Deportations Haunt Mexican Countryside

SAN MARCOS, Mexico — It's been five months since Luís Romero Chegue, an illegal immigrant who lived and worked for two years in metro Atlanta, was deported from Gwinnett County to his struggling hometown in southwestern Mexico.

Now the 20-year-old husband and father is contemplating his next move while working sporadic, low-paying construction jobs.

To the north, Atlanta beckons once again for Romero, with its promise of $12 an hour as a house painter and the comfort of his mom, sisters, uncles and cousins who live there.

If he decides to return to the United States, he won't be alone. Experts say most deportees return, defying court orders and risking prison terms.

In San Marcos, a humid, chaotic town about an hour south of Acapulco, the future doesn't look so bright: when Romero manages to find work, he earns less than $10 a day, hardly enough to buy a house for his young wife and 3-year-old daughter.

"I'm trying to figure it out, how I'm going to take care of them," Romero says softly, staring at the cracking concrete floor of his rented house. "It was like the American dream had ended for me."

Romero is among a sharply increasing number of deportees from the Atlanta area whose reappearance in Mexico is causing worry in their hometowns and perhaps fundamentally altering traditional patterns of migration.

The U.S. government deported a record 280,000 illegal immigrants in the fiscal year ending September 2007, up from 186,000 the previous year. Nearly half of those deported were returned to Mexico.

The 2007 numbers include about 40,000 voluntary returnees — often detained immigrants who agree to return home, but don't receive a formal deportation order. Voluntary returnees were not included in the 2006 count.

The overall numbers for both years also do not include hundreds of thousands of apprehensions under the "catch and release" program along the border.

Nowhere is the rise in deportations more visible than in the Southeast, where the rate doubled from 2006 to 2007.

In Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, deportations increased from 5,187 in 2006 to 10,925 in 2007, according to the Atlanta field office of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which covers the three states. Again, the 2006 numbers do not include voluntary returnees.

The pace continued this fiscal year. From October 2007 through March 17, 5,220 illegal immigrants were deported in the three states.

Officials say the spike in the Atlanta area stems from more aggressive tracking by federal immigration agents and increased cooperation from local law enforcement officers. Georgia State troopers, Georgia Bureau of Investigations agents and drivers license investigators have all been recently trained to start deportation proceedings. The Cobb County Sheriff's Office has been deporting inmates since July.

Romero said he was detained when immigration agents came to his apartment last fall looking for a roommate who had pending deportation orders. He said he had a previous run-in with police when he was cited for drinking in public and being a minor in possession of alcohol.

As part of his deportation order, Romero cannot attempt to apply for a visa for re-entry for another decade, and he risks prison time if he returns illegally.

Guillermo Meneses, a researcher with the Tijuana-based Colegio de la Frontera Norte, said deportations from the interior of the United States have the potential to bring profound change to both countries. Unlike many of those caught along the border, migrants caught in raids or arrested by local police tend to have established jobs and families.

"If other cities imitate Atlanta ... the impact on Mexico could be considerable," Meneses said.

Deportees like Romero represent a double whammy for their hometowns. Not only has the former migrant stopped sending money home to his family — money for diapers and food that gets injected directly into the local economy — but he has become added competition for an already underemployed workforce.

Add hundreds or thousands more Luís Romeros to the town, residents say, and the result would be upheaval.

"Imagine if all these people come back to San Marcos," said Eloy Morán, who directs a migrant aid office in San Marcos, a town of 45,000 that sends the vast majority of its migrants to Atlanta. "It would be a huge social problem to find jobs for these people. There are even people who graduate college here who can't find work."

In Mexico, the spike in deportees arriving in Mexico, a group that increasingly includes women and children, has sparked outrage against the U.S. government, and against Mexican officials, too.

Last year, members of the government-funded Institute of Mexicans in the Exterior called on the Mexican government to set up re-adaptation centers along the border to give deported migrants psychological, legal and medical help.

President Felipe Calderón responded in December, announcing the Program for Humane Repatriation, which he said will give deportees food and clothing as well as access to temporary work in border cities.

Francisco Pellizari, a Catholic priest who runs the Scalabrini Casa del Migrante shelter in Nuevo Laredo, said deportees make up an increasing number of migrants in his shelter. He said the deportees, many of whom have lived for years in the United States, return to the border in the grip of culture shock.

"They are completely disoriented," he said. "According to the authorities, (Mexico) is their homeland, but in reality it isn't. ... For many, their lives, their family, are in the U.S. Mexico for them is a good place for a vacation, not to make a life."

Pellizari said it's easy to identify the deportees by their clothing and their tendency to huddle in groups speaking English.

At Romero's rented home in San Marcos, his daughter Becky tugs on his arm, looking for attention, then runs to play with a huge stuffed Barney the Dinosaur. Romero says he's not sure if he will return to Atlanta.

He weighs the options carefully: prison time would be an economic disaster for his family. Yet he knows several friends who have been deported multiple times without landing in prison.

Romero's wife, Yanet, doesn't want her husband to leave her and their daughter alone again. She's not sure she can endure more years of telephone calls. And she insists that if he decides to return to Atlanta, they go as a family.

But Romero said such dreams of remaining together may not be realistic.

"I've told her, it's very hard to bring a baby girl across the desert," he said. "We'll see."