Pain of deportation swells when children are left behind

Mexico is preparing to receive a wave of returnees due to Trump’s stricter immigration laws

The New York Times

WSANSIMÓN EL ALTO, Mexico hen 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.

To an outsider, the goldgreen fields rolling across Mexico’s central plain seem to promise a chance at a decent living. But drive into places like San Simón, where the concrete houses stand incomplete and the paved road peters out, and the poverty that drives people to leave for the United States comes into focus.

Like Mr. Cedillo, now 32, many of them eventually come back. Some are deported; others return to care for a sick parent or simply decide it is time to leave the United States.

But the homecoming is never the end of the story. The sequel is rarely simple, and for those with children left behind, it is agonizing.

Under President Donald Trump’s more aggressive enforcement policies, arrests of undocumented immigrants were up almost 40 percent in the first three months of his administration compared with the same period last year, and Mexico is preparing to receive a wave of returnees.

Migrant advocates here have been arguing that the newcomers need jobs, counseling and help with Mexico’s cumbersome bureaucracy if they are to restart in a country that most of them left more than a decade ago.

PresidentEnrique Peña Nietohas allocated an additional$50 million to Mexico’s consulatesto help migrants inthe United States, and the country’sCongress has changedthe law to make it easierfor children who have returnedto enroll in school. Somestate governments are offering small grants to repatriatedmigrants who are setting up businesses.

But when Mr. Cedillo was deported in 2010, there were no such programs to ease readjustment.

Morethan two million Mexicanswere deported, and anunknown number crossed backon their own, during the Obamaadministration, and theyhave been trying to remaketheir lives since, reunitingwith families changed overtime and serving as culturalguides for their American-bornchildren.

After arriving home, Mr. Cedillo found that the money he had earned up north helped soften the hardship of his childhood. He got construction work in the nearby city of Toluca, built a house and rented land with his father and brothers to grow corn and avocados.

InAmerica, however, the familyhe had left behind beganto unravel. His wife found anew partner, and the authoritiesin Florida, judging the coupleunfit as parents, placed thechildren, Ángel and Alejandra,in foster care.

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. “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 Fort Pierce, Fla., to allow him to raise his own children. There was a home for them in Mexico, but at first he found little sympathy from the court.

“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 culture that was very different.”

Desperate, he found help from the Corner Institute, which works with returning migrants in the town of Malinalco, a short drive down the mountain from San Simón.

Migrants knock at the institute’s wooden door with problems that reflect the complexities of families that straddle two nations.

Thereis the young woman withtwo small children, widowedwhen her husband died tryingto cross the border. A familyis seeking help after havinglost touch with a daughterwho left for the UnitedStates with a man the familydid not trust. A wife neededassistance finding herhusband, only to learn thathe had been deported andwas too ashamed to go hometo her.

“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.”

These struggles affect migrants both when they are detained — and after they have returned to Mexico and need to navigate agencies in the United States, as Mr. Cedillo was forced to do to win back his children.

“That’s where things start going terribly wrong, and it’s an invisible humanitarian crisis,” Ms. Calmus said.

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 constantpresence in his children’slives, dropping them offat school and picking themup. There, Alejandra, 9 andwithdrawn, is protected bytwo effervescent cousins, Yaczuriand Cintia. Ángel, 10, whospeaks better Spanish, hasadapted more quickly.

The struggles of Mr. Cedillo’s return are familiar to families across the region.

Nearly everyone in San Simón, Malinalco and the nearby town of Chalma seems to know someone who has migrated to the United States. The mayor of the Malinalco municipality, Baldemar Chaqueco Reynoso, is the only one of six siblings who did not leave.

Several members of his family now have legal residency, but his younger brother Cuauhtémoc, 38, was deported three years ago, after 16 years in the United States.

Heand his wife, Isabel Mancilla,37, faced a difficult decisionover whether she andthe couple’s four children shouldcome back with him. Theireldest daughter, Lorna, hadfinished her freshman yearin a suburban Cleveland highschool, and they were concernedabout her educationin Mexico.

But the whole family returned, and for Lorna, the first year was hard. She struggled with depression and fitting in at her Mexican high school.

For a region with so many migrants, there are few signs of prosperity from the dollars earned up north.

Migrants send back money to pay for schooling or to build houses, said the mayor, the elder Mr. Chaqueco.