“The decision is to give peace to my wife and to my children,” Fidel Rivera says.
The Rivera family of Raleigh, North Carolina, spent a recent weekend playing board games, cheering at a soccer game and visiting a local park. But unlike most families out and about that weekend, those routine moments marked an emotional farewell.
Fidel Rivera, a husband and father who has been in the U.S. for 30 years without legal status, decided to return to Mexico, leaving his U.S. citizen wife and two daughters behind. He said his decision was the result of the Trump administration’s promise to “arrest and deport” anyone without legal status.
Rivera, who left Mexico at 18, is one of a growing number of people forced to self-deport out of fear of arrest and detention. The administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement has escalated the risk: Nearly 60,000 people are currently being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
According to the agency’s own data, almost half of those detainees have no criminal record — their violations are limited to immigration offenses.
“The decision is to give peace to my wife and to my kids,” Rivera told Raleigh ABC station WTVD. “I don’t want [them to] see me in handcuffs with chains in the jail.”
“As we started seeing people that were being picked up for dumb things — like, not criminals — and picked up and put in detention centers, I didn’t want my husband wrapped up in that,” Rivera’s wife Jennifer Rivera said. “I cannot see him being tied up in any of that.”
Over the past 30 years, Rivera became an electrician and worked in construction. He met Jennifer, a math teacher, 19 years ago while salsa dancing. Their two daughters, Isabella and Mackenzie, are high school students.
Because Rivera entered the country without authorization, he cannot adjust his legal status, even though Jennifer and his daughters are U.S. citizens.
“Even though he’s married to a U.S. citizen, even though we have two U.S. citizen children, even though he pays taxes, and even though he is not a criminal — he has to leave the country,” Jennifer said.
The Rivera family’s decision reflects a national trend. Rivera is one of the 1.6 million people the Department of Homeland Security says have self-deported amid the threat of arrest.
The administration has actively encouraged undocumented individuals to self-deport, viewing voluntary departures as proof that its policies are working.
According to the Center for Migration Studies, mass deportations threaten to break up nearly 5 million mixed status families — those with at least one undocumented resident.
