The Trump Administration announced Operation Midway Blitz on September 8, 2025. A press release justified the Chicagoland raids as a way to “honor the legacy of Katie Abraham by relentlessly arresting criminal illegal alien drunk drivers across Illinois.” In the video accompanying the announcement, “Angel Parents Speak Out About Daughter Katie,” Abraham’s father, Joe, and mother, Michelle, talk about the undocumented Guatemalan man who struck and killed their daughter with his car.

Joe says he has little sympathy for those who claim that undocumented people are “disappeared,” “taken,” or “snatched,” because his own daughter was “disappeared,” “taken,” and “snatched” from him. “Katie received no due process,” he says; so “why,” asks Michelle, “do these people . . . who are not US citizens deserve due process?” Furthermore, the plight of undocumented people is easier than their own. “I wish she was in another country, or in some detention center,” Joe says of his daughter.

Four days after the announcement, in the majority-Latino suburb of Franklin Park, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent pulled over an undocumented Mexican immigrant named Silverio Villegas González, shot him in the neck, and killed him. After he’d been shot, Villegas González’s gray Subaru veered into the underside of a parked tractor trailer belonging to a local sausage and cheese distributor. Along with his partner, the ICE agent who killed Villegas González then broke open the driver’s-side window of the destroyed car, dragged Villegas González out, and tried in vain to administer first aid on the sidewalk.

In his video of the incident, the truck’s driver mentions his commercial driver’s license while panning from the car to Villegas González’s body. Another witness filmed Villegas González from inside their car, lowering the camera below the dashboard after lingering momentarily on the agents. In yet another video, the filmer’s shadow is visible on the sidewalk in front of Happy Nails, a salon that also captured the crash on its surveillance camera. The video’s narrator speaks in Polish about the scene before her, but there are no car horns, screams, or other sounds that would attest to the significance of the event. Besides the woman’s own voice, all one hears are sounds of truck engines echoing off parked cars, muffling the agents’ talk.

After the murder, DHS issued a statement claiming that Villegas González had struck the agent with his car and dragged him “a significant distance” (the words are in boldface). This is refuted by all available evidence, including body-cam footage from the Franklin Park Police Department, in which the agent describes his injuries as “nothing major.” The agent’s identity has never been confirmed by DHS, nor has anyone been charged with a crime. No riots broke out in the wake of Villegas González’s killing, and there were few large protests outside of Chicago. He did not receive the attention that Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti did, and his face has not been painted on murals. In Chicago, the local government’s response to his murder could not have been more different from the reaction in Minneapolis.

He told me he’d been arrested by some people, what were they called, those people — “ICE,” I said — and he said, “Oh yeah, ISIS.”

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In Minnesota, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office launched an investigation into ICE’s misconduct in the state, including the shootings of Good and Pretti; it filed a lawsuit to preserve evidence and created an online portal for residents to submit relevant information. In Illinois, on the other hand, reporting by the news organization Block Club Chicago revealed that the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office had no files on the shooting; the consul general of Mexico received no response after formally requesting a US government investigation; and, apart from an initial police report and body-cam footage, the Franklin Park Police Department had no records of the murder. Villegas González’s family received no details of any pending investigation. What they got instead were autopsy results and his mangled car.

Nonetheless, Villegas González’s parents did not record a video for the Mexican government calling for state violence against American citizens. In September, they received their son’s body in a village of 260 people outside Irimbo, Michoacán, after he’d been flown south with funds from the Mexican consulate — perhaps over Chicago, over Dallas, and over the Sierra Madre — inside a cardboard box labeled with his name. Upon arrival, Villegas González’s body was driven to the family home in a pickup-truck hearse, then carried into his parents’ living room. A small house, four rooms supported by painted tree trunks. Relatives and neighbors sat outside on folding chairs next to a cornfield. Beside his coffin was a collection of wreaths and a golden crucifix.

The Michoacán photojournalist Ivan Villanueva attended a larger funeral service in Irimbo. “The whole town stopped for a while to accompany Silverio, many of them even leaving their jobs,” he said. “The businesses around the plaza — the transportation, the police — everyone was focused on the memorial. When it was over, I decided to fly my drone overhead to get a couple of aerial shots, and the truth is, yes, the square was full.”

