A breeze swept over me as I looked over Laguna del Carpintero in Tampico, Tamaulipas.
Nearby, my three-year-old son Lucas and a local boy about the same age took turns rolling their miniature monster trucks down a blue playground slide. Lucas’ Hot Wheels rattled down first, then the other boy’s lime green truck. Off in the distance, my partner walked back with agua de jamaica from a street vendor.
It was a moment of bliss that had otherwise evaded us that week.
We left the U.S. on Jan. 20 for a new life in Mexico, and the four days we’d been here felt like a continuous whirlwind. Our son was pissed about the move and acting out. Our AirBnb was dirty. We kept getting lost driving around the city. Rental home tours were letdowns.
Every day I thought, “We need to go back.”
We had already moved away from our families in northern Virginia and Dallas. We got rid of our possessions. I quit my job at National Public Radio in Washington D.C. The chaotic start to our new life felt like a prank we allowed to go too far.
As relaxing as that lazy Saturday afternoon in January was, the anxiety that gripped me for the past year felt like a hand closing around my throat. The doubts family members expressed about our move echoed in my head.
Then, my phone buzzed. It was a news alert out of Minnesota, where a brutal immigration crackdown was ongoing.
“Holy shit,” I muttered under my breath after reading the headline. “They killed another U.S. citizen.’’
A Nightmare for Immigrants
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, a lot of people have decided that living in the United States isn’t worth doing anymore. So much so that the U.S. experienced negative net migration in 2025 — the first time that’s happened in at least a half century, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. The trend is expected to continue in 2026. Not only that, but a record number of U.S. citizens also decided to leave the country last year, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.
My partner and I decided to leave the U.S. almost a full year before Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minnesota. Their deaths felt like an inevitable climax of Trump’s abhorrent campaign against immigrants living in the country.
The rapid start of raids in Texas and across the U.S. in early 2025 sent chills down the spines of millions of immigrants and their families. Kids — nearly one million in Texas — were leaving their homes with the renewed fear that their parents could be ripped away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Even children are not safe, like 15-year-old Emmanuel Alexander Gonzalez Garcia, a disabled boy who wandered away from his mother in Houston and was detained by immigration authorities for 48 days. Or the 2-month-old deported after being hospitalized with bronchitis. Recently, even Ms. Rachel has started sharing stories of the children at Dilley Immigration Processing Center who’ve been neglected, sickened, and denied basic human rights.
Trump’s return to power, and the violent escalation in immigration enforcement, has undoubtedly forced many of the nearly 14 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. to question whether they even want to live in a country that doesn’t appreciate them, asking themselves whether they should “self-deport.”
The New York Times ran a story in February about the patriarch and matriarch of a California family who decided to return to Mexico after living for decades in the U.S. Last summer, CNN reported about a mixed-status family from Pittsburgh who moved to Mexico to ensure they could remain together. Both stories frame the acts as self-deportation.
Some immigrants who decided to “self-deport” have documented their returns on TikTok and Instagram, gaining thousands of followers in the process.
The Trump administration and its allies have championed “self-deportation” — despite the term having apparently no legal definition in U.S. immigration law. They’ve aired absurd ads warning immigrants, whom they haven’t been able to find for decades, that ICE will arrest them.
“Do what’s right — leave now,” the now-ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in one video nearly 11 months ago.
In an attempt to fluff the effect of the immigration crackdown, administration officials have repeated dubious claims that more than 2 million people have voluntarily left the U.S. since Trump returned to office. But as Nick Miroff of The Atlantic pointed out in December, such a sudden drop in the foreign-born population would likely affect food prices, wages, rent, and other factors. And there’s no obvious observable evidence it has.
Even if many people decide that now is the time to go because of the anti-immigrant climate, immigrants themselves and allies should not give in to the fear by calling their decision to reclaim their lives as a move to “self-deport.”
To do so undermines the autonomy that brought immigrants here in the first place.
Deportation is a punishment that is done to someone. It is the act of federal agents physically removing someone from the country. In zip ties, sometimes after long periods of detention in miserable facilities with undrinkable water, and often separated from their families.
Human beings making the self-guided, calculated decision to free themselves on their own terms from this flawed country is philosophically the opposite of that.
The term “self-deportation” implies wrongdoing or miscalculation on the part of the immigrant — as if we’re correcting a mistake instead of choosing to avoid being persecuted for providing for our families.
Many upstanding undocumented immigrants feel like the world is collapsing around them and that it is their fault. Another Trump electoral victory later, I can understand why. It’s what I felt back in November 2016 when he first won.
This year marks a decade, but the emotions live within me as if it was yesterday. I didn’t sleep that night after watching election night results at my parents’ home in Dallas. I was undocumented, and his winning was my worst nightmare come true. He had won on a platform of anti-immigrant promises and threats that specifically targeted Mexicans.
