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n the arctic evening of Feb. 13, Yessenia Ruano and her husband, Miguel, stand in their Milwaukee living room turning over a question they’ve been avoiding for weeks: whether tomorrow will be the day Ruano, 37, says goodbye to their two nine-year-old twin daughters, without knowing when she’ll see them again.
The two discuss the topic as Ruano, whose round face is framed by a curtain of long, thick black hair, pulls a plastic storage bin out from the closet. She and Miguel sort through documents they haven’t touched in months, maybe years: tax returns, pay stubs, the girls’ birth certificates. Ruano pulls out two Social Security cards and hands them over. “Paola,” she says, “and Elisabeth.” Ruano then gives her husband the girls’ passports. A sea-green school folder with a seashell on the front holds their immunization records.
Miguel, in socks and a pair of fraying flip-flops, sits back in his chair, taking in the scene. He clasps his hands over his head, eyes locked on the floor. The weight of what tomorrow could bring seems to settle on him all at once.
The last time Ruano was gone — just two nights away — he reminds his wife, the girls sobbed for hours. Ruano has taken to sleeping next to the twins every night, a habit of early motherhood that grew harder to break over time. Ruano pauses, reflecting on the memory. But she doesn’t stand still for long. There’s too much to do. She moves quickly through the details of her routines with her daughters. Miguel, who has no legal immigration status, works long days at a local factory and leaves before the rest of the house wakes. Ruano tells her husband to get the girls up at 6:05 so they can be out of the door 35 minutes later. She explains what snacks they like, which groceries to buy, and how to comfort the twins when they’re upset. The instructions seem meant to soothe Ruano’s growing anxieties as much as guide Miguel.
Miguel asks what he should pack when — and if — he and the girls follow Ruano to El Salvador after the twins finish the school year in June.
Ruano looks over at Paola and Elisabeth, who sit on the couch lost in the Spanish translation of Wicked playing on the television. Ruano has tried to shield the girls from the uncertainty. When her daughters glance her way, they’re curious. Ruano smiles at them, holding the expression even as it dims from her eyes.
“Their nicest shoes,” she tells Miguel. “They’ll need to be baptized again.”
IN SOME WAYS, THE ANXIETIES THAT plague Ruano on this particular February night are familiar. In the 14 years since she fled El Salvador and asked for asylum in the United States, Ruano has endured numerous sleepless nights in the hours leading up to her annual check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In total, Ruano has had 19 in-person check-ins over her near decade and a half in the United States. But this upcoming appointment is different: A few months ago, Ruano was warned that this check-in would likely be her last.
Here in the Midwest, Ruano has built a life shaped by school drop-offs and grocery lists, spring prairie walks and summer afternoons at Lake Michigan. But the violence she fled left a permanent mark. After graduating from university with a teaching degree in 2009, Ruano says she was regularly followed and threatened by MS-13 gang members. Once, she recalls, a group of men grabbed and mugged her on the street, yanking the gold earrings from her ears. Even now, she refuses to wear gold. “If I stay here,” Ruano remembers thinking, “I’m just waiting for something horrible to happen.”
She crossed into the United States in 2011 leaving behind her mother, brother, and nearly all of her extended family. She paid a coyote thousands of dollars and made the grueling journey through Guatemala and Mexico alone, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border on foot. “Everything was scary,” recalls Ruano. “The gangs. The coyotes. Women were injecting themselves with birth control.” She pauses. “I can’t believe what I went through. All of it. When I try to remember it, it’s like a movie.”
Not long after Ruano entered the country, she was detained by ICE and issued a deportation order. Ruano returned to El Salvador and immediately turned back around and paid a second coyote to bring her back into the United States. This time, she was guided through a network of underground tunnels that led to a windowless halfway house in El Paso, Texas. There, Ruano says she was held for two weeks with 30 others. The women, adds Ruano, including herself, were assaulted by the coyotes and warned that if they tried to leave, ICE would be called to detain them. When the coyotes finally moved the group out of the house, ICE found them within days, and took Ruano and several others to a detention center near Falfurrias, Texas.
After six months in detention, a judge found her eligible to apply for asylum. Ruano was placed in what’s called “withholding-only” proceedings, a process that allows asylum seekers with removal orders to seek protection while their cases are being considered. Her bail was set at $5,000, and after scraping together the money from a broad network of family and friends, she boarded her first-ever flight — to Milwaukee, where a friend had settled a few years earlier.
