Leading up to the election, my mom thought about going back to Mexico before she could potentially be deported. It wasn’t until February that she gathered me and my two siblings for a family meeting to break the news. She knew we would be fine because we’re no longer living with her at 32, 29, and 23 years old. But I know she was thinking about her grandkids and the milestones she might miss. We’re planning a quinceañera for my daughter in two years. Will she be there for that? Or my niece and nephew’s baptisms? All those questions rushed through my head, but mostly, I worried for her safety.
She didn’t want to risk staying in the U.S. because her biggest fear is getting detained. My mom is strong, but she has been working all her life and has accumulated injuries, including a bad back and a bad hip. She’s also a little bougie, and if she were detained, she’d pretty much be in jail.
I didn’t believe it when she told us. She’s so Americanized—I couldn’t see her going back, but I knew if my mom was going to feel safer and more comfortable in Mexico, then I had to make peace with it.
My mom had humble beginnings in Mexico, but she built a new life with hope for better opportunities in the U.S. when she moved here in 1989. She started as a garment worker because that’s what she knew. She would leave for work first thing in the morning, way before we ate breakfast. Because she wasn’t able to drop us off at school, we were left with my aunt, who also lived with us because they immigrated here together. It was a full house of around 12 people because we shared the space with my 4 cousins and my aunt, who watched us and cooked for everybody while my mom worked 12-hour days. She was a seamstress, but her job had sweatshop vibes. The workers would get paid pennies per piece as they went through stacks of fabric and hemmed them together into wearable clothes. My mom wanted to be a teacher growing up, but she gave up on that dream for the reality of raising our family.
She was exhausted once she got home from long days at work, but my siblings and I always made time to crawl into bed with her and watch telenovelas like La Fea Mas Bella, Teresa, and Destilando Amor. We loved spending time with her, no matter what we did. On the weekends, she would tell us to be ready so we could go out to eat. It wasn’t anything fancy—we’d go to McDonald’s and local Mexican restaurants. When garment work died down, she picked up different side hustles. She would make and sell food and desserts and sell perfume and even started delivering on DoorDash and Uber Eats to help us get by.
My mom is undocumented, but she was granted a work permit. At one point, it expired, and she once had to renew it and go through the whole process of proving her eligibility and immigration status. We weren’t in a financially good place. The filing fees range from $260 to $520, and at the time, it would have taken months to process her application.
She didn’t end up renewing it because of this delay, so in the early 2000s, my siblings and I looked into my mom applying for American citizenship. That’s when she became paranoid about being deported. We would hear stories of people being forced to go to Mexico for up to 10 years as a penalty for seeking citizenship with an expired work permit. She was scared of everything, but life took over. She was used to living this way—to surviving.
I first learned about ICE in middle school, when I did my first protest. It was 2006, and people were walking out of schools to protest the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act, which would have made it a felony to be in the U.S. without legal status. It didn’t feel as bad as it does now, but it still left a mark on me and my family. I knew that my parents were undocumented, and I knew if we—the ones who were born here—didn’t say anything about it, ICE could just come and take my mom and my stepdad, who are both Mexican immigrants.
For all of it to come back around 20 years later has me at a loss for words. When I saw Trump had won the presidency, I went completely numb. I didn’t even want to know how bad it was going to get, and it’s at its worst with his latest legislation. As the “Big, Beautiful Bill” passes and ICE potentially becomes the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the government, I can’t help but feel disgusted. I couldn’t rightfully celebrate Independence Day when everybody’s losing their independence. It just seems so off. It reminds me of the Nazi era and tragic genocide that followed it.
When we were sending my mom off in Tijuana, I told my family that I was going to record everything as a memory for us. Then I thought, Wait, this would be a good post for me to share on Instagram and TikTok. Like, “Come with me to self-deport my mom.” It was such a crazy way to start a video, but I hoped that it would help people.
My daughter was like, “What are you doing? Why are you sharing this? This is why people hate influencers. Why are you recording?” My mom even told me not to post anything until she made it safely to Guerrero, where she is now.
It’s hard to come by a viral video that doesn’t have hateful comments. The fact that my post reached people and had so many positive comments made me feel like I wasn’t alone. I knew I was doing something right when I got DMs from people who voted for Trump, saying, “This is not what I voted for.” The fact that I’m getting empathy from the other side threw me off and was the last thing I expected.
It was important to me that putting this out there wasn’t an advertisement to self-deport. A Spanish television network, Univision, and other networks were running ads from the Department of Homeland Security that warned illegal immigrants to leave the U.S., and it received a lot of backlash. I was upset by it, and I wanted to make sure that wasn’t what I portrayed in my videos. But I also didn’t want to tell people that they have to stay here, take the abuse, and get arrested.
Even though this is still happening and people will be affected by this, knowing that my mom’s safe with my grandma—whom she hadn’t seen in 22 years—keeps me strong in this fight. She feels at peace since she’s not paying rent out there so she doesn’t have to look for work right away. At the same time, I see that she’s struggling to readjust. She reassures me that she’s fine, but then I’ll see it in her eyes.
The one thing my mom made me and my siblings promise is that we would be close. We agreed to see each other once a week, just like we did when she was here. Going on family outings without her doesn’t feel right because her presence was very loud. I forget that she’s so far away because we talk so much in our family group chat, but not being able to depend on her has been a crazy adjustment. I’ve been supporting local Mexican restaurants to fill the void of her home-cooked meals and to help the vendors, who are also struggling under the Trump administration.
Latinos are more than just work or what we can provide to the economy—we’re human beings, we’re parents, we’re children. With everything that’s been happening under this administration, we’re being treated like trash or some kind of pests. I want to move away from that narrative and remind people of our humanity.
