The group gathers in the front room of the mobile home, trying to find the best spot to hide the Bluetooth trackers that would let friends and family know where they are. Yarlidis and her four children, ages 6 months to 9, are preparing to turn themselves in to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to begin their self-deportation journey. Nine-year-old Emily is not only scared about what the next days will bring — she’s scared of being disappeared to a place no one can find them.
It is Dec. 1, and the family is organizing, packing and readying themselves to show up at an ICE office on the south side of Tucson early the next morning.
Yarlidis suggests slipping one of the tracking devices onto her daughter Emily’s keychain. Or maybe they can sew it into 5-year-old Ian Samuel’s pants pocket, somewhere less visible, somewhere safer.
“Or here!” Emily says in Spanish, lifting her necklace. Her 1-year-old little brother isn’t old enough to understand. He whizzes about the room eating and dropping his apple.
The devices are a protective measure, in case the family goes missing in ICE custody or after being flown back to their home country of Colombia.
“It’s so that Ms. Lucia and Rosa can see where we are,” says Emily, explaining the need for hiding the tracking devices. “Because if they don’t know where we are, something bad might happen.”
Lucia and Rosa are two members of La Ristra, a small Tucson-based nonprofit offering therapy and a measure of stability to migrants navigating moments of crisis. They don’t advertise online, keeping it word of mouth, to maintain a safe space for migrants. For the past few months they have been helping the family find emotional stability — and a bit of calm — as they deal with the fear and stress of heightened levels of immigration enforcement. They both asked not to use their last names for fear of negative repercussions.
Yarlidis and her four children are among the millions of immigrants affected by the Trump administration’s expanded and more aggressive immigration enforcement policies. The Department of Homeland Security claimed more than 400,000 removals, and an estimated 1.6 million self-deportations.
“2 million illegal aliens have been removed or self-deported in just 250 days,” said Homeland Security Department Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin in a September press release.
PolitiFact has questioned that claim, saying “it relied on a government survey with a small sample size and large margin of error.”
Trump administration officials have stated agents are “targeting the worst of the worst.” Immigration experts have also countered those claims.
“Despite the regular rhetoric from White House and DHS officials that detainees are “criminal illegal aliens,” nearly three-quarters of ICE detainees as of September had no criminal conviction, and many of those who did were for minor crimes such as traffic violations,” according to an October analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank.
Although Yarlidis’ departure is technically voluntary, she said the decision to self-deport was shaped by sustained fear — sparked by the arrest and deportation of her partner earlier this year, as well as what she described as intensifying hostility toward immigrant families who have not committed serious crimes.
“I don’t want to see my children in handcuffs or for them to handcuff me, because I’ve never gone through that, and it would be a very hard blow. It would be really tough,” she said.
Yarlidis came to the U.S. after making an appointment on the CBP One app, seeking asylum. She said at least three times in the last two months armed officers knocked on her family’s trailer door. She doesn’t know what agency the officers were with, but says they were wearing beige uniforms. She says officials claiming to be with ICE also called her on the phone.
“This is the shadow”
In the past year, ICE, along with Border Patrol, has increased enforcement operations, carrying out more home and workplace raids and expanding removal efforts in major cities. At the same time, the Trump administration has ended or moved to end several humanitarian protections, including temporary protected status and parole programs, leaving many mixed-status families with no viable pathway to remain in the country.
For families like Yarlidis’, the result is a reality where choosing to leave — leaving behind her mother-in-law, her community, her children’s school and what she hoped for their future — becomes the only option that feels safe. For her two youngest children it means leaving their native country.
People like Lucia, a long-time immigration activist, and Rosa, an immigrant and psychologist, recognize the psychological toll the current political climate places on families like Yarlidis’. Together, they founded La Ristra in Tucson to offer support for something too often overlooked for migrants: mental health.
“I’m involved in this out of conviction and because of my profession,” Rosa said in Spanish, weeks before Yarlidis and her children felt coerced to leave their community. “The idea came up between Lucia and me to combine our experiences and create this nonprofit project.”
Through La Ristra, Rosa provides art therapy sessions for families coping with the harsh realities of an increasingly punitive immigration environment, helping children and parents process fear, uncertainty and loss.
