This is where their stories end (legally speaking)
Between 2007 and 2016, the United States deported over 2.6 million people to Mexico alone.
At the Casa del Migrante in Tijuana, a glass bowl sits on a shelf. It’s filled with key chains.
Each one used to unlock something in the United States. A house. A car. An office. The places where people built their lives. After deportation, these keys become useless. The bowl fills slowly, key by key, representing homes, families, and entire futures abandoned at the border.
This is where their stories end, legally speaking. But it’s also where something else begins.
Between 2007 and 2016, the United States deported over 2.6 million people to Mexico alone. During Obama’s eight years in office, the country expelled more people than it had in the 108-year period between 1892 and 2000. And many of those deported share something that challenges our assumptions about what it means to be American.
They grew up here.
Gina was born in Mexico, but her only memory of the country is a hazy image of falling off a donkey when she was three or four years old. Her childhood memories are American ones. Chuck E. Cheese birthday parties. Dancing at her high school prom. She gave birth to three children in the United States and celebrated countless holidays with her family, all of whom are now U.S. citizens.
When she was deported to Tijuana in 2011, everything felt foreign. The hillsides lined with makeshift shelters patched together from scrap metal. The downtown area known as Zona Norte, where deportees arrive if they walk straight from where Border Patrol leaves them, a haven for drugs and prostitution.
She experienced her so-called return to Mexico as a foreigner would.
Gina is not technically American. But she almost was. She had passed her citizenship test. She remembers hearing “Congratulations, you passed!” The next step was a swearing-in ceremony. She never made it. A domestic violence conviction derailed everything, even though she was the victim in an abusive relationship so severe that she suffered two miscarriages from beatings. She was the one arrested. She was the one convicted. And eventually, she was the one deported.