Back in Franklin Park, students from East Leyden High risked truancy slips and scuffled with school security guards in order to join a walkout in Villegas González’s honor. They walked more than a mile to visit his roadside memorial at Grand Avenue and Emerson Street, which has been maintained since his passing by the local social justice group Hijas del Pueblo. The collection of candles and signs has been pelted with stones and destroyed in a car accident but keeps being rebuilt; Hijas volunteers have found vases for donated flowers and cut their stems.

There is also a memorial for Villegas González on a shelf in the supply room of Tom and Jerry’s Gyros on West Montrose Avenue, where he worked. A painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe sits beside his portrait, along with his work cap and a can of Red Bull that the owner of the restaurant, Juan Acuna Hernandez, had purchased for Villegas González in anticipation of his coming into work that day. Hernandez bought it early in the morning, before Villegas González dropped his children off at the Small World Learning Center and Passow Elementary.

When he was hired, Hernandez said, Villegas González had not needed instruction on any part of the grill — he just started working. Customers from other gyro restaurants where Villegas González had worked before would recognize him through the kitchen window. Hernandez and the other cooks said this made him a celebrity, that women were falling in love with his looks. “After he died, I wanted to move away and sell everything. I didn’t give a shit,” Hernandez said. “You can’t replace a man like that with someone on the street corner.”

After his own departure from a small village in Mexico, Hernandez had worked for a Greek man for many years, from whom he bought the restaurant. On the third anniversary of this purchase, he decided to offer free hot dogs to customers. Villegas González served up more than a thousand hot dogs that day because his coworker had called out sick. Hernandez recalled this incident, and Silverio’s murder, and began to cry. He sat near a sign that read, I can only please one person per day. Today I chooseme.

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About two weeks after Villegas González’s death, in the middle of the night, a group of ICE and Border Patrol agents rappelled out of a Black Hawk helicopter onto the roof of a large dilapidated building in South Shore and raided the apartments inside. According to residents’ testimony, agents armed with long guns broke down the doors of their homes, tore their furniture apart, zip-tied them and their children — some of them naked — and loaded everyone into vans: Latino residents in one van, Black residents in another. Many of the Venezuelan detainees were deported after being falsely accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua, while other residents, after showing proof of citizenship, were allowed back into their homes.

After the raid, the editor of a neighborhood newspaper told me that a woman had called her office to express astonishment at the scale of force deployed against her neighbors, but also gratitude to the ICE agents, because the “Venezuelans played their radios too loud at Rainbow Beach.”

The raid appears to have been undertaken with the blessing of the building’s landlord, Trinity Flood, who allegedly provided the agents with a map of paying versus nonpaying tenants. The ward alderman didn’t seem overly bothered by the operation, either. Asked about it by a local reporter, he replied that the raid was “over with,” and called for a judge to clear the building of any remaining tenants.

In December, I visited the building. Having received the order to vacate, residents were packing their belongings into moving trucks. At least, it seemed that some of the people I spoke to were residents, and that some of the things were their belongings, and that some of them were moving out. Others were carrying items into apartments; one of the movers told me that these people were hoping to squat in the building and then claim relocation payments that were being offered to residents. Another mover said this was a lie.

This second mover was smoking a cigarillo with a toothless man, who told me he’d once stopped a murder in the building. He was in the elevator, he said, when an “immigrant came in, swinging a gun.”

“So I said to him, ‘You gotta go do that, you gotta go kill somebody some other time. There’s a child in here,’” the man said. The gangster had respected the man’s wishes, and murdered someone in an apartment one or two days later, as the man recalled.

Later, inside the building elevator, I asked the man what had happened to him on the night of the raid. He told me he’d been arrested by some people, what were they called, those people — “ICE,” I said — and he said, “Oh yeah, ISIS.”