That same friend introduced Ruano to Miguel, who had made a similar journey from El Salvador after his brother was threatened by MS-13. Ruano found work as a teacher’s aide in a public elementary school and attended church every Tuesday and Sunday. In 2015, she gave birth to twin daughters. A few years later, she and Miguel bought a house. Not long after, they bought the building next door. Little by little, her life expanded into something Ruano never imagined possible had she stayed in El Salvador.
Every year, Ruano checked in with immigration officials, logging each visit in pencil on a single lined sheet of paper she kept in the same plastic folder. The appointments weren’t to evaluate her asylum claim, but to confirm she hadn’t broken the law.
In 2023, Ruano’s plea for asylum was finally heard by a judge and denied. Rather than reapply, Ruano’s attorney at the time suggested Ruano close the case since the Biden administration had deprioritized deportations for long-settled immigrants without criminal records.
But last November, the administration — and its policies — changed. Ruano’s long-dormant deportation order meant she was no longer legally allowed to remain in the United States, even under government supervision.
In response, Ruano — on the advice of a second attorney — applied for a visa available only to survivors of trafficking. The application, which came with nearly $14,000 in legal fees, would be Ruano’s last shot at staying in the U.S. legally.
In 2025, Ruano decided to take that shot in an extraordinarily difficult moment for immigrants in America. As part of his campaign and now his return to office, President Trump has vowed to deport millions of people living in the United States without permanent legal status. In recent months, his administration has signaled its willingness to go to great lengths to meet that goal. This summer, Trump secured $170 billion to fund his immigration agenda, with the majority earmarked for the Department of Homeland Security to carry out mass deportations. With an annual budget of $28 billion in funding, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is now the country’s largest law-enforcement agency. “Every single administration since Gerald Ford has had a prosecutorial discretion policy,” says Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank focused on immigration. “But on day one, Trump rescinded those discretion policies. And now, for the first time, the goal seems to be making everyone deportable. No discretion, no protection.”
While extreme cases have drawn national attention — massive workplace raids,Venezuelans sent to detention centers abroad without due process — millions of immigrants like Ruano live in growing uncertainty, their lives caught in a terrifying limbo. Their only offense: entering the country without authorization. It is these quieter cases, unfolding everywhere across the country, that reflect how the United States is rapidly redefining its position on immigration — and on who is allowed to belong.
“I’ll be leaving behind my dreams,” Ruano says, reflecting on the possibility of deportation. “Coming here opened my eyes to the amount of possibilities that are in the world.” Clinging to those dreams, however, has taken a toll. “It’s like they’re trampling me, like they think immigrants are animals. I feel like I have to constantly prove that I’m a person.”
AFTER PUTTING HER DAUGHTERS TO BED, Ruano lies awake for most of the night. The uncertainty of her case — and whether she’ll be detained at her check-in the next morning — swirls in her head until the alarm to wake the girls for school sounds just before six.
Ruano, who dresses for the day in a pink silk blouse and black slacks, puts on a swipe of pink lipstick — a dash of optimism. A school colleague arrives around 6:30 a.m. She’s come to sign a standby guardianship form, legal paperwork that would allow her to take Paola and Elisabeth home if Ruano is arrested at the appointment.
On the ride to the regional U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field office, Ruano sits between her daughters in the backseat of her colleague’s car. Paola cries, her head leaned against her mother’s shoulder. Elisabeth stares blankly as she tracks the winter morning outside the car window. Ruano repeats a mantra she told girls the night before: “We have to trust in God,” she says. “What happens is meant to happen. There’s a plan. And if I’m detained, we will be together again in El Salvador.”
When the car pulls up to the field office, Ruano is stunned to see a large crowd marching on the sidewalk. She’d heard a few people might join her, but she didn’t expect to find dozens of supporters including clergy, co-workers, and local politicians. Together, the group marches the length of the block holding signs with slogans like: “I won’t be silent, up with education, down with deportation.” Many are chanting. Local news has come, too, and a cluster of cameras crowd the corner.
“We cannot, and will not, remain silent,” asserts Christine Neumann-Ortiz into a microphone. Neumann-Ortiz, the executive director of Voces de la Frontera, a Wisconsin immigrant-advocacy group, helped organize the protest for Ruano. “We are here … to call on ICE,” she says, “to grant a stay on her order for deportation.”
