Love in the Time of Self-Deportation

An immigrant was forced to leave the country. His U.S. citizen wife followed him. A family was uprooted.

A photo of “Diego” and “Emily” adapted and edited to protect their identities. (Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos: Courtesy of the author / Shutterstock)

WHEN DIEGO WENT TO COURT IN TENNESSEE for his annual ICE check-in on February 12, he didn’t expect anything different from past years. Neither did his wife, Emily, a U.S. citizen, who went with him. They weren’t planning on going anywhere. But this time, Diego, 30, was detained. He was shipped off to an ICE detention center hundreds of miles away where he stayed for weeks before being deported to Colombia in early March.¹

Emily, 41, suddenly had a huge decision to make: Uproot her entire life or be separated from her husband? If she chose to self-deport along with her 2-and-a-half-year-old son, who is also an American citizen, then just like that, their lives in the United States would be over.

She plans on leaving the country in June.

“My husband and I are two very different people, we bring two very different skill sets,” she said, of their approach to building a family. “Neither of us would be great at raising our son alone, but together we’re wonderful.”

When Trump promised mass deportations, he and his team stressed that they would be getting gangs and criminals out of America. Legal experts and immigrants themselves warned it was a ruse, that the policy would inevitably disrupt and even destroy the lives of legal immigrants and native-born Americans, that people like Emily would be caught in the dragnet.

Now those predictions are coming true.

As we’re seeing families torn apart and innocent people being thrown into foreign prisons, we at The Bulwark feel it’s important to do our best to convey those realities without softening them.

Some of the stories Adrian pursues for Huddled Masses are hard to read. But we can’t look away, and if you don’t want to look away either, consider joining us. The only way out is through—together.

“Our family is meant to be together”

The story of Diego and Emily is the story of the excesses and reach of Trump’s immigration regime. But it’s also a story of love itself—the ways in which one finds it and it finds you and how it can bind people together in trying circumstances.

Emily was in a bad place during the COVID pandemic. Having recently gotten out of a long marriage, she was struggling financially, had difficulty finding a job, and, along with her then-20-year-old daughter, was going hungry. She started delivering for DoorDash and Grubhub, which is how she met Diego. He was working at one of the restaurants where she picked up food. He liked her. One day, he got her a burger, which she accepted because, hey, free food. But a free patty melt wasn’t enough to clinch the deal. She avoided the restaurant, and so his flirtations, for months.

But eventually Emily decided to give him a shot and came back. She gave him her number, which led to an all-night phone conversation. Soon they were dating.

They moved from California to Tennessee later that year to be closer to Emily’s sick father. In 2022, they welcomed their son.

Emily’s father, a Vietnam veteran and a diehard Trump fan, got along well with Diego—so well that he officiated at their wedding in January 2023. There are no wedding photos from that day, though. Emily had already experienced the big flashy wedding; she didn’t want that this time around, and Diego was happy to follow her lead. So they were married in their living room—in their pajamas.

That month also brought with it a reminder that, with their move to Knoxville, they had left the more liberal politics of California behind. One night Diego was pulled over two blocks from home and charged with possession of marijuana, spending one night detained. He had been pulled over before (which Emily attributed to racism). But this time, his lawyer encouraged him to just plead guilty, which Emily did not agree with. She said the officer told her Diego had been driving fine, which made her wonder why he had been stopped.

Diego pleaded guilty and spent the night in jail.

Diego’s first interaction with U.S. authorities came in 2013, when he arrived in the United States from his native Colombia seeking asylum. It was denied, and he was put in detention. Emily explained that he was subsequently released but had to regularly check in. But because of all the moving around he did—both with Emily and before he met her—along the way he missed one of those check-in appointments with ICE.

That led to a 2019 deportation order—which Emily insists neither she nor Diego knew about, and which she said never came up during the yearly check-ins he attended. Trump’s return to office changed that.

The president has demanded a crackdown on those in the United States illegally. And he has shown no sympathy for individuals who have otherwise built lives inside the country with legal citizens here.

Emily’s first glimpse of this new world came during the February 2025 check-in with ICE that turned her world upside down. There she watched as a young woman became upset when her fiancé was detained at the office after having first been brought to a back room. Then Diego went in and he too was directed to the same back room.

