By Diego Oré
Uruapan, Mexico (Reuters) -As broadcasters, Donald Trump declared the next president of the United States, Sonia Coria turned to her husband and asked if they should go home.
For seven months they lived in Glendale, Arizona, and shared an apartment with two bedrooms with Coria's Aunt and slowly built a life on the threats and cartel violence, so they fled Mexico.
Coria, 25, adopted strange jobs as a cleaner and her husband, Carlos Leon, also 25, worked as a gardener. Their oldest child Naomi, eight, went to a local charter school, made friends and picked up English. In the small kidney -shaped pole of the condominium building where they lived, she had learned to swim. Little Carlos, five, learned bicycles.
Their neighborhood in Western Glendale – a city of around 250,000 people just outside of Phoenix – was the home of many Mexican migrants. Opposite their apartment block was a small butcher, Carnicería Urapan, named after the city they had fled in the dangerous Mexican state of Michoacan.
They had purchased their first car on installments-a tan-colored Ford F-150 pick-up of 2008 that cost them $ 4,000. They were still poor, sometimes they went to soup kitchens for a meal or picking up devices and toys that neighbors had thrown away, but it was a life where they could only have dreamed from home in Mexico.
Trump's campaign and his victory changed how they felt about life in the United States. They had followed the law, entered the United States at a border crossing and applying for asylum. The application was in process. But they were now afraid that they could lose everything.
“We run the risk that they will take away the little that we have succeeded in scraping together,” Coria recalls that her husband told that night while the coverage of the elections played on television.
Leon nodded and hugged his wife. They started to cry quietly, afraid that Carlos and Naomi would hear them while playing on the floor in the bedroom that they all shared. The children were allowed to stay up late, so that Coria and Leon could see the results coming in.
The family's account is based on interviews with Leon, Coria and NGOs who helped them on their return to Mexico. Reuters was unable to verify all the details of their journey, but centers were supported by photos, videos, messages and customs documents that the family shared.
While the Trump government promises to carry out the “largest deporting operation in American history”, authorities have robbed workplaces, alleged Venezuelan gang members sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador and used the National Guard and active Marines to contain anti-government protests in Los Angeles.
Apart from the 239,000 people, the administration has so far deported, some have buffered and led to aircraft, the very public expulsion of migrants has still had an effect: activating tough and complicated decisions in immigrant households in the US on whether or not to stay or leave.
While they discussed the return to Mexico, Leon set one condition: that they were waiting until after Trump on January 20, to save some more money and to see if he turned out to be as hard in migration as he had promised.
Eventually fear led them to leave before Trump was even sworn in.
'Project Homecoming'
Despite high -profile deportations to Guantanamo or El Salvador, the total number of deportations under Trump Trails former President Joe Biden last year in office.
Increasingly, convincing migrants to leave has become a core strategy on their own initiative.
“Self-declaration is safe”, reads a DHS-Flyer that can be seen at Immigration Law in the US “Leave your own conditions by choosing your departure flight.”
The Trump administration in March launched an app named CBP Home that was designed to help people move and in May Trump revealed “Project Homecoming”, a radical initiative that offers “illegal aliens” $ 1,000 and a free flight to leave.
Since then, “tens of thousands of illegal alien creatures” deported themselves via BP Home App, an official from the Ministry of Domestic Security told Reuters, without giving further details.
More than 56,000 Mexicans have returned voluntarily from the US since Trump returned to the White House, according to the figures of the Mexican government. Figures from last year were not available.
Self -deviation is not a new idea. During the large depression and again in the 1954 operation Wetback, American deportation campaigns printed more than a million Mexicans and Mexican -Americans – much more than by formal deportations.
“Self-declaration is not an accident, but a deliberate strategy,” says Maria Jose Espinosa, executive director of CEDA, an non-profit organization in Washington who works to improve the relations between the US and Latin American countries.
'Left with nothing'
On January 19, Coria, Leon and the two children took what they could fit in their F-150 and drove to the Mexican border. It was just a three -hour ride.