Ruano stands nearby, nodding, tears in her eyes. Flanked by her daughters, she takes the microphone and reads her testimony. Her speech comes out in spurts, the sentences punctuated by deep, guttural sobs. “They [have] broken my heart,” she says. “It’s so painful for my soul and for my dreams.” She then looks toward the cameras, addressing her kindergarten students directly. “I love my kids. If you see the news today with your parents, I love you. You will be all the time in my heart.”
Just before 8 a.m., Ruano heads to the immigration field office. Standing at 5′ 1″, she nearly disappears among the crowd of supporters who surround her. As she waits to enter the building, Ruano takes a breath and pulls her daughters close.
Two hours pass before news arrives: Ruano has been granted 45 more days. It may be enough time for her trafficking visa application to be logged and placed under official review, a process that can take up to 18 months. But that alone would not necessarily ensure that Ruano could stay in the country. And if she is indeed denied, Ruano was told she must return to the office with proof of a one-way plane ticket to El Salvador. Without it, she risks detention and deportation.
As the news spreads, one of Ruano’s colleagues begins to cry from relief. “In the Jewish tradition, we say dayenu,” she says — a sentiment that loosely translates to, it’s enough for now.
RUANO IS IN A FESTIVE MOOD. With her hair twisted and pinned in a large gold clip, she moves confidently around her kitchen as she shapes a clump of pupusa dough with damp fingers. She’s been working since the early morning and made 70 pupusas in total: bean and cheese, chicken, mozzarella. Nearby, Miguel assembles Salvadoran ceviche, and Ruano teases him about being the sous-chef. “He likes to play restaurant,” she laughs. In another life, she says, she might have been a chef.
Ruano’s pupusas are a favorite among colleagues and neighbors. She runs a small side business, mostly by word of mouth, sometimes making as many as 200 for a single event. She doesn’t advertise much, but the word pupusa is scrawled in marker on the facade of her house, with an arrow pointing toward the door.
Around lunchtime, Ruano’s sister-in-law and her kids show up. They’ve gathered to celebrate Ruano’s good, if precarious, news. The family settles in around a folding picnic table in the living room, which Ruano pulled out for the occasion. Paola and Elisabeth giggle with their cousin before the three disappear upstairs, slipping into that preadolescent world where stuffed animals and TikTok influencers coexist.
“This is the first time I’ve eaten a pupusa in a long time,” Ruano says. She’s lost several pounds since learning about her expedited deportation order. Many have asked Ruano if she’d consider disappearing into the shadows, at least until the administration changes. A friend even offered to house Ruano and her family in their cabin in the woods. “Sometimes I consider giving up because I am so tired of fighting the immigration process,” reflects Ruano. “I think maybe it’s a better option to live in the shade.” She pauses as though to consider the thought. “But I want to leave with my dignity.”
Three weeks later, in March, Ruano and her family visit the Milwaukee RiverWalk, a secluded path tucked between woods and an overpass. The four have come here often since the pandemic. Nearby, men in waders fish for carp. “I tried carp once,” Miguel says, shaking his head. “Didn’t taste good.”
Most years, Ruano and her family would spend spring break further northwest at an indoor water park, but Miguel, who cannot legally obtain a driver’s license in Wisconsin, was recently pulled over and given a warning: If he’s caught driving on the highway again, he will be detained and deported. While Ruano still holds onto hope that she’ll be allowed to stay in Milwaukee, Miguel is tired — tired of their world shrinking, of the constant fear. He no longer feels welcome in a country where, he says, even the way people look at him makes him feel like he doesn’t belong. Returning to El Salvador, he adds, would be a chance to start again on their own terms.
Ruano is due back at the immigration office in just a few weeks. She’s called every day to check on the status of her visa application. So far, she learns, it has yet to be processed.
Four days before her next check-in with ICE, Ruano fears the worst and buys herself a ticket to El Salvador on June 3.
Under previous administrations, immigrants with pending visa applications were often allowed to remain in the country while their cases were reviewed, a process that could take years. “Deportation is extremely expensive,” says Marc Christopher, an immigration attorney who works with the advocacy group Voces and who took on Ruano’s case pro bono in March. (Ruano has rotated through four attorneys since first applying for asylum in 2011. In total, the legal fight has cost her upwards of $36,000.) “In the past, the government used its limited resources to focus on people with criminal records, but that’s not the case anymore. If you come into their view, they want you gone.”
And Ruano — who refuses to disappear or leave without a fight — stands squarely in view.
