A year later, deported Ariz. mom adjusts to Mexico life
ACÁMBARO, Mexico — Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos sits on her bed, plugs in her phone and gets ready for the highlight of her night.
The screen lights up with Jacqueline, Guadalupe’s daughter. Jackie’s 15. She smiles, her mouth full of braces. Guadalupe stares back into the videochat app on the phone.
A year ago, the two were looking at each other inches apart, through the barred window of a federal immigration vehicle. Dramatic news photos captured Guadalupe’s forlorn face that night, as several hundred angry protesters, including Guadalupe’s two children, tried to block the vehicle from leaving Phoenix.
Later that night, she was driven to
Nogales, Arizona, and sent across the border into Mexico — becoming, by all accounts, the first person deported as a result of President Donald Trump’s newly ordered no-holds-barred approach to immigration enforcement.
A year later, Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos is living with her parents and extended family in Acámbaro, the same colonial town in central Mexico where she grew up before crossing the border illegally into the U.S. when she was 14.
It has been a rough year for the 36year-old mother.
She struggles daily with depression, unable to earn a decent living despite help from the Mexican state government opening a tortilleria — tortilla shop — while coping with the emotional pain of being separated from her husband of 18 years and their two children, 17-year-old Angel and Jackie, all of whom remain 1,400 miles away in Mesa.
At night, she is tormented by the hard choices the family must face: Should her husband and American children come live with her in Mexico? Or should they stay in the United States, separated perhaps forever, clinging to hope that she may one day be allowed to return?
In the meantime, barred from returning to the U.S. even for visits, Garcia de Rayos continues her life here.
She usually rises at 6:40 a.m. each morning to open the tortilleria, located a short walk from her family’s adobe and cement house. She spends several hours making and selling corn tortillas with help from a single employee.
She opened the shop in July, after the governor of the state of Guanajuato sent her a check for 320,000 pesos after her deportation received widespread news coverage in Mexico and the U.S.
With the money — the equivalent of about $17,000, a small fortune in Mexico — Garcia de Rayos purchased three pieces of equipment: a large vat to cook dried corn, an industrial-size grinder to turn the corn into masa, and a machine that spits out fresh tortillas on a conveyor belt after the dough has been stuffed through a funnel.
To draw in customers, she also bought a yellow awning with the name of her business, Tortilleria Lupita’s, in black letters. The tortilleria sits off a sidewalk on a narrow street, lined with adjoining houses, a few blocks from the town’s central plaza. Garcia de Rayos can hear the bells from the main cathedral toll every hour. She had the awning hung outside the store, above the doorway, and to add a touch of beauty, she placed two plants on the front step.
Because the tortilleria is inside an empty house owned by her uncle, Garcia de Rayos doesn’t have to pay rent.
But so far, the tortilleria has been a bust. Within a few blocks, there are several other tortillerias, each with their own established clientele. As the newest tortilleria, Guadalupe de Rayos’ business can’t compete.
Meanwhile, her tortilleria brings in about 150-200 pesos — about $8 to $10 — a day. That is less than she earned in a
single hour as a maintenance worker in Mesa. The earnings are enough only for Garcia de Rayos to pay a woman she hires to help her with the laborious work of running the shop.
So now she is looking for a better location closer to the center of town.
On a recent morning, however, the tortilla-making machine, still shiny and new-looking, sits idle. A part had broken loose and jammed the motor, knocking the machine out of service. Garcia de Rayos doesn’t have money to pay a repairman. So instead of making tortillas, she is at home, nursing a cold.
Sheets covering the window in her room flap loudly as a fierce wind blows in from outside. A series of cold fronts had swept through the area, dropping temperatures at night into the high 30s, unusual for this subtropical region.
Garcia de Rayos is sure she caught her cold from sleeping in her unheated room. The glass covering the window broke months ago. But Garcia de Rayos couldn’t afford to replace it. Her nose red from her illness, she sits on the edge of her bed, next to a mound of blankets, wearing a blue hoodie to keep warm.
Her second-floor bedroom overlooks a small courtyard in the center of the house she shares with her mother and father, her sister and brother-in-law, her three nieces and two aunts — 10 family members in all.
To reach her room, Guadalupe must climb a set of uneven cement stairs that wind treacherously around the inner walls of the courtyard. With no railing, a fall from the top could be fatal.
The house lacks many of the comforts she grew accustomed to in Arizona. The cement shower and dishwashing basin are outdoors, exposed to the sun and rain. The kitchen is so small, family members take turns sitting at the wooden table during meals.
After she was deported, Garcia de Rayos was reunited with her family members, many of whom she had not seen in years, including her mother and father, a sister and a brother. Some she had never met, including her three nieces, who were born after she left Mexico for the United States 21 years earlier.
Being surrounded by their love helps her get through the pain of being separated from her husband and children.
She also tries to keep busy. Besides running the tortilla shop, she helps her sister and mother at a stand they run, selling cups of sliced fruit, in the center of town, across from the Catholic cathedral that anchors the town plaza.
But when darkness falls, she dreads returning to her bedroom alone.
“It is very difficult, even though I am pretty happy to be with my family here,” she says. “But once nighttime comes, I miss my children dearly.”
She points at a bed on the other side of the room, below a poster of Jesus, blond and blue-eyed, raising his hand as if giving a blessing.
“That is where my children sleep when they visit,” she says.
Angel and Jackie have visited their mother three times in Mexico: for a week in March during spring break, for a month in July and for two weeks during Christmas break. As U.S. citizens, they are free to travel back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico.
