Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Kevin Sullivan.
There: Ann Arbor, Mich., where she was born, the only home she’s ever known. Her top-notch high school, with small classes, in English, and kids who pay attention. Then, she hopes, the University of Michigan and medical school.
Lourdes “Lulu” Quintana-Salazar’s U.S. passport gives her the option, and the burden, of deciding between two lives.
She could live with her uncle, a U.S. citizen, and slip right back into her old life of frozen yogurt, the YMCA, Panera, the mall. Where she felt safe. Welcome.
There are thousands of kids like her in Mexico — U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents who have been deported, who are struggling to adapt to a country they don’t quite know, a language they don’t quite speak and people who often regard them as oddities.
Deportations
Their numbers are expected to spike in the coming years. President Barack Obama increased arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants, but he focused mainly on those with criminal records. President Trump has ordered authorities to ignore that distinction and deport as many unauthorized residents as possible.
Since his election, deportations of unauthorized immigrants with no criminal record have nearly tripled, from 16,442 in 2016 to 45,789 last year, according to U.S. records.
A thriving family is uprooted
Lulu’s mother, Lourdes Salazar Bautista, went to the United States in 1997 and overstayed her tourist visa. She married her childhood friend, Luis Quintana, who had been working illegally in the United States since 1985.
They considered themselves good Americans. Salazar cleaned houses, and Quintana built up a drywall business, paid taxes and hired a half-dozen employees. He cleaned their church on the weekends. They never had any trouble with the law.
They bought a pretty, five-bedroom split-level in Ann Arbor, with a big deck, trampoline and swing set, close to a lake. They began raising three children, all U.S. citizens because they were born in Michigan.
In 2010, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up at their house and arrested Salazar on a 1998 deportation order she says she didn’t know existed.
Quintana hired a lawyer, and a deal was struck: ICE officials said they would allow Salazar to remain in the country with her children, provided she reported to their office once a year. But Quintana would be deported immediately.
They kissed goodbye in a Detroit immigration lockup, and Quintana returned to their village in Mexico. They stayed in touch with Sunday phone calls, and Quintana joined birthdays and holidays by video chats when he could find good Internet service.
In March 2017, at her first check-in with ICE during the Trump era, Salazar said she was told: “We have new instructions. You have to leave the country.”
In August, Salazar and her children flew to Mexico City, where her husband, who hadn’t seen his wife in seven years, was waiting. Quintana was thrilled to have his family reunited after so long, but his children couldn’t stop crying.
Eventually, Bryan adjusted. He’s now 14. He likes America. He likes Mexico. He’s crazy about video games and soccer and gets lots of attention from the girls in his class. His Spanish is better than his sister’s. He’s playful and funny and adaptable, and maybe too young to think about it all too much.
‘They are welcome here’
Lulu’s life in Mexico has been better than what most deportees face. For starters, the government helped her family buy a house, a tiny, shiny-white box of a place in a new development of identical two-bedroom rowhouses on the outskirts of Toluca.
Before she was deported, Salazar went to the Mexican consulate in Detroit to get Mexican identity papers for her family. There, she was introduced, by chance, to Carlos Manuel Sada Solana, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States who now heads North American affairs in the foreign ministry.
Sada, in an interview, said he was moved by Salazar’s story, especially about her teenage children.
“That’s the toughest age,” Sada said. “They are not old enough, and they are not young enough, to adapt easily.”
Friends had started a campaign to stop the family’s deportation, which generated media coverage in Michigan. Sada took note and said he thought they deserved support. So he called his friend Eruviel Ávila Villegas, who was then governor of the state of Mexico, where Lulu’s parents were raised and where Toluca is located.
Ávila met the family after they landed at the Mexico City airport and gave them about $16,000, which helped them buy their new house and pay for a car and school expenses for the kids. He also gave the children each a new laptop.
Ávila, whose term ended last year, said his administration provided financial support of varying amounts to more than 400 deported families.
“It is lamentable how our brother migrants have been treated in the United States,” Ávila said in an interview. “They are welcome here, and we are going to treat them with compassion and love.”
Lulu’s trip
In Ann Arbor, she was an over-scheduled American kid diagnosed with ADHD, who danced hip-hop and jazz, played soccer, swam, went camping and learned karate. She had just gotten her driving permit. She babysat and earned good money that she spent on lunches with her friends, maybe something sweet at Starbucks.
Here, she struggles with even basic communication. Her friends tease her because she says “copito” instead of “poquito” when she means “a little bit.”
Lulu doesn’t want to talk down the country of her heritage, but she hasn’t felt truly safe, healthy or happy since she left Michigan.
She wonders whether that happiness is still out there, 2,300 miles to the north, waiting for her. But she also wonders whether she can live without her mother.
“I want you to stay with me,” her mother tells her at the dinner table. “I think you are mature, but it’s a tough decision to go and be alone, without me to help you.
“If you can do it, okay,” she says through rising tears. “Just promise me you will study hard and be well. I want you to be happy. But we will always be here waiting for you.”
Her father doesn’t like to talk about his daughter’s decision.
“I finally just got her, and now she wants to go back,” he says, and here come the big tears down his sunburned cheeks. “It hurts so much. It’s like a knife in the heart.”
She is going back to Michigan in July for a three-week visit. Everyone knows it’s a trial run to see what her old life feels like without her family. Everyone knows she might not come back.
An uncle in Michigan is paying for her plane ticket. Her dad now earns $83 a week as a maintenance man in Toluca, and her mom sells fruit cups for $1. If Lulu moved back, they couldn’t afford to bring her to Mexico for visits.
It’s Lulu’s choice.
