Faces of deportation:
Border towns see influx of those who called U.S. home
Border towns in Mexico see a rise of those who called the U.S. home.
NOGALES, Sonora — Ricardo steps off a white government deportation bus and crossed into a chaotic Nogales, Sonora, on a night in late May. ¶ The 35-year-old is disoriented, and his upper body is wrapped in a black Velcro support vest. He says it was issued by a hospital in Denver after he hurt himself when he fell from a scaffold while hanging drywall. ¶ Ricardo is at Mexico’s National Migration Ministry office at the border, in a gritty white hallway with narrow steel benches bolted to the tile floors. Two doors — one leads to Mexico’s side of the port of entry; the other leads into Mexico. A beggar chants softly under the harsh fluorescent lights outside a border dentist office.
Ricardo still bears marks on his stomach and on his right side.
His story is a common one. He’d crossed 10 years ago on a tourist visa, stayed illegally in the United States and sent money back to his wife in Mexico. Until he was injured.
After Ricardo was injured, he says, immigration agents were called and appeared at the hospital where he was detained. He was then bused to Nogales and ended up here.
Federal records show that apprehensions along the Mexico border are down. Border Patrol charts on the numbers show lines plummeting nearly vertically, from 47,000 arrests in November to 11,000 last April.
At the same time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement numbers have stayed much the same under President Donald Trump as they did under President Barack Obama.
According to ICE, almost 58,000 people were deported from January 20 to April 29 of this year. Last year, in the same four months, more than 66,000 people were deported. And in 2014, there were almost 92,000 deportations in the same time period.
Taken together, those numbers create a new reality on Mexico’s border: a changing demographic of deportees hovering on the foreign streets of a country where they were born and separated from a country they called home.
At the Kino Border Initiative, a volunteer leads 40 people through a prayer exercise before breakfast at the church-run kitchen for deportees and those heading north. People awaiting a hot meal giggle as the volunteer leads their chant.
The shelter serves about 46,000 meals a year, and this year is on pace to match that, dropping arrests at the border or not, Father Sean Carroll says.
“This year we’re serving more people who had been living in the U.S. for a number of years and then were detained and deported,” Carroll says.
Arnulfo Hernandez stands outside the shelter. He wears a rosary over a rock Tshirt and a worn towel draped over one shoulder.
“I was arguing with my wife — you know, just words — and my neighbors called the cops on me, and ever since Trump became president and you go to jail and you don’t have Social Security, you automatically, ICE get a hold of you,” Hernandez says.
He lived in Ohio for 18 years. He’s lived in a Nogales, Sonora, shelter for the past two weeks. Hernandez says he’ll probably return to his mother’s home in Oaxaca.
“I think it’s time I go back. I wanted (to) go back to the U.S., but not right now,” Hernandez says. “I don’t think it’s a good idea right now.”
At the Juan Bosco migrant shelter in the hills of the city, a drunk musician weaves back and forth strumming his guitar and singing to the migrant men waiting inside the shelter’s chapel.
Juan Francisco Loureiro runs the shelter. He says the number of migrants he sees has dropped, but, like his Mexican federal-government counterparts, he’s suspicious as to why.
Loureiro worries that the U.S. will deport people held in over-capacity detention centers in one massive rush, overwhelming Mexico’s border cities.
As for Ricardo, the injured man at the port? “Well, I’m going home,” he says.
Sheepishly, he says he’ll go home to a small town in southern Sonora, broke and injured, his only belongings stuffed into a clear plastic bag emblazoned with the blue Homeland Security Department logo.
After that? He’ll probably try to cross again.