“ISIS came in here and they took me out to the parking lot, but wasn’t nothing to it.” He hadn’t done anything, after all. “ISIS” rounded up the “immigrants,” and then “things kind of smoothed out after a while, in the building,” he said. The Venezuelans here had been gangbangers, he said, and their gangs didn’t ride with the gangs already present in the neighborhood. (No reporting has indicated that any of the Venezuelan residents had gang affiliations.)

A younger man, wearing a surgical mask over his beard, passed us in the hallway. “They didn’t tell me nothing,” he said. “They acting like I still got to figure it out on my own. . . . Nobody contacted me like, ‘Oh, you gotta be gone by tomorrow.’ Crazy bro, that’s crazy.” Then I rode up the elevator with another man, Alex, who told me that the bearded man’s comments had been “for entertainment purposes only” — that tenants had been given ample notice to leave. Alex invited me up to his apartment, with a Tribune reporter in tow, where he proceeded to tell us a different story, which was in some ways equally hard to believe.

On the night of the raid, he said, he was awoken by the sound of helicopter blades on the roof above his bedroom. He got out of bed, took out the trash, and carried a cigar out into the hallway. There he saw armed, masked men with sniper rifles, who zip-tied him, so that he had to drop his cigar. Then they let him go. Alex seemed unfazed by the whole experience. “People do what’s best for them,” he said, by way of explanation.

Her son would ask her each day after work, ‘How are the migrants in Chicago, Mom?’ And, “Did you cry at work today?’

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The condition of his apartment was deplorable. Alex’s living room was covered in puddles of black water, causing the wood laminate of the floor panels to warp and peel away. In the warmer months, he said, the water attracted gnats and flies; in the colder months, leaks from the radiator pooled with the rain that leaked from the ceiling. Mice and rats lived in a hole in the corner of the living room that connected the apartment with another unit down the hall, which had recently caught fire. Alex had covered this hole with aluminum foil. He warmed the apartment by leaving one stove burner on at all times, trapping the heat with a plastic drop cloth taped across the windows.

“People do what’s best for them,” he repeated. This axiom was offered to explain the behavior of the ICE agents who’d torn up the building as well as of the people with substance-use disorders who lived down the hall, who often knocked on his door begging for leftovers. When I later texted Alex that I would be writing a long piece about the building and Operation Midway Blitz, he replied, “😄 In what way 👍 positively or 👎 negatively 🤔 because you’re view point shapes perceptions for readers 😁.”

In the parking lot I spoke to another person, who stood leaning against a metal pole. He told me that he also lived in the building and that he’d been caught up in the raid, but he offered very few details about it. He mentioned that he was the father of two children, and insisted that he’d never been told he had to leave his apartment. If nothing changed about his situation, he said, he’d have to sleep on the Blue Line that night. I don’t think he actually lived there, however, because earlier he had walked up to the building and asked someone, “What all is going on?” He spoke in a tentative, suspicious tone that suggested he might be looking for something, and that facts were almost like jacks, in that they might be thrown around to one’s advantage but more often than not served no purpose at all. As was the case here, it seemed.

The building itself, and the pain it had covered for years with spackle and drywall, seemed to have shaken the psychic foundations of the residents and lurkers who gathered around it on moving day. The part it had assumed in our national terrorism dramedy — star for a night in a Michael Bay TikTok — was only its latest role, after shamming for so long as a home for human souls.

In the remaining apartments that I visited, through the half-open doors not covered by metal grates, I saw accoutrements of abandoned lives scattered across sodden floors. Ice cream cartons, kid-size Humvees, bathroom candles, ring lights, then the occasional gaunt face seen through a crack, a hoarse voice addressing someone — a building manager, a social worker, they didn’t say, they seemed frightened of me and of everything else. They looked sick and thin.

One of the movers told me that he had been born on the West Side and he knew how it was with all the residents here — why they “threw trash on the ground,” why they “hurt each other” and “didn’t want to work.” It was simple, he said. For them, “everything is a ‘lick,’ as they call it.” He attributed the building’s overlapping catastrophes to an accumulation of poor personal choices.

