Without a Country
Deportation stories are often headlined with the numbers of “illegal” immigrants removed from the United States. I set out to replace the status and the stats with names and intimate moments. Children, spouses and employers were effectively orphaned, divorced and abandoned by the unexpected removal of a wage earner. I focused on deportees marching over the Rio Grande into a Mexico that some hadn’t known for decades or couldn’t remember because they were smuggled across the border as children. Once across the bridge, dads, moms and students were suddenly homeless. As borderland shelters filled up I found people sleeping on riverbanks and in cemeteries. The consequences of deportation was also in the United States. I visited families left behind after one or both parents were deported. A high school girl in Georgia sobbed when she lifted her mattress to show me letters from her El Salvadoran father and the cash she earned after school from house cleaning and waiting tables. A 7 year old who was born in Riverside, CA lost her father during a raid of his workplace. She shined her “magic flashlight” on the kitchen counter to show me the otherwise invisible graffiti that read, “I love dad”.
Click on image/s to enlarge and read captions
