Last summer, a woman working as a teachers aide at a public school in Milwaukee was forced to self-deport to her native country of El Salvador.
Yessenia Ruano and her husband Miguel Guerra chose uncertain safety over the constant fear of detainment, after a decade-old deportation order for Yessenia rose to the surface. Immigration officials did not honor her pending application for a visa reserved for trafficking victims.
Now, the couple and their 10-year-old twin daughters are trying to create a new life in a country that feels foreign to all four of them.
This fall, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Sophie Carson and photographer Jovanny Hernandez visited the family in their new home in San Alfonso, El Salvador.
You can read their reporting on the Journal Sentinel's website.
WUWM Education Reporter Katherine Kokal spoke with Carson about the project, which was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Katherine Kokal: So it's been six months now that Yessenia and her daughters, Paola and Elizabeth, have been living in El Salvador. Her husband, Miguel, left his job in Milwaukee and joined them a few months later. Can you tell me what their new life is like in El Salvador?
Sophie Carson: Yeah, it's very different from their life in Milwaukee. That was something I really wanted to find out when I went there. It's different in many ways. The family just doesn't have the level of sort of independence they had previously. They owned their home. Yessenia and Miguel were working. The girls were going to school. They kept their evenings busy. In the story I write that they went to trampoline parks, they went to the playground, they went to dance class, and the girls were very active in school. Yessenia was very active in her church.
But now they live in just one room — the four of them in one room — with three twin beds pushed together. It's very hot in the house, but that room has air conditioning. The girls will start school when the school year starts in January in El Salvador. It's a four-hour school day. The girls finished fourth grade in Milwaukee, but they really are kind of going in blind to this new school year. They don't know much about Salvadoran history or geography. They speak Spanish, they went to a bilingual school in Milwaukee where Yessenia was also a teacher's aide.
But the whole world is different for them in many ways. So Yessenia is currently working at a convenience store that is attached to her mother-in-law's home. She and Miguel are taking a pastry course that's offered for free by the government for returning Salvadorans who were deported [by the U.S.] So they are trying to figure out what their next steps are and trying to figure out how to kind of rebuild their lives.
There's a lot of reporting and access to people who are being removed from the U.S. There's not a lot of reporting about what it's like after someone leaves the United States. Why was it important to tell this story now?
I still have not seen very much reporting about what it's like to be back. I think in the U.S., I understand why. We're very focused on our policies, you know, how our taxpayer dollars are being used to fund ICE operations or federal federal agencies.
But from a human perspective, I was really interested in her story. She's a very compelling person in that she's very friendly, and she's incredibly hopeful. Even now, she's hopeful that she can return to the U.S. Her story, I think, struck a chord in Milwaukee because she was this person who had no criminal convictions. She has U.S. citizen children. She was working in a public school legally, so there was a lot of community support for her.
So as we were kind of thinking about how do you tell her story next, it just made sense to try to go [to El Salvador.] It was a long shot, but being with someone day-in and day-out, you can really see the rhythm of their lives and how they're adjusting, how they're making do. That is something you can't really get over, say, a Zoom call or a phone call.
You mentioned that she doesn't have any criminal convictions. We've heard over and over again that the Trump administration is going after people who represent "the worst of the worst." She doesn't really seem to fit that bill. What does her story mean in the context of this greater immigration crackdown?
It's a great question. I think her story is really representative of many of the people who have been targeted and forced to leave the country under Trump's expanded deportation crackdown. We hear a lot about "the worst of the worst." We hear a lot about the people with criminal convictions or violent criminal records. Yessenia was not one of those people. She was not even charged with illegal re-entry. She did cross the border twice. She was not charged with illegal re-entry on her second entry because she said she had a fear of returning to El Salvador. So she spent pretty much 14 years, her entire time in the U.S., waiting for a decision in her case to be able to hopefully earn a legal status and stay in the U.S.
When I spoke to her friends in Milwaukee, what they said was she really was representative of the kind of complex process that many immigrants go through in trying to gain legal status, trying to remain in the U.S., you know, trying to make it work. When we hear about, 'Well, why didn't she just come the right way?' Or, 'She had 14 years to become a U.S. citizen. Why didn't that happen?' They really said this was a big misunderstanding of just how complicated this process is and how, in many cases, it's actually impossible for people in situations like hers to gain a legal status.
To hear more reporting on immigration, check out WUWM's new podcast, Status Pending.
Katherine Kokal is the education reporter at 89.7 WUWM - Milwaukee's NPR. Have a question about schools or an education story idea? You can reach her at kokal@uwm.edu