He and I rode up and down the elevator. While he placed things in milk crates, I took photos of a drawing someone had made on the elevator wall. It showed Earth inside a slashed circle, as if to say, The totality is not allowed here.

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In response to the South Shore raid, and Villegas González’s murder, and ICE agents’ shooting of Marimar Martinez (five times) and then charging her with assault, someone, we were told, had decided to seek revenge. He was “depraved,” a “thug,” the Department of Homeland Security said; prosecutors claimed he was a “high-ranking member of the Latin Kings.” He was also a carpenter, according to early reporting, and he had allegedly put out a hit on senior Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino.

I was intrigued by these initial reports, not least because I had seen Bovino myself downtown, shortly after his men had detained two parents and left their 8-year-old girl behind on the street. And because Juan Espinoza Martinez, the man who had supposedly solicited the murder for hire, had offered only $10,000, less than the price of a decent used car, and from a Snapchat account with the username Monkey2430.

The amount in question made me feel sorry for Martinez, and I felt even sorrier when he came into the courtroom bowing so that his lawyer could pull a suit jacket onto his body. He looked preoccupied and sad during the prosecutor’s opening statement, each word of which was delivered as if it were a stand-alone sentence: “‘10k. If. You. Take. Him. Down.’ Words that speak for themselves. Words that are more than just words. Words that are a call to action. Words that call for murder.”

My gradual enlightenment as to the true meaning of these words played out both epistemically and visually. As usual, facts that appeared scary and damning revealed themselves to be quotidian and inconsequential, while people who seemed serious and imposing revealed themselves to be clowns.

At the beginning of the trial, in the overflow room, the courtroom feed on the flat-screen TV showed the feds as all bulk and shoulders, in particular the DHS tech who had gone through Martinez’s phone. But in person later that day, I could see the youthful pimples on the tech’s neck, his botched fade and aspirational Reno 911!–style mustache. In cross-examination, he explained that before hunting Bovino’s would-be killer, he’d been a police officer for about a year, working the streets of Markham, Illinois (population 11,000).

During his testimony, Martinez’s brother, Oscar, said that Juan had learned of the alleged bounty on a neighborhood Facebook page. Posters were spreading the rumor that the Latin Kings were soliciting the hit for $10,000, and Juan then sent this information to Oscar, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. Afterward, neither man had taken discernible steps to procure a gun, to study Bovino’s movements, or to order anyone to go after him. But Juan had made the mistake of also sending the information to someone who turned out to be an informant, and later repeated it in a recorded interrogation that he had given freely, still in his work shirt, at the local FBI headquarters. He also told the interrogators that he had $20 in his bank account.

The crux of the government’s case was a photo of a handgun that Juan had texted Oscar after sending the message about the hit. Though the government attorneys worked to obscure the chronology of the texts, Juan had in fact sent his brother the picture of the gun almost a full day after relaying the words “10k if u take him down.” Moreover, the gun itself turned out to be innocent, even touching, in context. According to Oscar, Juan had sent the photo because the gun’s handle was engraved with an image of Saint Jude, their family’s patron saint, whom they believed to have intervened on their behalf during their father’s kidney failure. Saint Jude had become, Oscar said, “their friend.”

Oscar was the sole voice of moral authority in the proceedings, neither engaging in the countertheatrics of Juan’s defense nor ceding an inch of ground to the prosecution. In a tone of mild, confused indignation, he methodically resisted the imposition of an imaginary conspiracy onto his brother’s life.

In response to Juan’s message about the $10,000 bounty supposedly placed on Bovino’s head, Oscar had texted back, “mames.” The government had translated this Mexican slang term as “fuck,” and used this “fuck” to suggest that Oscar was taken aback, even frightened, by the seriousness of his brother’s intent to kill Bovino.

But that’s not how it was, Oscar said. Mames does not mean fuck.

And what does it mean, the government attorney asked. Oscar thought for a moment.

“Mames . . . mames is more like, it means” — Oscar spoke emphatically, twisting his head — “a mames type of thing.” Shortly afterward, he stepped down from the witness stand.

