This article is co-published with Capital & Main, a non-profit publication based in California covering politics and culture.
On a warm evening in early August, friends and family gathered in Juan Ramón González’s Pasadena, California, backyard to eat homemade tacos and share stories about the kind-eyed 56-year-old who had lived in the neighborhood for three decades.
González, who entered the country in his 20s without authorization, had recently been reassessing his life in the United States. Amid challenges that once seemed unimaginable, he had been wondering whether he could — or should — stay here, or return to the homeland he hadn’t visited since the mid-1990s.
When he first told his wife, who has a U.S. green card, that he was thinking of “self-deporting” back to his home state of Michoacán in southwestern Mexico, she thought he was joking — and it wasn’t funny.
González had started considering leaving after the Trump administration began an aggressive campaign of harassment, detention and expulsion targeting undocumented immigrants. According to President Donald Trump, “People in our country illegally can self-deport the easy way, or they can get deported the hard way.”