The Education Crisis For Children Of Deported Parents

ENSENADA, MEXICO – By Sarah Tory, High Country News. When Angie Romero thinks about the home in Idaho she left seven years ago after her husband, Mike, was deported, she misses the wide, clear skies. “They were so defined,” she said. Not like here, in Ensenada, Mexico, where the air from the Pacific Ocean is often misty and gray.

Angie was born in Caldwell, a town of just over 50,000 near Boise, where she lived for the first 31 years of her life. Most of her extended family lives there, too: parents, siblings, cousins. Her daughters, Vannessa, 18, and Yisel, 15, were also born in Caldwell, and they lived in a small house in town. But after her husband was deported, they could not pay their mortgage off in time and the house was foreclosed on — the first of a string of losses that followed them across the border, away from everything they knew.

Angie fell in love with Mike Romero in 1999. They were out dancing in Caldwell. He had come to the U.S. from Zacatecas, Mexico, as a 15-year-old without papers, looking for work. Knowing that he could be deported, she often told him, “If you get deported for something stupid — like if you get in trouble with the law — I’m not coming with you. I’m not doing that to our girls.”

But then one night in 2012, he was stopped by police for failing to use his turn signal — the kind of mishap that could have happened to anyone. Angie knew that a deportation can be like a forced divorce: a couple separated by the border for so many years that eventually their relationship falls apart, too.

So she worked the graveyard shift at a potato plant in Caldwell to make some extra money while she prepared for the move to Mexico with Vanessa and Yisel. After Mike was deported, he had returned to Zacatecas, in central Mexico, but there were no jobs there. “Don’t come,” he told his wife. Instead, they chose Ensenada, an hour and a half south of Tijuana, because it was allegedly safer than the big city, but still had access to the economic opportunities near the border. Idaho, at least, was only an 18-hour drive away.

The Romeros have been rebuilding their lives ever since. In Idaho, Mike was a successful building contractor. In Ensenada, however, he struggled to find steady work. Angie works as a bookkeeper for a California-based surfboard company, but her wages in Mexico are so low ($4.20 an hour) that she returns to Idaho periodically to work for her sister and her cousin at their accounting offices.

But perhaps the most important hurdle faced by families like the Romeros is also the hardest: What should these relocated families do about their children’s education? Children of deportees sometimes speak little Spanish, and they are strangers to the Mexican public school system and the intricacies of Mexican society. Now, as the Trump administration ramps up its deportation efforts, a makeshift and unconventional education model has emerged in response to the growing number of American children caught in this academic limbo.

READ MORE at The Colorado Independent

Students wait to get into class at the American Learning Center's second campus, located in a rented church they hold classes in six days a week in Tijuana. (Photo by Carlos A. Moreno for High Country News).