A Mexican man’s fatal journey in search of an American life

ST. ANTHONY, Idaho — Belinda Luna, the librarian in this outpost in Idaho farm country, still shakes when she remembers a visit one day a little more than a year ago to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Idaho Falls. An immigration official informed her husband, right in front of her and their children, that he was being deported to Mexico.

“He told my husband to hug his family one last time,” said Belinda Luna, 41, wiping away tears as she stared at a video of the episode her daughter recorded on a cellphone. “Can you imagine the sadness for a father to be humiliated like that? That was the day my life began to fall apart.”

Her husband, Adrián Luna, 45, was a construction worker who had followed his star at age 18 to eastern Idaho, a bastion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the famous Idaho potato. He worked hard, paid taxes, raised a family. Ensnared in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and deported after that day in 2017 to Mexico, Luna lost no time in planning his return to the place where everything he understood as home resided: Wife, children, residence, job, friends, church. Obligations that did not go away with an order from an immigration court.

His wife got the news from her brother-in-law one day in July: Her husband’s body had been found deep in the California desert. He had made a desperate bid to come home to her, but had not survived the perilous trek. A team of volunteers, along with a reporter and a photographer from The New York Times, had found him.

The story of the Lunas, a family whose roots run deeper in Idaho than they do in Mexico, is becoming a familiar one. Deportations of foreign-born long-term residents are surging under the Trump administration, but as they reach into well-established immigrant communities far from the border, there is often little chance they will be permanent.

More than 15,700 people — nearly all of them men — were prosecuted in 2017 for trying to enter the country again after

VICTOR J. BLUE / THE NEW YORK TIMES An altar to Adrián Luna is set up at his sister’s house in St. Anthony, Idaho. Luna died trying to cross the California desert to return to his family in Idaho after being deported to Mexico by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year.