Monumento a la Revolución, in Mexico City’s Tabacalera neighborhood.

The New Gringos

Deported by Trump after decades in the U.S., Mexican-born immigrants are being treated as foreigners back home. But in Mexico City’s Little L.A., they’re finding work—and one another

By John Beck

When American immigration officers unshackled Danny Iniestra and ordered him across the border into Mexico last October, it was the first time he had set foot in the country of his birth since being smuggled into the U.S. in 2005, three weeks before his sixth birthday.

Iniestra grew up in suburban Virginia, a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era program that provided temporary work permits and protection for people brought to the U.S. as children. But the ICE agents who detained him following a D.U.I. arrest showed little interest in his DACA history, and repeatedly pressed deportation papers on him. When the agents began asking about his family, Iniestra gave up and signed. He was transferred by bus to a detention center in Georgia and later deported from Texas to the Mexican border town of Matamoros.