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in the portals of Tlapa It is where José goes to sleep at the end of the work day. Every 15 days he travels approximately three hours to this city to sell seeds and meet the expenses of his home in the Nahuatl community of Tlacotepec. Among all this routine, Don José lives with a deep sorrow, because since August 2025 he has not been certain of what happened to his son Miguel; He, like many young people from the Mountain, migrated to the United States to give a better life to his people. However, last summer, a family friend notified that Miguel had suffered a spectacular road accident, causing his car to catch fire just a few minutes later. There was not much news about Miguel, which is why we searched in hospitals and prisons, but there was no information. Thanks to the Atlanta consulate, it was learned that a person at the Knox County coroner matched Miguel’s characteristics. Despite this, identification has not been easy, since there are protocols in that country for the recognition of bodies. Upon learning this, Don José did not hesitate, and despite not knowing any places other than his community and Tlapa, he decided to go to Puebla to carry out DNA studies at the Foreign Relations offices. Currently, Don José and his family are waiting for the forensic results to begin the repatriation of the body.
A similar feeling is experienced by Wendy, a woman of Puebla roots, but born in the United States, who is fighting for the release of her father Juan, a community leader who was detained by ICE on November 9 in the county of Staten Island in New York. Juan was waiting to be hired to do some work in the place known as the “Corner.” The videos show how Juan is held by several ICE agents while they take him out of his truck. Off camera, his daughter Wendy can be heard yelling at her father “not to say anything and she will take him out.” Since then, Wendy has waged a fight for her father’s release. He sought support from priest Fabián Arias – the Lutheran father who has led the battle over the arrests in Federal Plaza; He opened a GoFundMe collection to pay his father’s legal expenses and the subsequent payment of bail, which is often thousands of dollars. Wendy knows that this is about resistance and that she needs to do her best so that her father can be with her little brothers again. Their greatest wish is that this Christmas they all spend it together at home as a family.
The situation of the migrant community is pressing. Arrests are the order of the day, throughout the United States. People are afraid to go out. The sons and daughters of migrants worry about their parents. They don’t want anything bad to happen to them, they live with stress and, even though some are young, they think about how they can protect them from raids. In informal conversations, one generally hears the phrases that they saw “the ice” on that street and that they took so many people. The fear is felt. Meanwhile, in Mexico, the impacts of these arrests have not been long in coming; According to the Migration Policy Unit of the Ministry of the Interior, from January to October of this year, 128,881 people from the United States have been returned. October was the month with the most returns, yielding a figure of 16,621 people. This is catastrophic because they represent dreams and hopes of many people who were looking for a better life for their families. Without a doubt, all this will have a great impact on the economies of towns like Don José, since there is no source of income coming from the north, families will go into crisis. They will have to continue leaving either for the United States or some other part of Mexico, because those regions are forgotten. In these places there are no projects or emergency plans that consider them; The actions carried out by the Mexican government in response to Trump’s mass deportations are concentrated in urban centers. They leave aside indigenous populations whose only survival has been to migrate. That is why in the streets of New York or Tennessee there are thousands of indigenous populations of Guerrero who, due to hunger or violence, have left their towns behind. For them, this Christmas will be marked by the fear of being arrested, by the lack of work and the persecution of a people who are the center of the hatred of Donald Trump’s government.
