Protests broke out in Phoenix this week over the arrest and deportation
of 35-year-old Guadalupe García de Rayos.
Today, García is beginning a new life in Mexico.
At dawn on Thursday, Immigration and Customs officials put her in a car and sent her down to the border,
making her among the first to be arrested and deported under new standards set by the Trump administration.
While President Obama focused deportation efforts on immigrants convicted of violent crimes,
Trump’s executive order widens the net significantly to include illegal immigrants charged with any crime at all.
On Thursday, Garcia’s children, both U.S. citizens, were getting ready to meet their mother in Mexico.
VICE News joined them for the journey.
As soon as they heard that their mother had been deported,
Jackie and Angel Rayos-García said their goodbyes and headed to the border.
During the car ride to Mexico, Jackie and Angel fielded a torrent of calls and text messages
from acquaintances old and new, who had heard about Guadalupe’s deportation on the news.
One of them was Angel’s sixth grade teacher, whom they hadn’t heard from in years.
Jackie and Angel had never been to Mexico before.
Crossing the border was easy. It usually is, in that direction.
Guadalupe was waiting for her kids just a few yards down the road.
Family members and advocates ushered the children into a van to meet her.
– We’re gonna let them talk to their mom for a minute, guys. Okay?
– Together for the first time since her deportation,
they spoke briefly to reporters inside a migrant shelter,
then checked into a nearby hotel with the assistance of an American advocacy organization,
already receiving more help than the typical person deported from the U.S. and dropped in Nogales.
The hotel is a stone’s throw from the border fence.
This morning, Guadalupe wasn’t even a hundred yards from the country that she hadn’t left in 20 years,
and that, until yesterday, she called home.
The family still doesn’t know what’s next.
They may travel to Guanajuato, in the center of the country,
to visit grandparents the children have never met.
There are legal avenues they could try to bring Guadalupe back to the U.S., but it’s a long shot.
– What will it be like at home in Mesa without your mom?
– Well, everything's gonna be different because, like, she’s always there for us.
Like, whenever she got home, we’d sit together at the table and she’d ask us how our day went.
It’s gonna feel lonely without her.
– My mother was my role model.
She worked hard for her kids.
– Carlos Garcia is the family’s principal advocate.
He drove the children to Mexico and intends to stay with them there for a few days to help plan their next steps.
Garcia is the executive director of Puente,
the immigrant rights group in Phoenix that organized protests against Guadalupe’s deportation.
Garcia co-founded Puente in 2007 in response to anti-immigrant measures by Joe Arpaio,
then the sheriff of Maricopa County.
Guadalupe was swept up in the first wave of Arpaio’s workplace raids in 2008.
– Why is this particular case important?
– This case is important because of timing.
Our organization has lived under this for a long time.
This country turned into Arizona last November.
We fought against Sheriff Arpaio, we fought against racist laws, Jan Brewer,
all these characters that are now mirrored in this federal administration.
– The new reality is slowly sinking in for Guadalupe, and there isn’t an easy answer.
She wants to be with her children, but she wants her children to be where they’re from: the United States.