Rosa uses art therapy to go “deeper into the soul,” she said, sitting at her office desk covered in papers, files and books.
Guided by Jungian therapy, she explained that “When you manage to let the unconscious be the guide, very powerful things can emerge.” Jungian therapy is a form of analytical talk therapy, emanating from the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, that seeks to let the conscious and subconscious parts of a person speak to one another.
Rosa points to a drawing of a faceless girl in front of a fence and a crimson sunset. The image rests atop of a book about Jungian theory that Rosa helped translate to Spanish.
“Faceless. And what’s behind her is the Nogales border wall. They crossed the desert. It’s very symbolic, and it’s not even finished; it’s a suggestion, not a literal depiction,” Rosa said of the 12-year-old girl’s art. “She’s not telling you outright that it’s the Nogales wall. You know her, you know they’re hiding, you know they are coming from a long process of violence in México. And she makes this.”
Next to the child’s drawing is her 18-year-old sister’s scribblings of black shapes or clouds.
“She is worse off emotionally, more stricken,” Rosa said. “This is the shadow, in Jung, it’s the archetype of the shadow.”
She reads the 18-year-old’s drawing as expressing a lack of future. “They’re losing hope. Young people, adolescents, are losing hope. And that’s what this government is causing,” she said.
“Like little bandages, covering that loneliness”
A July report by researchers with the University of California Riverside School of Medicine and NYU Grossman School of Medicine and published in Psychiatric News details how profoundly immigration policy can affect the mental health of children and families.
The report states that post-migration stressors, including legal uncertainty, limited access to services and persistent fear of immigration enforcement, can affect daily life.
“Parents and caregivers living under the constant threat of detention or deportation frequently experience symptoms of depression, anxiety, and trauma,” the authors wrote, and those symptoms often transfer to their children.
Regular daily life is something Lucia and Rosa said was lacking in a lot of the migrant families they work with. On top of the therapy sessions, La Ristra tries to provide people space and time to destress. They convinced some of the families to get together for a day at a local pool, as well as organizing potlucks, asking families to bring and share a favorite dish.
“We wanted them to have a few moments to let their guard down. To just relax and talk to other moms, feel normal,” Lucia said in Spanish.
Despite the moments of reprieve, some of the families working with La Ristra struggled to see beyond the fear.
Yarlidis’s mother-in-law, Ibeth Redondo, says, “There were moments of panic.”
“We couldn’t send the kids to school.”
Ibeth works as a housecleaner. She hopes to continue working to support her family now back in Colombia. At least, she said, until “Trump calms down.”
“I’m just thankful to all the people I’ve met, all the people who have helped me,” Yarlidis said. She said she’s especially thankful for Lucia and Rosa. “They’ve been there for me like family.”
Rosa said that in her sessions the presence or absence of hope and resilience is critical. Without hope and resilience, she explained, families can slip into what clinicians describe as resignation syndrome or learned helplessness.
“‘Well, there’s no solution anyway.’ ‘Well, you don’t expect anything anymore.’ It’s the death of hope, the death of the soul, the cancer of the soul,” she said. “Love and hope are essential for moving forward. Life is always going to be a struggle — life is a constant struggle.”
Yarlidis said Lucia and Rosa’s support came at a time when she felt especially isolated after her partner’s arrest and deportation. Lucia said they invited everyone involved with La Ristra to a Thanksgiving gathering, creating a space where families could come together.
“That loneliness I had, they came and covered it,” Yarlidis said. “They were like little bandages, covering that loneliness for me.”
Self-deportation
Early on the morning of Dec. 2, Lucia, Yarlidis and her children arrive in a black van at a gated entrance behind a shopping center, where federal officials were waiting. A small crowd of supporters and journalists gather as the family unloads their belongings — three suitcases, two duffel bags and several backpacks.
“The last thing I wanted was for my family to be torn apart like this,” Yarlidis’ mother-in-law says to reporters.
“We never came here to hurt anyone. We came to find a better future and to give my grandchildren a better quality of life.”
Lucia leads a prayer as people weep nearby. Yarlidis, carrying her 6-month-old baby David Alejandro in a carrier on her chest and pushing a stroller in front of her, walks through the gates of the ICE office with her three other children in tow.
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