Added Pain for Deported: The Children
SAN SIMÓN EL ALTO, Mexico — When Alejandro Cedillo was deported to Mexico from the United States, his Florida- born son and daughter were little older than toddlers, and it would be six years before he would see them again.
Mr. Cedillo returned, alone, to his close-knit family in San Simón el Alto, the hilltop farming town he had left nine years before, when he was only 17.
Under President Donald J. Trump, arrests of undocumented immigrants in the United States were up almost 40 percent in the first three months, compared with the same period last year.
More than two million Mexicans were deportedduring the Obama administration, and they have been trying to remake their lives since.
But the homecoming is never the end of the story, and for those with children left behind, the new life is agonizing.
When Mr. Cedillo was deported in 2010, he found that the money he had earned up north helped soften the hardship. He got construction work in nearby Toluca, built a house and rented land with his father and brothers to grow corn and avocados.
In America, the family he had left behind unraveled. His wife found a new partner, and the authorities placed the children, Ángel and Alejandra, in foster care. But when Mr. Cedillo received a registered letter asking him to waive his parental rights, he decided to fight back.
“I want them to be with me, to give them values,” said Mr. Cedillo, 32. “There are children who get everything, but they are lost, they turn to drugs.”
Forbidden to enter the United States, he needed a way to persuade a family court judge in Florida to allow him to raise his own children.
“It was a hard case. Everybody was against me,” Mr. Cedillo said. “They said the children couldn’t come here because they didn’t speak Spanish, they were coming to a cul- ture that was very different.”
He found help at the Corner Institute, which works with returning migrants in the nearby town of Malinalco.
“Migrants are susceptible in these areas where there’s no communication,” said Ellen Calmus, the institute’s director. “They are in these informational black holes when they cross the border.”
She obtained a Florida lawyer for Mr. Cedillo, and he won the custody case. In October, the children arrived to a father they barely remembered and a country they did not know. Mr. Cedillo is now a constant presence in their lives, dropping them off at school and picking them up. There, Alejandra, 9 and withdrawn, is protected by two effervescent cousins, Yaczuri and Cintia. Ángel, 10, has adapted more quickly.
Nearly everyone in San Simón and Malinalco seems to know someone who has migrated to the United States. The mayor of Malinalco, Baldemar Chaqueco Reynoso, is the only one of six siblings who did not leave. His younger brother Cuauhtémoc, 38, was deported three years ago.
He and his wife, Isabel Mancilla, 37, had to decide whether she and their four children should come back with him. Their eldest daughter, Lorna, had finished her freshman year in a suburban Cleveland, Ohio, high school, and they were concerned about her education in Mexico.
But the whole family returned, and for Lorna, the first year was hard.
“One day I looked in the mirror and thought, ‘Who am I?’” she said.
The wrenching change made Lorna, 17, a cultural observer. “There, everybody was busy with school and work, and here you have more time for family,” she said. “There you have a bunch of money, but you’re going to waste it going shopping.”