No One Talks About Life After Deportation, But These Activists in Mexico Are Changing That Laura Weiss - The Nation | |
go to original May 5, 2017 |
The Stream - Life After Deportation (Al Jazeera English)
On the night of November 8, 2016, 26-year old Maggie Loredo, like millions of others, was messaging her friends with growing anxiety. “Watching the election…it just all fell apart,” she recalled two months after Donald Trump’s victory. But Loredo was watching the election results not from the United States, a country where she lived for most of her life, but from her hometown of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, where she had returned eight years before.
Loredo came to the US as a toddler with her family and decided to move back to Mexico after graduating high school. Barred from receiving financial aid from public universities in her home state of Georgia and with no way to legally work in the United States, Loredo thought it would be easier to attend college in the country where she was born. But in San Luis Potosí she found that the officials at the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Secretary of Public Education) were incompetent and unable to give her the appropriate guidance to validate her high school diploma.
In the meantime, she says she became the victim of labor abuse in a job at an English school that exploited and stole from her. “There was no way I would get another job, because I didn’t have a college diploma or experience or a lot of recommendation letters,” she explains. She says it almost felt like being undocumented again, despite being a Mexican citizen. It would take five years of navigating government bureaucracy before she would be able to start college.
Loredo is one of around 500,000 Mexican youth who were raised in the United States but have come back to the country of their birth. Some have found themselves or family members deported, while others, like Loredo, left because they felt chewed up and spit out by the US government due to their undocumented status. In 2014, Loredo co-founded Otros Dreams en Acción (Other Dreams in Action, ODA) a support group for Mexican deportees and returnees. Along with the organization’s other co-founder, Dr. Jill Anderson, a Mexico City-based researcher, ODA members help each other readjust and respond to life in Mexico.
Read the rest at The Nation
Related: ‘It Just Feels Wrong’: Trump Voters Tell 60 Minutes They’re Sad Their ‘Good Hombre’ Friend Got Deported (RawStory)
Related: Trump Targets Undocumented Families, Not Felons, in First 100 Days (The Intercept)
Related: Three Children, 19 Years in the US, No Criminal Record: Meet the Man Still Deported by Donald Trump (Independent UK)
Related: Mexico Is Not Number One Anymore in the Number of Immigrants in U.S.A (NRIWorld)
We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!
From activities like hiking, swimming, bike riding and yoga, to restaurants offering healthy menus, Vallarta-Nayarit is the ideal place to continue - or start - your healthy lifestyle routine.