To get there, they must travel first from Phoenix to Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, a nearly three-hour flight, and then drive four more hours to Acámbaro, a bustling railroad hub with cobblestone streets, known throughout Mexico for its sweet bread.
Angel and Jackie live with their father in a comfortable split-level home with a two-car garage and a large yard in east Mesa. Their father has not seen his wife since she was deported. He asked that his name not be published, because he fears his family could be targeted by “racist people.”
He works at a restaurant as a cook. After his wife was deported, he said, he took on a second job at a shoe store to make up for the loss of income from her job at Golfland Sunsplash, an amusement park in Mesa where she earned about $12.75 an hour cleaning the pools and doing other maintenance work.
Even though it means living apart, Garcia de Rayos says she doesn’t want to raise her two children in Mexico. They will receive a better education and have more opportunities in Arizona, she says.
She worries about her children getting sick here. The week before, her pregnant sister-in-law lost her baby because the hospital didn’t see her in time.
She doesn’t want her children exposed to the violence in Mexico. She hears about people getting killed daily on the news, and even witnessed a shooting while walking in the center of her town. “Do you think this is a safe place for my kids? It’s not,” Garcia de Rayos says. “I know people criticize me and say, ‘Why doesn’t her family go live over there (in Mexico)?’ They have no clue how bad it is over here.”
Garcia de Rayos was deported the day after she had gone to the Phoenix offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for what, until then, had been a routine check-in.
In March 2009, Garcia de Rayos pleaded guilty to a felony charge of criminal impersonation for using someone else’s Social Security number to work illegally. The charge stemmed from a work-site raid conducted by former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in 2008 at Golfland Sunsplash.
After three months in the Estrella Jail, she was transferred to ICE custody and spent three more months at a federal detention center in Florence before she was released on a $6,000 bond.
Garcia was deemed a low deportation priority under the Obama administration, and ICE declined to deport her for eight years, even though she was issued a final order of removal in 2013, as long as she checked in annually and stayed out of trouble with the law. The temporary reprieve also made her eligible for a work permit, which she used to return to her job at Golfland Sunsplash, this time legally.
Then Trump was elected. Days after the inauguration, on Jan. 25, 2017, Trump signed one of three executive orders related to border security and immigration, following through on a campaign promise to greatly expand deportation priorities. During a major speech on immigration Trump delivered in Phoenix in August 2016, the candidate had declared, “No one will be immune or exempt from enforcement.”
Garcia’s annual check-in with ICE fell on Feb. 8, just two weeks after Trump ordered ICE to take a more aggressive stance toward immigration enforcement. Her deportation drew international attention, and reflected a sudden and dramatic shift in U.S. immigration policy from the Obama administration.
During Trump’s first nine months in office, from Jan. 20 to Sept. 30, 2017, ICE made 110,668 arrests, a 42 percent increase over the same period a year earlier, according to a report last month by the Migration Policy Institute on Trump’s immigration record.
Of the 110,568 arrests, 29 percent were people with no criminal conviction, the report said. By comparison, 90 percent of people removed by ICE from the interior of the U.S. in 2016, under the Obama administration, had been convicted of serious crimes. “This is a sharp break from the end of the Obama administration, during which interior enforcement focuses almost exclusively on criminals,” the report said.
Before going to her check-in, Garcia de Rayos said she knew there was a possibility ICE would arrest and deport her. But in the back of her mind, she thought the agency might not follow through so quickly on Trump’s order.
The Rev. Ken Heintzelman, the pastor at Shadow Rock United Church of Christ, offered to let Garcia de Rayos take sanctuary from ICE inside the church, where six immigrants facing deportation have lived since June 2014.
But Garcia de Rayos said she declined. She needed to keep working to help support her family.
The other option was to try hiding from ICE. But ICE knew where she lived. And she said she didn’t want to be always looking over her shoulder.
Looking back, Garcia de Rayos says she doesn’t have any regrets about turning herself in to ICE. Showing up for the check-in was the right thing to do, she said. A devout Catholic, she prayed before the ICE check-in that she wouldn’t be deported. Now she prays that she will be reunited with her family in Arizona. But that won’t be easy.
Garcia de Rayos’ felony conviction virtually destroyed her chances of ever returning to the U.S. legally, even though a sister who is a U.S. citizen applied for her to get a green card 15 years ago. Her children could also sponsor her for a green card once they turn 21.
But Republican-led proposals in the House and Senate, backed by Trump, would eliminate Garcia de Rayos’ children and sister from sponsoring her for a green card.
“I think only a miracle can help me,” Garcia de Rayos says, back in her bedroom. “I hope God touches those people’s hearts so that they may take that felony off my record.”
Later that night, Garcia de Rayos slowly navigates her way up the cement stairs in the darkness to her bedroom. She is returning from a walk with her brother-in-law’s sister, ready for the highlight of each night.
Garcia de Rayos picks up her phone and presses the keys, calling her daughter in Mesa. Jackie appears.
For several minutes, Garcia de Rayos is no longer separated from her family. She asks her children in Spanish how their day has gone. Jackie tells her she’s been sick and stayed home from school.
Garcia de Rayos asks what their grandma brought over for them to eat, since their father is out that night attending a prayer meeting at church.
“She made me the noodle soup you used to make,” Jackie tells her.
In the background, Angel is clowning around. “Angel, stop!” Jackie yells, in English. Angel then gets on the phone. He’s also been sick, with allergies, he tells his mom. I love you so much, Garcia de Rayos repeats over and over in Spanish. Take care of yourselves. “Los quiero mucho. Cuidense. Adios.” Then the screen on her phone goes dark.
Garcia de Rayos suddenly looks very alone, sitting on her bed, holding the phone in her hand.