When Juan Espinoza Martinez was acquitted after more than three hours of jury deliberation, he looked neither overjoyed nor relieved. He just tilted his head up to look at the ceiling. A day later he was taken into ICE custody in Clay County, Indiana. He had not spoken once during the trial.

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Oscar Martinez’s remarks were emblematic of a more general response to Midway Blitz: an aggrieved, futile attempt to correct someone who has violently misinterpreted reality. Over and over, I heard Chicagoans point to the normality of life as a kind of defense against the menacing accusations and absurd theories that ICE, Border Patrol, and national politicians had promulgated about the city and then, through the government’s own violence, manifested into being. In the accounts of people who have had acquaintances or loved ones kidnapped, or who have been detained or deported themselves, the normal becomes almost a talisman, whose invocation might protect us against these dangerous misreadings. People are not simply deported, we say — they are deported while filling up their cars, while dropping their children off at school, while visiting the doctor, while shopping for groceries. Life goes on, and meanwhile it does not.

At a law clinic, recent arrivals from Venezuela and throughout Central America have to apply for work permits and changes of court venue while DHS helicopters fly overhead. They have to breastfeed their children while recounting every brutal moment of their past in order to fill in the fourth and fifth sections of their I-589 Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal.

We walked past a row of mental health watch cells whose inhabitants were arrayed like zoo animals.

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While playing a mobile quiz game about the logos of American brands, a Venezuelan asylum seeker who had been shoved off the roof of a moving train told me that, yes, indeed, “I lost my whole leg.” Then he asked me if I knew what the Pringles logo was.

Another Venezuelan man told me how, during his journey through the Darién Gap, in the jungle, he had seen a dead woman inside a tent, her hands still holding her dead children. But “personally, I liked the jungle, for its beauty,” he said. He’d seen monkeys there, snakes, and other exciting animals. He also showed me a TikTok video he’d filmed during his journey through this land of corpses, featuring himself and some Egyptian men, laughing as they tried arepas for the first time.

A teacher told me about her Venezuelan students, some of whom had also seen dead people in the Darién Gap, or had recently been evicted, or had parents who would not leave the house for fear of ICE. Some learned next to nothing in school because of language barriers, she said, but during an auditorium performance where their teacher sang an oddly impassioned Christian song, they nonetheless danced blissfully, their hands waving in the air, in total miscomprehension, as if they were at an Ariana Grande concert.

An organizer named Baltazar Enriquez told me about an enterprise he’d founded called the Magic School Bus, which transported the children of undocumented parents who were too frightened of ICE to leave their homes. Once, Enriquez said, a 10-year-old boy had asked why Enriquez was taking him to school instead of the boy’s mother. After thinking for a moment, he replied, “It’s because you’re awesome.” A little later the FBI showed up at Enriquez’s home and interrogated him inside his doorway.

A nurse and small landlord named Vicky also operated a shuttle bus, this one carrying undocumented adults to their dental appointments. Recently she’d taken in a little dog belonging to an undocumented tenant of hers who had been detained by ICE while on his way to a job installing carpeting and had then been deported. The dog had swallowed rat poison, and she’d launched a GoFundMe to pay the veterinary bill. Now Vicky was selling off the undocumented man’s tool chest to fundraise for his new life in Mexico.

In February, I was eating sopes in Cicero, talking with a Venezuelan woman who had a large scar on her neck. She told me her cousins had been killed by paramilitaries linked to the Maduro government, and that she’d studied law and then nearly starved in Venezuela, subsisting for a time on banana peels and chicken skin. Nonetheless, she did not want Maduro to be detained, she said — while a nearby TV played footage of her country’s president in US custody. After lunch was over, she went back to her job delivering groceries for Uber Eats.

A Venezuelan nurse told me she had lost her job because she was afraid of leaving her house and getting deported. It was a surprise to be treated this way in the US after all she’d been through, she said. Life here felt strangely continuous with life in Venezuela.

She had ferried her severely disabled son through the jungle in the Darién Gap, where he fell ill after drinking river water mixed with dried milk. She and her son and her partner had all been detained and assaulted by the police in Mexico, and the memory, as it resurfaced, made her weep. While she dried her eyes, her son was smiling and laughing, clapping along to a TikTok video of Goofy handing out candies at Disney World, which he played over and over again to soothe himself.

