who are U.S. citizens.

“Labeling all of these people as criminals doesn’t make sense,” Reyes said. “They aren’t criminals.”

The transition

Getting off the plane, it turns out, is the easy part. For the millions of U.S. deportees and their family members who return to Mexico, they are welcomed by a maze of applications, documentation and legal formalities to begin working and living in Mexico again. Just moments after the U.S. labeled them foreigners, their home country requires them to prove they are really Mexican.

For many, including those who were taken to the U.S. as children, the process proves difficult. Varuk Racine is among them. His parents took him to Southern California when he was 3 years old, where he grew up “American,” he told me. He took tae kwon do lessons and enrolled in music classes. But at night, he would accompany his mom to her English classes, where she would study basic grammar and vocabulary. In Mexico, she was a teacher with an advanced degree. “You’d see engineers, you’d see doctors (in the night classes),” Racine recalled. “But they were all learning English to have a day-to-day job with minimum wage.”

Racine’s parents eventually decided the situation was untenable. Proposition 187 had just passed in California, which barred undocumented immigrants from attending public schools. Racine, then 13, was about to enter high school, and his parents realized his ability to access the American dream would be severely diminished. But Racine protested. He had no memories of Mexico. “I didn’t want to come back,” he said. “It was really, really hard.”

The adjustment was hard. Even though Racine was a Mexican citizen by birth, it was nearly impossible to enroll him in public schools, as he didn’t have evidence of prior schooling in Mexico. Even after he enrolled in a private school, he struggled: Racine was a straight-A student in the U.S., but in Mexico, he flunked music class because he didn’t know the Mexican national anthem and English class because he corrected his teacher.

Now, three decades later, Racine is focused on making the adjustment easier for young deportees and returnees. He works at Pocha House, a nonprofit organization and community space geared toward offering “dignified accompaniment” to deportees as they adjust to life in Mexico. (Pocha, which translates to “rotten fruit,” is a slur often leveled against U.S. deportees in Mexico.) Pocha House’s goal, Racine told me, is to provide a space for individuals to be their full selves — not quite Mexican, not quite American, but very human. “We speak English, we speak Spanglish,” he said. “Here’s a space where you can find that comfort.”

Finding work is a first step. Pocha House offers Spanish classes to help new arrivals sharpen their language skills; if they want to foray their English skills into a job, Pocha House can help them become certified as English teachers. Pocha House and its mother organization, Otros Dreams en Acción, is actively pushing the Mexican government to relax its application requirements for government ID, as tracking down birth certificates or the other necessary documentation can be tedious or impossible.

If deportees or returnees move to Mexico with their U.S.-born children, they face an even steeper challenge. The Mexican government requires that documentation for migrant children — including birth certificates and school transcripts — be notarized by the U.S. government. Without these documents, the children cannot receive dual citizenship, even if both parents are Mexican citizens, and cannot enroll in public school nor receive public medical care.

The process is much more difficult than it might seem, Racine said. “It’s like, ‘You’re back in Mexico, you’re back in your country, get yourself together, it’s easy,’” Racine said. “But there are lots of difficulties in coming back. These are things that we know as an organization, because we went through that.”

Even as they settle in Mexico, though, rarely are their families intact. “I think everyone who comes to ODA has some type of family separation,” Racine said. Some family members stayed in the U.S.; others were forced to leave. “It’s been years since I’ve been with my family,” Racine said. The folks at Pocha House can do little to help deportees and returnees gain legal status in the U.S.; one imperfect solution — via an ingenious loophole — they’ve found, though, is petitioning for tourist visas. They call it “visa justice.”

When a member of the community wishes to reconnect with family in the U.S., Pocha House taps into its vast network of connections with U.S. universities and organizations and schedules events featuring the ODA member as a speaker. It’s a win-win for both; the organizations get to hear the experiences of returnees who’ve lived on both sides of the border, and the returnee has an invitation letter they can use to bolster their visa application. ODA raises funds to help pay for the application and passport fees. So far, the program is working: in 2023, five people had visitor visas approved.

It’s a muffled celebration, though, as Pocha House is filled with people whose ideal would not be visiting family, but living with them. On the wall of Pocha House is a shrine to José Martin Delgado, a man deported to Mexico after decades in the U.S. He faced serious health challenges when he was removed from the U.S.; during his time in a shelter upon arriving to Mexico, his health worsened. Within two months of returning he died. His family requested, successfully, that his body be returned to the U.S. for burial. “But what had to happen?” Racine asked. “He had to pass away so he could be unified with his family.”

The lifestyle

Edwin Malagón is back in Mexico, but that doesn’t mean he can’t use the skills he learned in the U.S. here. His main job is as a customer service agent for a timeshare company, where he mans the English-language helpline. On the side, he runs his own barbershop, using the clippers his family mailed from the states.

Sometimes he does both. On the Thursday afternoon we met, he wore a microphone-equipped headset, his scissors in hand. A teenage boy sat in his barber chair, patiently waiting while Malagón took frequent pauses to speak to customers through the headset. The haircut took over two hours.

“I’m living the American dream in Mexico,” Malagón said, grinning. “Working two jobs.”

His life in the U.S. wasn’t all that different. Malagón was 15 when his family paid a coyote to smuggle them across the border. He spent the next decade-and-a-half in Atlanta, working to provide for his family, while sending money to pay off the coyote. He dropped out of high school to help bring in income. He got odd jobs in construction and painting. He enrolled in a barber school and learned how to cut hair. He tried taking the GED twice, but hit eligibility requirements; he then couldn’t receive DACA protection, even though he came as a minor, because he had no education record in the U.S.

In 2013, after 14 years in the U.S., a routine traffic stop led to law enforcement discovering his legal status. He was deported shortly after. Back in Mexico City, he found community in Little L.A., working at a call center. Many of his co-workers were fellow deportees. “It was like, oh snap, you’re in the U.S,.” he said. But the pandemic changed that. Remote work became the norm, and many workers moved out of Mexico City in search of cheaper rent. “Little L.A. is scattered now,” Malagón said.

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For Malagón, that means a newfound sense of independence. Gone are the days he would give haircuts on his grandma’s porch; now, he rents his own space, building up a steady clientele with affordable haircuts. Some of them are fellow deportees, too, like Guillermo Perez, a 35-year-old who spent over two decades in Austin, Texas. “I was less than 2 years old when my parents took me (to the U.S.),” he said. “That was my life.”

At 23, he was deported back to Mexico alone. His parents are still in the states, both undocumented; several of his younger siblings were born there and are citizens. Perez arrived to Mexico knowing little about the country and no one here. “Not having family was probably the most difficult thing,” he recalled. He struggled with cultural stigma, where Mexicans judged his Spanish or looked down on him for having tattoos. “Everyone in the states had tattoos,” he said. “That wasn’t a thing here.”

Slowly, though, Perez built a life. He got a steady job in a call center, too, and met his partner. They’ve been together for a decade now. Their children are ages 7 and 6. “I don’t have any wish of going back over there,” Perez said. “I don’t see myself over there. My life is here.”

Malagón, overhearing the conversation from across the room, nodded and turned off his clippers. “These are the people I want to help, to show them they can build a life here,” he said.