Deported Mexicans face shattered lives

Wednesday morning

The prisoners arrive at the gate chained together at 10:43 a.m., some still in gray prison pants and black slippers. Once released, they scramble for the pile of paper bags on the ground that contain their few belongings — a belt, diabetes medicine, a few coins.

A Mexican official checks off their names on a clipboard as they file into the country.

The men do not know what they will do next. Residents of the already violent city of Tijuana also wonder what will become of the ex-cons filling the city's shelters.

Almost a third of the 278,000 people deported in 2007 were prisoners. Last year, the U.S. started speeding up the removal of prisoners and deported a record 95,000 after they served their sentences. The U.S. also has detained or deported 10,000 gang members since 2005.

Alejandro Fonseca was convicted on drug charges and deported last year. He now lives in Tijuana with his American wife and three U.S.-born children.

They have survived by eating at the Salvation Army shelter in a rough Tijuana neighborhood near the border. But his 13-year-old daughter has missed a year of school. She cannot go to school in Mexico because she does not speak Spanish.

Fonseca says the new life has been hard on his family, but has also forced him to give up his drug habit.

"A lot of guys try to run the same game that they ran over there, but they end up falling on their face," says Fonseca as he waits for dinner at the shelter.

Fonseca is searching for work in the impoverished city, but even filling out an application is difficult. Fonseca has spent 30 of his 31 years in the United States, so English is his main language.

"You see, we know Spanish, but we don't know the exact words, and when we try to explain to somebody something, they're like 'huh?'" he says.

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Thursday morning

Battling with crutches, Nestor Ortiz struggles to line up at the gate at 11:30 a.m. after being returned for the third time in 10 days.

Ortiz worked in the U.S. for a decade. Then a police officer pulled him over and found out he had no driver's license, which he couldn't get because he was illegal. The life he had created suddenly ended.

Desperate to be with his family again, he first walked across the desert in Arizona after paying a smuggler $3,000. The next time, he went in a car driven by an American resident. And then he scaled a 20-foot-high corrugated metal wall marking the border between Tijuana and San Ysidro and jumped from it.

He winces each time he moves the throbbing leg he crushed. Both his feet are swollen.

Mexican immigration officials help the cabinet finisher from La Habra, Calif., into the back room of their office.

He still has not had a chance to take off his bracelet from Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, where he woke up this morning, three days after doctors put in a metal plate that runs from his hip to his ankle.

"What can I do? I don't know anyone here," says Ortiz, 39.

An ambulance pulls up to the Mexican Migration Institute's office. Paramedics warn if he does not keep the swelling down, he risks losing his foot.

"They shouldn't have deported you so soon after your surgery," the paramedic tells him.

The divorced father phones his two sons in California.

"I'm not coming back," he says, choked up as he talks to his 17-year-old son by phone from Tijuana's Salvation Army shelter. "I can't walk. Both my feet are in bad shape."

He asks Juan to consider moving to his hometown of Tlalnepantla, on the edge of Mexico City.

The conversation turns tense. Juan has lived in the United States since he was 7 and doesn't want to leave his friends.

"I think you should not be alone over there," Ortiz says, sighing. "Finish high school and then you can come here. At least here you have your grandparents, your cousins. Over there, what do you have?"

Ortiz breathes in deeply, holds his brow and reels in his overwhelming grief.

He tells his other son, 23-year-old Nestor, to cancel his father's gym membership, put the Chevrolet Suburban in his name and take Juan to live with him.

"Be good, son," he says. "Keep working, be careful and keep your chin up."

Around 9:30 p.m. Thursday, six women and a 7-year-old girl arrive at the gate. Migrant activists have repeatedly urged the United States not to deport women and children at night along the violent Mexican border.

Dominga Bejar, 37, stops after walking through the gate blasted by floodlights. She needs a place to stay and is nervous about grabbing a taxi by herself.

"It's really dangerous here," she says. "I'm really scared to go outside."

Blanca Villasenor, who runs a Mexican border shelter, says women are continually dropped off after 9 p.m.

"They deport them at any hour, at 10 p.m., at midnight, and in some cases they wind up in the street or they sleep in the offices of Mexican immigration agents," she says.

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