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It rained and rained in late February; it rained, and the water sprayed up from the oil trucks in front of us on the highway to Michigan, on our way to visit a young Venezuelan woman in ICE custody. Maureen Graves, the woman’s lawyer, had agreed to let me accompany her.

As it rained, Graves described the gradual dissolution of the asylum system as a series of “shoes falling.” The first shoe was ICE’s decision to arrest several asylum-seeking clients in front of the immigration courthouse on Monroe Street (rain); the second shoe was the termination of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans (rain); the third was the introduction of pretermission motions (more rain); the fourth was the targeted firing of younger and more progressive judges (more rain); the fifth was the introduction of Asylum Cooperative Agreements, which let the Trump Administration deport people to countries and continents they’d never been to before, such as Uganda (more and more rain). Together these falling shoes had shattered the hopes of asylum seekers in the city, and humiliated and demoralized legal professionals and volunteers who might have once reasonably believed their work could help someone find a permanent home here. In response to these changes, Graves’s own health had deteriorated, and her son would ask her each day after work, “How are the migrants in Chicago, Mom?” And, “Did you cry at work today?”

When we arrived at the jail where her client was incarcerated, we walked past a row of mental health watch cells whose inhabitants were arrayed like zoo animals. On the floors of the cells were torn pieces of paper and what might have been sawdust, as in farm stables. The men inside wore coarse green blankets around their waists, fastened in place with padlocks. Graves’s client walked past these men on her way to meet us, and they turned their heads to watch. In the meeting room she smiled at us pacifically. She had been detained here after accidentally taking a wrong turn onto a bridge into Canada.

The woman was young, and she recounted to us a number of extraordinary and disturbing things that were neither here nor there, exactly, vis-à-vis her case, and which I can’t repeat for reasons of client confidentiality. Then she returned to workaday complaints about how bad the food was in ICE custody and how there was nothing to read in Spanish except books about Jesus. She said that she and the other Latinas locked up there were convinced the water had been adulterated so as to reduce their libidos. She said she wanted to be deported as soon as possible, so that she could go home and get her life in order again. About an hour later, we logged onto her hearing on Zoom. Graves asked for her client to be deported, and the judge said she could be deported immediately. He wished the girl well.

On the way back it did not rain much at all.

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A little before the trip to Michigan, I was put in touch with Mateo (a pseudonym), the Mexican man who had been deported and whose puppy had eaten rat poison in his absence. He’d been arrested by ICE, detained in Broadview, transferred to Michigan, then flown south after his request for deportation. When we spoke, Mateo was just starting his life anew in Mexico and was living with his mother.

On the day he was detained, Mateo said, he’d had a presentiment that something bad would happen:

In the morning it was quiet . I woke up and took my dog for a walk. I went to the church and crossed myself by the shrine for the Virgin of Guadalupe. I crossed myself because I had a bad feeling — some fear — when I woke up . I went home to drop off my dog, and my boss passed by and told me, “Let’s go to work.” I told him I didn’t feel like it, I better not . He said, “Come, let’s do a little job, let’s get there quick.” And, well, I put on my shoes, I crossed myself again, and got into his truck.

We got onto I-55, took the exit for Bolingbrook, and on the first right, at the first traffic light, we got caught — right there at the traffic light . We turned to the left and a few minutes afterward the light went on, ICE followed us, and caught us. They had three cars: one parked in front of us, one to the side, and one behind. The window was rolled down a little, and an agent just put his hand inside the truck and unlocked the door. They turned me around, took my phone, my wallet, my phone charger, and threw it in their truck. They pushed me onto the hood of the truck and handcuffed me. They put me in a van and took me to Broadview.

When I got there, there was a man on one side of the room who had just had an operation on his foot, and they brought him in without his shoes on — just socks — and they tied him up . There was another man who had fallen to the ground, with a bunch of agents on top of him. He was having a seizure. They called an ambulance that took him away.

