A growing number of undocumented migrants are making the decision this year to self-deport in the face of President Donald Trump’s sweeping and controversial immigration arrests campaign.
But when you speak with them, many sound like Tino — seemingly less concerned with their deportation to another country than with their disappointment in this one.
“I've always loved this country, but right now I’m … I'm basically losing everything I’ve built through the years," Tino, an Argentine immigrant, told WLRN as he stood outside the business he and his wife own in Broward County — and which he'll soon have to abandon.
"But we came to the conclusion that we’re no longer welcome here and, to be honest, no longer being treated fairly here," he said.
Tino is not his real name, which he asked WLRN not to use because, as he concedes, he's technically in the U.S. illegally. He came to South Florida legally as a teenager almost 25 years ago, escaping the economic chaos and political violence that was tearing his native Argentina apart in those days.
He applied for U.S. asylum when his visa expired. But 9/11 had just happened, and U.S. immigration processing had all but ground to a halt.
Tino was left in migratory limbo. Still, like so many undocumented migrants, he found that if he stayed underground, under the official radar, he could build a life here as he waited for the immigration status adjustment door to open again.
“The idea was to do everything legal," Tino said. "But yeah, I wasn’t expecting it to be this way. I mean, I’d seen stories of people that had been here for 20 years without papers and I’d go, ‘No, whoa, that’s crazy.’
"And yet, here I am.”
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Today, Tino is a successful, taxpaying business owner (he also asked WLRN not to identify his business) and a well regarded family man in his Broward community with no criminal record. He said he often helps the homeless.
But even though a relative with legal residency here has had a longstanding family petition to grant Tino his own legal status, it still looks years off for him.
"What I find astonishing," Tino said, "is that in the quarter century I've been here, U.S. politicians had ample opportunities to pursue immigration reform to address cases like mine in the broken system here, and they never did.
"I guess they figure they just score more political points by playing the same game year after year."
As a result, Tino has decided to beat the Trump administration to the deportation punch.
In a few months, he, his wife and their two U.S.-born children will leave the country before, he says, he's subjected to the ordeal of being rounded up and detained — "humiliated in front of my family and friends and thrown, I don't know, into Alligator Alcatraz or something," he said.
“I’m like one stop sign, one traffic stop from being, y’know, pointed to like a criminal," Tino said, referring to the frequent criticism that Trump's deportation crusade is targeting non-criminal migrants as zealously as it's going after those with criminal histories, and often without due process.
"Even if my [immigration] problems were solved tomorrow, I would still consider the [self-deportation] move, because I don’t like the racist way Hispanic people are being treated now.
"If the U.S. wants to get rid of immigrants that have no papers, it certainly has the right to do so. But treat law-abiding people humanely. I’ve seen a lot of racism here lately, and a lot of people looking away from that racism that wouldn't have looked away before.
"They're treating people like garbage.”
As Tino drank a coffee at his business in Broward, he was asked: Is his self-deportation in that sense a victory for the Trump administration — which is betting precisely on that aura of severe treatment of migrants as a deterrent to illegal immigration?
“They’re winning in that part of it," he acknowledged.
"But in the end they’re going to lose, the country's going to lose, because they’re going to get rid of people that actually help the community. I mean, what’s going to happen when you have to pay $25 for a pound of tomatoes because there’s no one to pick them?”
Tino’s one consolation is that his kids are U.S. citizens by birth — and his teenage son will stay here with the relative who has legal residence and finish high school.
"Even if my immigration problems were solved tomorrow, I'd still consider self-deportation, because I don’t like the racist way Hispanics are being treated."Tino, an undocumented Argentine migrant in Broward County
Another self-deporter interviewed by WLRN, a Venezuelan migrant named Meliana, said she, too, has her own U.S.-born child, a two-year-old. But Meliana took him with her to Spain — where she left for refuge this summer after she decided her own pending asylum application would not keep the Trump administration from deporting her.
Meliana came to Miami legally two years ago to escape Venezuela’s brutal dictatorship and economic collapse. But her humanitarian parole has expired. And, like Tino, she says what she calls the Trump administration’s "spiteful" immigration actions made her question the U.S. in ways she never had before.
'Danger for my kids'
“I would never take my children back to Venezuela,” said Meliana, who asked us not to use her last name.
“But neither was it worth the xenophobia and hatred to try to keep them here, even if one of them is a U.S. citizen. Staying in the U.S. suddenly felt like danger for them.”
Meliana, who spoke to WLRN from Madrid, said she feels no such hatred in Spain — a country that’s being extra-welcoming to immigrants.
But Meliana points out Spain is being more immigrant-tolerant these days in order to solve a problem the U.S. itself is facing: a declining worker-age population and a shortage of professionals like teachers.
Meliana, who was a lawyer in Venezuela, was teaching Spanish to U.S. kids at a bilingual private school here before she lost her work permit and self-deported.
“It’s a lamentable and devastating situation,” Meliana said, “not only for us personally but for the U.S. — which seems to have decided that immigration is criminal.”
It’s not certain how many undocumented migrants in the U.S. have self-deported this year. An estimated 11 million people are in the U.S. illegally, including about 590,000 in Florida, according to federal government data. And the vast majority have chosen to stay and take their chances despite the rising number of migrant arrests being carried out by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asserted that "hundreds of thousands of people have left on their own."
But immigration experts call that a lavish exaggeration meant to obscure the fact that the Trump administration can't possibly meet the unrealistic goal it's set of deporting a million migrants a year. (It has, however, set a modern migrant detention record this year with 60,000 now being held.)
The administration — which insists that any migrant in the country illegally is technically a criminal — has offered $1,000 each and airfare to those who do self-deport. But migrants like Tino and Meliana said they had no intention of taking Trump up on it.
“The day I decided to self-deport I had a panic attack,” Meliana said. “I threw up and I fainted.
"I had no desire to accept money from anyone who brought that on me.”
Meliana says her fellow teachers here instead set up a GoFundMe account to pay her airfare to Spain.
A tech-skilled South African migrant, Richard (not his real name), told WLRN from Johannesburg that he recently self-deported back to his country after running a thriving business in Miami's Coconut Grove for almost a decade.
Richard, who was undocumented in recent years after his business executive visa expired, said he too decided "not to be a sitting duck for the cruelty I was watching Trump 2.0 put in place this year."
"My nose was very clean, I was a taxpaying entrepreneur, but it became evident pretty quickly that none of that was going to matter," he added.
"But I'll move forward. The experience has reminded me, as I think a lot of people are being reminded these days, that the world is actually a bigger place than the United States."
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