A mother’s choice: Jail in L.A. or deportation to Mexico with her children
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- Federal raids at cannabis farms in California swept up more than 300 undocumented immigrants, including a Mexican woman and two of her daughters, who also worked at a Glass House farm in Camarillo.
- Back in her hometown in Mexico’s Oaxaca state, the woman and her daughters face an uncertain future.
- Her situation is made even more complicated by the family’s mixed immigration status. Some of her daughters are U.S. citizens, others born in Mexico.
YOJUELA, Mexico — Modesta Matías Aquino was working her regular morning shift — 3 a.m. till noon — at the Glass House Farms in Camarillo, caring for rows of marijuana plants.
Among her co-workers on the morning of July 10 were two of her daughters, aged 16 and 19.
“With everything going on, with the raids, there had been rumors that something bad might happen,” Matías recalled.
About 9 a.m., she said, phalanxes of masked agents in tactical vests sealed off the sprawling compound. Matías and her daughters were among more than 300 undocumented immigrants — including at least 10 minors — who, according to U.S. authorities, were detained at a pair of Glass House sites.
The raids, like other such operations across the United States, split many so-called mixed-status families, those with both U.S.-born citizens — often children — and undocumented relatives, typically one or both parents.
Matías’ family life is, by any definition, complicated, including seven daughters in all. Her two youngest daughters, aged 2 and 5, are U.S. citizens, born in California. Her 2-year-old grandson —the child of Matías’ 16-year-old daughter — is also a native Californian. So when Matías was held in a federal lockup in downtown Los Angeles, she faced a momentous choice — one that would mark her family for life.
As fear over ICE raids mounts across Los Angeles, undocumented families are grappling with how to handle crucial conversations with their children.
Matías, 43, could accept removal to Mexico. But that might effectively banish her from returning to the United States, where she had toiled as a fieldworker for most of the past quarter-century — and where she had deep family ties.
Alternatively, she could fight expulsion in court. But that would leave her in custody, possibly indefinitely.
“They told me I could be locked up for months, maybe a year, and never see my children,” Matías said, recalling what U.S. agents informed her in Los Angeles. “I just couldn’t endure that.”
Instead, Matías said, she agreed to return voluntarily to Mexico, but with a caveat: She had to be accompanied by her two youngest daughters and her grandson. After some haggling — federal authorities initially balked at sending U.S. citizen minors to Mexico, Matías said — an agreement was reached. (The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to inquiries from The Times.)
She and four daughters — the two undocumented teenagers who worked at Glass House and the two U.S. citizen youngsters — were soon in a van en route to Tijuana. The U.S.-born grandson was also with them.
“Go ahead,” an agent told Matías upon letting the family out at the border. “You’re back in your country now.”
Back to Yojuela
The hamlet of Yojuela is home to some 500 people — all of Indigenous Zapotec origins — who reside deep in the Sierra Madre Oriental, in Mexico’s southern Oaxaca state. The area is known for its clay pottery, fired from distinctive reddish earth, and for something else — dispatching its offspring to work in the fields of California, supporting loved ones left behind in a time-tested rite of passage.
The scripted sequel is the triumphant homecoming of those who moved on but never forsook their roots. These days, however, many return to places like Yojuela broke and embittered, casualties of President Trump’s deportation onslaught.
Matías and her family showed up last month, just 20 days after she was detained. She had last set foot here seven years earlier.
“This is where I was born and reared,” Matías said with both resignation and pride, ushering visitors onto a verdant patch shimmering in the aftermath of recent rains.
Reaching the ancestral hearth involves a two-hour, uphill drive on a washboard road from the nearest city, and then a short hike — across a stream and up a steep hill, past fields of corn and beans and stands of pine, all to a soundtrack of clucking turkeys and braying donkeys.
Accompanying Matías were two U.S.-born daughters, Arisbeth, 2, and Keilani, a onetime Oxnard preschooler who turned 5 in Tijuana. Also present were Matías’ 16-year-old daughter, Ailed, and Ailed’s U.S.-born son, Liam Yair, 2.
I’d like like to go back to California
— Ailed Lorenzo Matías
It marked the first time that the native Californians met their extended family, including a platoon of curious cousins.
Seasoned to the periodic reunion ritual was Cecilia Aquino, mother of Matías and her five siblings— all of whom had made the trek to California. For decades, her adobe dwelling hosted waves of grandchildren and great-grandchildren as sons and daughters went back and forth, entrusting expanding broods to the matriarch.
Matías and her mother, now 72, embraced, no words needed. Each examined the other closely. Time had taken its melancholic toll.