There were so many people, so many of us in just one room. I stayed there for a night, all of us piled on top of each other, on the ground. A guard came and asked me what country I was from and when I came to the US and if I was afraid to return to Mexico. I told him, “No, I’m not afraid, I’m Mexican.” He asked why I’d come here to the US, and I told him, “To work.” He told me to sign a voluntary departure form, and I said, “No.” Then he grabbed me by the jacket and put me back in the cell.

And that’s all. They gave us each half a sandwich and some water. They kept us for one day and one night, and then they took us to Michigan early in the morning.

In Michigan, Mateo was treated somewhat better, though it was very cold.

The guards were only two on a shift at a time, and they were very nice, in general. They played dominoes with us, talked with us, watched television. Sometimes they even gave us things to distract ourselves — brainteasers and little puzzles.

They fed us early, three times a day. Beans, rice, ground beef; potatoes with ground beef, sometimes carrots. And a little bread. Two hot dogs, two buns, and peach puree. The electricity failed two or three times, and we got locked in our cells because the doors only opened with electricity. When it was locked, I’d ask myself, “What if I was trapped in here and the jail burned down?”

During recess or lunch, everyone would talk for a long time, gossiping. That’s how we learned that someone had died because they didn’t give him the right medication, or maybe he hadn’t taken the right medication. And we also found out that a person had tried to hang himself in another cell block. After the hanging they moved us to another cell where there were even more people, and it was even colder — and the power went out there for two days, so it became very cold. The guards just said, “They’re working on it.”

Your mind plays with you. Suddenly you think you’re not going to get out, that they’re going to have you inside for a long time. You’re inside your cell, and you go out to the yard, yes, and you watch TV. But if you’re used to going out on the street, to the store . . . you get frustrated. I know that sometimes people fall into despair — because they were assaulted or something like that . But I just said to myself, “I’m going to keep my mind focused on what I’m going to do once I get out . I’m going to see my friends, my aunt, my mom, and my whole family in Mexico.”

I’d call my aunt, sometimes my friends, sometimes Doña Vicky — I talked to her to see how my puppy was doing. I called everyone excessively, every day. I just didn’t think about anything else, because if I thought about something else, it would scare me. It was two months inside there.

At the end, I asked to be deported. I went to see the judge, and he told me I was going to have to leave the country because I had no valid reasons to stay.

On the day of my deportation, they took us out of our cell block, to the front of the detention center. They took us out at about three in the afternoon, and we waited until four in the morning. We arrived in Detroit at about eight or nine in the morning. They made us sign some papers. We boarded a plane and arrived at the border about four hours later. We took a bus to a bridge, and then they left us there. They opened a gate and said, “Go that way.”

Once in Mexico, Mateo spent a night resting at a consulate building, where he was able to bathe and eat. The next morning he was bused to Querétaro and then on to Troncones. His mother took him in. “My family received me very well,” he said.

They were very happy, yes, very happy. Right now I don’t have any thought of leaving — maybe in a few years. At the moment I prefer to be here with the family, taking advantage of my time with my mom. I want to go on walks with her and enjoy her food. I get a good scolding now and then — she’s very strict in her way. I was living alone before, so there was no one to scold me. But I don’t care if she scolds me — I’m here with her and happy.

At the beginning, though, it did feel very different . Everything here has changed. Many houses have changed, the weather has changed. People don’t look at me the same, or they look at me strangely, because it’s been many years since I’ve been here. Sometimes I think they don’t remember me. My family, my cousins, I left them, all of them. I last looked at them when they were little, and now they’re grown up .

But life here is calm. You don’t take it as fast . I’m trying to survive and carry things forward, to get my papers, and do what I have to in order to work. It’d already been a while since I’d wanted to come back — and so I wouldn’t say it’s bad luck. Things happen for a reason.

I give thanks to God, because I’m here with my mom, my brother, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles. We’re all putting our heart into it, and I’m seeing what we can do. Once it gets a little warmer, I can work. We don’t have a big house or really a house at all — the truth is that this is a very humble house. But if, one day, you want to come and visit, you can. Here is your poor little house.