Throughout the night, I stared at the ceiling. My eyes repeatedly traced a crack in the white drywall above me. I stayed up weighing the two options I believed I had: going back to Mexico or taking my own life.
I believed that — maybe by moving to Mexico — I could get my journalism career off the ground. In the U.S., I had been unable to get full-time work or better-paid freelance work because I didn’t have work authorization. I thought maybe I could report from Monterrey or Mexico City to achieve my dream of working for The New York Times.
For years I had spoken about how proud I was to be a Mexican immigrant. I bragged about my parents’ valiant efforts to pay for my education, our home, and our way of life by selling tacos out of a minivan on the streets of Dallas to construction workers, day laborers, and warehouse employees.
Though I’d been reporting and writing for just a couple of years, I had already met dozens of immigrants and their families who had literally risked everything by coming to the U.S.
Some had been here for decades after crossing the border on foot or wading through the Rio Grande or overstaying visas. Others had been in the U.S. for just days or weeks. Some had ridden La Bestia, the massive freight train railway system that stretches from Mexico’s southern border almost all the way to Texas.
Despite what they’d been through, they were optimistic because they had grabbed life and the U.S. by the horns.
Writing their stories powered me through most days. But that election night, I allowed myself to be pushed to an edge from which there was no turning back. I felt like being in the U.S. was a fatal sin, even though I was just four years old when my parents moved from Monterrey, Nuevo León to the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff.
I wondered what I could’ve done differently to avoid the seemingly inescapable fate of being hunted, detained, and deported. Even tortured.
Then a friend and former editor assigned me to cover an anti-Trump protest in downtown Dallas.
As the demonstrators began marching with signs that read “hate will never win,” I ran alongside, behind, and in front of the crowd. The adrenaline coursed through me as I snapped photos and pulled people aside to interview them.
“Trump, you didn’t win. Racism did,” read another sign.
By the end of the night, just from doing the work of journalism, I had a crucial realization: Donald Trump had not and could not keep me from my dream. He had no power over me because my dreams predated his political career. His winning didn’t magically change that fact.
‘Self-Deportation’ as a Door to a New Life
Just a few days after Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I met my partner April. The following spring, we got engaged. We married in the summer. I got my green card thanks to their patience and willingness to go through the process. Over the next few years, I worked at The Dallas Morning News, Colorado Public Radio, and NPR. In 2024, I became a U.S. citizen.
We had a baby and bought a home. I achieved just about everything my parents hoped that I would — despite the obstacles this country’s immigration law had placed in my way.
Immigrating anywhere with the goal of building a better life is one of the ultimate acts of self-determination that exist in this world. Deciding to return home may just be the next part of the journey for some of the millions of immigrants in the U.S.
That’s where I find myself now. Yes, moving back was about avoiding unnecessary risk. In the months before leaving the D.C. area, I began carrying my U.S. passport with me just in case I was questioned by the federal agents or National Guard troops deployed around the nation’s capital. Every time I left our house, I hoped I would not encounter ICE in immigrant-rich Arlington, Virginia where we lived, as many of our neighbors unfortunately did.
We’ve gained a whole new set of headaches in our two months of living in Mexico. We are figuring out how the credit system works so we can buy a car and get a local driver’s license.
Our son is rejecting most new foods here, though like a good Mexican, he loves eating tortillas and avocado.
But I also have reopened a door to a life I didn’t think would ever be possible. I get to keep doing journalism and can eat tacos in the plazas of my parents’ hometowns. My partner will feel the immigrant experience and work on their own creative projects.
I get to research my family’s Indigenous roots in person and teach my son about them. We recently visited the Museo de la Cultura Huasteca here in Tampico, where I showed him a sculpture of Ehecatl, the god of the wind, whom our ancestors worshipped for bringing the rain for the crops.
The pull I feel to experience my country of birth on my terms and learn about my past is more powerful than the fear I felt for immigration agents. It’s my choice to be here, and the only role the White House played was to show me just how toxic conditions could get in the U.S.
I am by no means arguing for more people to leave the states.
Doing so has complications, like being barred from reentering the U.S. for several years — or forever. In the case of Mexicans returning home, there’s dealing with the headache of reintegrating properly. As The Barbed Wire previously reported, Mexico’s government has repeatedly fallen short in its efforts to formally welcome back its citizens and keep them safe from the threat of organized crime.
It takes valor to free one’s self from the grip of a country that is too foolish to recognize your worth.
And there is no shame in going home with your purse full, your family taken care of, and your head held high.
Let us not forget that simply because a small man thinks he’s big.