“All of my children had to go away and leave their kids with me — there’s no work here,” said Aquino, worn down by years of toil, as she prepared coffee on a kindling-fired stove. “Then they come back. Then they leave again. It’s sad. The children never really get to know their parents. I wish the officials on the other side [of the border] would let them be together.”
Leaving home
Matías joined the migrant trail as a teenager, following the harvests — strawberries, celery, broccoli and more — from California to the Pacific Northwest. Through the years, she gave birth to her seven daughters — four in the United States, three in Mexico — as she crisscrossed the border a dozen times.
“I was always a single mother, always battling on my own for my children,” Matías said. “I earned everything through my own sweat and toil. The fathers of my kids never gave me anything.”
Her last journey north, in 2018, was the most difficult, as the once-porous international boundary had become a militarized bulwark. She vowed it would be her last crossing. Four years ago, she said, she secured work at Glass House Farms, a major player in the legalized cannabis boom.
“It was the best job I ever had,” she said.
There was no backbreaking stooping: Trimmers sat on benches. The pounding sun wasn’t an issue in the temperature-controlled facilities.
Matías said she rose to become a crew chief, overseeing 240 workers. She said she earned more than $20 an hour, and, with overtime, regularly grossed in excess of $1,000 a week — a unfathomable haul in Oaxaca, where field hands pocket the equivalent of about $10 a day.
Her plan, she said, was to remain in California until she turned 65, then retire to Yojuela, using savings to open a shop.
“I never wanted to stay forever in Oxnard,” she said.
Then came July 10.
‘Total chaos’
“People were running all over the place,” Matías recalled of the raid. “Some tried to hide inside the greenhouses. Others crawled inside the ventilation shafts. It was total chaos.”
One worker, Jaime Alanis García, 56, died from injuries suffered when he fell from a greenhouse roof, apparently while trying to evade arrest.
Blocking any escape for herself and her two daughters, Matías said, were los militares — heavily armed U.S. agents in martial getup.
The farmworker who suffered fatal injuries while fleeing an immigration raid in Ventura County was buried in his Mexican hometown.
That evening, Matías said, she spent a sleepless night in detention in downtown Los Angeles. The next day, she accepted a “voluntary return” to Mexico.
For almost a week, the family stayed in a shelter in Tijuana, awaiting the arrival of her male partner and the boyfriend of her 19-year-old-daughter. Both were also among the of Glass House detainees. The three-day bus ride south included a frenzied, crosstown change of terminals in Mexico City at midnight to catch the last coach for Oaxaca.
With her remaining savings, Matías purchased an unfinished, cinder-block house on the outskirts of Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz, a historic but drab city that hosts a federal prison. It’s about a two-hour drive on a rough track from Yojuela, but offers baseline schooling and job prospects.
The expulsion to Mexico shattered a family that had attained a modicum — perhaps an illusion — of stability in California.
Like her mother, Ailed Lorenzo Matías, 16, succumbed to the siren call of the border. She was 14 when she and her boyfriend crossed into California. She struggled to climb the fence and descend on the U.S. side, worrying about her baby. She was five months pregnant.
The other day, Ailed sat in a stairwell of the new home in Miahuatlán, cuddling her son. They were sharing a video call to Oxnard with the boy’s father, who also worked at Glass House. But, in a twist of fate, he was off duty on July 10.
“I’d like like to go back to California,” the soft-spoken Ailed said. “My son was born there. And that’s where his papá is.”
Unlike Ailed, her sister, Natalia Lorenzo Matías, 19, has no intention of returning.
“No, I don’t want to go back,” Natalia said. “You don’t have a real life there. You spend your time working and locked in your house, always afraid that you will be arrested.”
Her mother is deeply tormented but endeavors to conceal her despair. “I have to be strong for the kids,” Matías said. “When I’m alone, I begin to cry.”
Among those at Thursday’s immigration action was a Trump voter who doesn’t like the president’s approach and the family of a National Guardsman who say it’s time for him to come home.
She says she understands Trump’s point: He wants to deport criminals. But, she asks, why target hardworking immigrants?
“In all my years in the north,” she said, “I never saw an American working in the fields.”
Her plan, she says, is to stabilize the family, enroll her 5-year-old in school, find some work — and, then, perhaps in a year or two, set off once more.
For now, though, Matías says she is concentrated on helping her family adjust to a new way of life — albeit, she hopes, a transitory one, until they get back on the road to California.
Special correspondents Cecilia Sánchez Vidal and Liliana Nieto del Río contributed.
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