A family and a mother cope with toll of deportation
BOCA DEL RIO, Mexico — It’s almost as if Letty Stegall is back home in the United States, beside her daughter to wake her for school, fussing over the list when her husband goes shopping, beaming when she sees what her family has managed to cook for dinner.
But Stegall’s face only appears on a screen, her words over the phone and in a barrage of texts. Lives once lived together are split by 1,600 miles. A woman who married an American and gave birth to an American and who came to think of herself as American, too, is now deported to her native Mexico.
“I lost everything,” she says. “It’s just me.”
As the United States takes a harder line on immigration, thousands who called the country home are being forced to go. Often, they leave behind spouses and children with American citizenship and must figure out how to go on with families fractured apart.
Studies have found an estimated 8 million to 9 million Americans — the majority of them children — live with at least one relative who is in the country illegally, and so each action to deport an immigrant is just as likely to entangle a citizen or legal U.S. resident.
Stegall was 21 when she paid a smuggler to take her across the Rio Grande in 1999. She settled around Kansas City, Missouri, and over time her fear of being caught receded. Then six years ago, police pulled her over and charged her Jennifer Tadeo-Uscanga, 17, has been separated from a mother she calls her best friend. with misdemeanor drunken driving. The arrest made authorities aware she was in the U.S. illegally and plunged her case into the immigration system.
Barack Obama was still president when Stegall received a deportation order, and like many at that time, she was allowed to stay in the U.S. while she made regular checkins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. An executive order issued by President Donald Trump changed ICE’s direction, effectively declaring any immigrant without legal status subject to arrest. Even the path once seen as simplest to legal status — marriage to a citizen — no longer is always enough to stave off deportation.
On Feb. 26, as Stegall backed out of her driveway to head to the gym, three cars careened in and agents arrested her. Four days later, she was shackled aboard a plane and headed back to Mexico.
Stegall’s deportation means she could be banned from the U.S. for a decade. She prays paperwork seeking to validate her return through her marriage could wind through the system within two years.
Back in Kansas City, her husband, Steve, and 17-year-old daughter, Jennifer Tadeo-Uscanga, are lumbering along without her.
“She’s not dead,” Jennifer said. “But she’s not here.”
Stegall’s in-laws have put off retiring because they’re needed at the family bar she helped run. Steve is depressed and hustling