He never came back.

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FOR A WEEK, EMILY DIDN’T KNOW where Diego was. His lawyer knew from an ICE contact that he was likely headed to a detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, which was notorious for human-rights abuses and inaccessibility. But Diego’s ICE locator—his listing in ICE’s online database of the whereabouts of detainees—went dark after he was taken from Knoxville.

When it finally became clear that Diego was in Jena, Emily left her son with family and made the nine-hour drive with a friend to go see him. They spoke through a glass partition on the phone in a visiting area of the ICE detention center.

Diego’s description of his treatment left her unsettled. He told her his trip out of town was a twelve-hour bus ride where the windows were shut the entire time and the driver smoked nonstop. At the jails where they stopped on the way to Jena, men had to sleep on cold floors and snuggle up next to each other. And when he finally got to meet with Emily, he was running a high fever.

Diego’s thoughts had turned dark. He feared that he had lost his family. “We’re going to be wherever you are,” Emily assured him.

Diego had been unwilling to sign a deportation order when given one, and the family hoped he would be permitted to stay in the United States until the end of the year when their I-130 form petitioning for him to remain in the country because he is married to a U.S. citizen would be approved.

Less than two weeks later, though, on a Sunday in early March, Diego called Emily to let her know he was being moved but he didn’t know where. On Thursday, he was put on a plane and dropped off in a country he did not immediately recognize at night. As he got his bearings, he realized he was back in Colombia, in Bogota, near where his father lived in Fontibón. He had his bank card, but could not buy a bus pass, so he walked through the night to his father’s home. He would relay to Emily that when he eventually made it to the right building, his father looked at him strangely, as if making out who the man in front of him was. When he finally processed what was happening, the two hugged.

Diego is now living in Bogotá, starting from scratch. He’s had to take six weeks of driver’s ed, and he’s looking for a job. He needed an ID to open a bank account, so he had to wait for his passport to arrive, which it did recently. He has struggled to get a job because employers require proof of residency, like having bills in your name, and he doesn’t have any yet. But Emily believes he’s on track to land a job soon. She visited him in Bogotá for several weeks earlier this year, while their son stayed behind until his passport was ready. But Emily doesn’t speak Spanish, which is a complicating factor in their move.

But still, she is moving. It was impossible to fathom not. Diego is her husband. He is the father of her toddler. And he was there for her in the toughest of times. When her father was diagnosed with a brain tumor last year, Diego “carried all the weight for the family so that she could be with him.” When her father died last September, Diego was her rock.

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I ASKED EMILY ABOUT THIS daunting life change and whether, as a U.S. citizen, she was furious with her government for forcing her to choose between country and family.

“There’s no decision at all when you have your family to think about,” she said. “There was not a thought in mind of ‘Am I really going to do this?’”

What it did do was open the eyes of the Trump supporters in her life. One of them is a colleague of hers who checks in and is upset by what’s happening. Emily also has Trump-supporting neighbors, ages 81 and 82—pillars of the community whom she calls the “sweetest, kindest Baptist people.”

“They were never able to have children and have treated our son like their own grandson and treat me and my husband like their children,” Emily said. She noted that the wife has cried over their forced departure. “The husband was teaching my husband how to garden, he helped us bury our dog when he was hit by a car, we attended their church on occasion, and my son visits daily. I wouldn’t even move fifteen minutes away from them because I knew how important they were to my family. The only thing that could get me to move is this.”

Emily herself voted for Trump only in 2016. But she had already turned away from him by 2024. She cited being a woman and her marriage to an immigrant as major factors in her change of heart. She wonders how her dad, who had already passed by the time Trump was re-elected, would feel now.

“I think he would have been pissed,” she told me. “I think he would have thought it was unfair.”

Ultimately, Emily said her decision to leave is because her son needs both of his parents.

Amid the uncertainty, Emily said only one thing is for sure.

“I don’t know where we will be in three years,” she said, “but I know we will be together.”

1. “Emily” and “Diego” asked that we change their names because they fear retribution. All other details remain unaltered.