A few weeks earlier they had witnessed immigration enforcement that held the father of a Mexican family who lived two doors of them. That, Coria said, had decided.
A lawyer that they saw in the Mexican consulate in Phoenix strengthened their opinion and told them that their asylum application was weak and would probably be deported.
The consulate said Reuters that the lawyer, Hugo Larios, occasionally offered free consultation, but they had no access to details of what was discussed or a record from the Coria-Leon family who was in January, only in April 2024. Larios did not respond to requests for comment.
It was a difficult decision to leave. They had fled their hometown in February last year after armed men claimed to be a member of the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel showing up at the avocado farm where Leon worked as a guard demanded protection money. Leon did not have the money to pay and the owner was gone.
Now they went back.
URURAPAN is one of the most violent cities in the world, with an official murder percentage of almost 60 per 100,000 inhabitants. In recent years, organized crime has taken over, run or extorting farms and companies and kill those who refuse to pay.
But the family hoped that their savings would make a difference. They had succeeded in scraping $ 5,000 together and the plan was to buy land and to open a car repair workshop using their pick -up to help with the company.
At 5 p.m., on January 19, they drew the border crossing of Dennis Deconcini in Wetales.
When they passed the Mexican customs, the Mexican National Guard stopped their vehicle and asked for papers, the family said.
Leon did not have the car title, only a temporary permit issued that day, so officials seized the truck and threatened to arrest him for vehicle smuggling. The officials also took $ 5,000, the whole savings of the family, for what they called a fine before Leon could go free.
Without a car and no money, Coria, Leon, Naomi and Carlos were on the floor outside customs, surrounded by their remaining possessions – 100 kilos of clothing, tools, kitchen utensils, a television, fridge and toys for children.
“We lost everything,” Coria recalled in tears. “We left with nothing and got worse.”
A spokesperson for the National Customs Agency of Mexico refused to comment on the details of the Coria case. She said in an e -mail to Reuters that his office “acts in strict compliance with the legal framework for the entry and exit of merchandise, as well as the customs control that applies to persons and vehicles that cross access points to national territory.”
The Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told Journalists this month that her government hugs her “Mexico” program to receive Mexican migrants who voluntarily return from the US to ensure that they are not subject to any corruption by the customs or immigration when they enter our country. “
The program offers a $ 100 cash subsidy, vacancies, free transport to their places of origin and facilities for importing goods, but the family returned before it came into action.
While the sun began to undergo, the dry desert air became cold. The family was worried about where they spent the night and how they would reach Michoacan about 2,000 kilometers away. They were seen by Francisco Olachea, a nurse with voices on the border, a humanitarian organization that works on both sides of the border.
Oachea remembers that he approached the crying family outside of customs and offered them a hand. They loaded the assets of the Corias on the ambulance of the NGO and a rented pick -up paid by olachea and another NGO, Salvavision.
That night Olachea took them to Nana Mineschies, a Christian organization in the border city Dekales. They received water, fruit, coffee and pozole, a traditional Mexican broth made from corn kernels with meat and vegetables. The four spent the night in a small room.
Together, voices from the border and Salvavision have picked up a little more than $ 1,000 to buy the family bus cards to Michoacan and to send some assets to Sonia Coria's mother house in black garbage bags. What they could not send was donated to the church where they had spent the night.
On January 20, the family returned to Uruapan.
The four shared a small room with no door in the house with tin roof of Coria's mother. The pair slept on the floor and the children shared a bed without a mattress. They later moved to an even smaller room in the house of an aunt.
Leon finally found work in a car repair workshop. Coria got a job in a Chinese restaurant. The children complain about leaving the United States. Carlos asks for his bike; Naomi forgets her English.
In June, a letter of 62 pages of customs told them by Reuters that their truck had been seized and had become owned by the federal treasury. They also owe the equivalent of $ 18,000 to customs duties for bringing in the F-150 to Mexico.
(Reporting by Diego Oré; Additional reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington DC and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; edit by Stephen Eisenhammer and Suzanne Goldenberg)
