Quebec Vasquez has a legal right to be in the U.S. Her mother brought her from Mexico when she was seven years old and she cannot remember anything about her life before that. She has lived and worked and given birth to three children here in the time since, and held temporary legal status for the last decade.
But at 33 years old, Donald Trump’s mass deportations have filled her with such terror that she and her family are choosing to “self-deport” back to Mexico, a country she barely remembers.
“I live in constant fear,” she says. “Right now, I'm uncomfortable driving my kids to school.”
Vasquez’s remarkable decision to abandon her life in the U.S. is yet another sign of the chilling effect that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is having on immigrant communities.
Acting on Trump’s orders to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history,” agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal authorities have launched raids targeting the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants across the country. ICE agents have nearly doubled their daily arrest rate as part of the crackdown since Trump took office, and more than 10,000 people have been deported already on military flights widely publicized by the White House.
Vasquez has watched all of it unfold with horror. She is one of more than 700,000 people in the U.S. with temporary legal status under the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) or the DREAM Act — a law that was passed during Barack Obama’s administration in 2010 to protect people brought to the U.S. as children from deportation. The generation of immigrants who gained legal status under the act became known as ‘Dreamers.’
Their status was always precarious, and now her pathway to full citizenship has been all but closed off. The same law that grants her protection from deportation has been in the crosshairs of Republicans for years, and rather than wait for it to be killed, she is moving back to Mexico.
“I feel like DACA at this point doesn't really hold any value if even U.S. citizens are getting questioned because they're out in public speaking Spanish, or because they look a certain way,” she says.
“I've exhausted all options for citizenship, and quite honestly I just want to get to be somewhere where I feel safe, where I feel equal, where I don't feel like I have to hide, where I can speak Spanish outside in public comfortably,” she adds.
Her decision marks the end of a long and meandering immigrant journey that began in 1999, when her mother, who was separated from her father, decided to cross the border into the U.S. in search of a better life for them both.
“The only memory that sticks with me is being asked by my mom, ‘Hey, do you want to go live in the U.S. with your aunt?’ who lived in New York at the time. And I was like, no. I have friends here. I go to school here. No. I remember just crying because I didn't want to leave,” she says. “That will stick with me forever.”
Vasquez and her mother moved first to Suffern, a small New York town just 30 miles from Manhattan. She saw snow for the first time and was dazzled by the scale of the skyscrapers. It took her about a year to learn English — helped by a brilliant second grade teacher. Then, somewhere along the way, she lost her Spanish.
“I was speaking English more, and then a lot of people speak Spanglish, so you kind of mix both languages and then lose your first,” she says.
After high school, Vasquez wanted to go to college to become a veterinarian, but as an undocumented immigrant, she could not apply for the needed funding.
Struggling to make ends meet, she and her mother moved to Gastonia, North Carolina, in 2011, where she waitressed at a local restaurant.
That’s where she met her husband George. Their love seemed fated: He had also been brought from Mexico at age seven. They married the following year and fell pregnant with their first daughter. They also both applied for and received legal status under DACA.
“I felt safe,” she says of their lives back then, under Obama’s presidency, finally able to get a driver’s license and a social security number.
“I felt like I had so many opportunities, like I was part of the land where I had lived for so long,” she says. “We never saw ourselves leaving the U.S.”
That changed in 2016 with Trump. He campaigned on ending DACA and made a serious effort to end the program before being blocked by a lower court, and eventually the Supreme Court. Trump rolled it back, forcing recipients to renew their status every year, instead of every two.
Still, the family continued to build their lives. They moved to Florida and found steady work at a car dealership. Their kids — three daughters now aged 10, 8 and 3 — were doing well in school. President Joe Biden reversed the DACA renewal time to two years, giving the Dreamers some more breathing room again.
But Trump’s return to the White House changed everything. “This time around he came in with a very strategic plan,” says Vasquez. “He learned from the first time what he needed to do to accomplish what he wanted with his mass deportations.”
Even though she has legal status, Vasquez doesn’t know how long it will last. She doesn’t want to risk being separated from her daughters, even for a moment. She reads the stories of even American citizens getting arrested with genuine fear.
“Let's say I get pulled over because they run my tag and my last name is Hispanic,” she says. “I don't know if I'll be given the opportunity to prove my status right then and there. Then I'll get arrested. And then what? Who's gonna pick up my girls from school?”
So Vasquez and her husband began to seriously consider leaving for the country of their births.
“In the end, we felt like it was in the best interest of the girls,” she says. “The only way that we could guarantee that we would not be separated from them is to move all together.”
After lots of research, they decided on a move to Merida, a beautiful city filled with colonial churches and Mayan relics around 180 miles west of Cancun.
The kids embraced the plan. DACA recipients aren’t allowed to leave the country, so when they learned that would be able to travel to places they had dreamed about, like Paris and Tokyo, they agreed.
Vasquez was most nervous about telling her mother, fearing she was abandoning her own dream.
“I felt like I was letting her down,” she says. “She was actually very supportive. She told me, ‘You know what, you're right. This is a good idea, because that way you can ensure you're with the girls.’”
“That kind of gave me a peace of mind to know that I had her approval, that she understood that I was trying to do what's best for my daughters.”
In an ironic twist, her mother was granted permanent U.S. residency last year, some nine years after first applying.
Vasquez doesn’t have any close family to help her land softly in Mexico, so they will be going it alone. They have spent weeks collecting the necessary documents, applying for passports and researching their new home. They have a few ideas for how to make money, too. George will try to find work selling cars like he did in Florida. Vasquez, meanwhile, wants to start a YouTube channel to document her homecoming and her family’s new life. She has already started sharing her story on TikTok, gaining millions of views for her story of self-deportation.
“Like any other job I’ll have to work it, and I don't expect it to be booming right away, but I know that it's a very interesting perspective that I'm sure people will want to see,” she adds.
There will be challenges — for starters, the girls can barely speak Spanish. But they are keen to learn the language of their new home, just like their mother did at their age.
They hope to move to Mexico by the summer, to build a life they never quite found here.
“I feel like the American dream that I envisioned when younger has ended,” she says. “Coming here and having opportunities and open doors, over time, those doors have shut.”
“I'm having to fight racism, the high cost of living. No. The dream that was once was doesn't exist anymore.”