IN APRIL, RUANO IS GIVEN ONE more 30-day extension. After her appointment with immigration, Ruano suggests that she and the girls get breakfast at IHOP, a favorite of the twins. But when the three arrive at the diner, customers are gathered near the host stand.
“I don’t think they’ll be serving breakfast anymore today,” an older man says. “ICE just came and took their cook.”
Ruano puts her hand to her mouth and pulls Elisabeth and Paola to her chest. She ushers them gently out the door.
“This is real. It’s really happening,” she says in a near whisper. “We’re together. We’re OK.”
Even if Ruano is allowed to stay for now, the ground under mixed-status families like hers, never solid to begin with, is eroding fast. The girls worry about Miguel; his workplace could be raided at any time. Ruano reassures them that he’s safe. But while she fights to remain in the U.S. legally, Miguel continues to live and work without legal protection, his own situation growing more precarious all the time. “The landscape is changing every day,” says Christopher, her attorney. “Everything is coming down at lightning speed. We’re just at the tip of the iceberg.”
At a nearby McDonald’s, Ruano orders pancakes and biscuits for the twins. She teases the girls that they’ll have to get used to beans and rice, a practiced parenting trick to put them at ease. Ruano looks out the window where the IHOP stands across the parking lot. She taps her fingers lightly across the table.
“We keep going,” she says. “Hop, hop, hop.” Forward, into whatever comes next.
HOVERING AT THE EDGE OF HER GARDEN in mid-June, Ruano leans down and gently tugs at the stems of a small strawberry bush. Summer has arrived, and with it, the syrupy weight of Midwestern heat. “I won’t have time to eat my strawberries,” she laments, surveying her plants.
Inside, Paola and Elisabeth are back on the couch, watching a peroxide-blonde YouTube influencer walk through the choreography of American air travel: security lines, boarding passes, takeoff, and landing. The twins have never been on a plane, and Ruano’s only experiences were a deportation flight to El Salvador in 2011 and a plane from Texas to Milwaukee that same year.
The extension in April was Ruano’s last. In May, she was informed that her time was up. On June 2, in a final attempt to remain in Milwaukee, Ruano filed an emergency motion to stay. Ten days later, it was denied. She and the twins plan to leave the country on June 17.
A scale sits against the wall, and beside it stand three large suitcases. Ruano circles the house, grabbing a pencil sharpener, a food processor, and a pupusa shredder. “You can’t find this stuff in El Salvador,” she says, handing them to Miguel. He places them in a large box, which he will send later in the summer. Miguel plans to stay in Milwaukee for a few more months to make a little more money and fix up their home for renters.
Ruano jokes that the first time she was deported, she had only a plastic bag and shoes. Now she’s leaving behind a whole house. “How did I end up with so much garbage?” she says with a laugh, picking up a seashell from a basket of rocks. Garbage, or the familiar menagerie of family life, collected over years of trips, school art projects, and birthday parties.
Paola has been quiet all day. She’s always been the more solemn of the sisters. “I worry,” Ruano says, looking at her daughter. “Am I doing the right thing for my girls? I’m happy we’re going together, but I wonder if it’s the right decision.”
On the morning of June 17, Ruano enters Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport. Inside, she stands in the terminal’s echoing hall, once again surrounded by supporters and news cameras. Ruano has agreed to one last press conference. Since February, Ruano’s story has reached beyond Milwaukee and a petition launched by Voces de la Frontera has gathered hundreds of signatures and raised more than $16,000 for Ruano and her family.
“To my immigrant community,” she says, tearfully, “I want to say that we cannot live in fear. We need to keep working for our children’s futures…. Our love and our togetherness is what will get us through.”
As Ruano speaks, Miguel circles the crowd, staying just far enough from the cameras to remain out of frame. He takes a risk coming to the airport; immigration arrests have been rising in recent weeks.
Just before 11 a.m., Ruano, Miguel, and the twins head toward security. At the far end of the departure hall, the four pass under an enormous American flag, turn the corner, and disappear from view.
A FEW DAYS LATER, RUANO SHARES a batch of photos from Comasagua, the rural, mountainous area of El Salvador where Ruano grew up and where she has now returned. In the first one, Ruano stands with the girls and her mother at a lookout, the group arranged neatly in front of a lush horizon. Even as she fought to stay in the United States, Ruano told herself that seeing her mother after 15 years might be the reason she was meant to return.
At first glance, the image could be a vacation photo, a family pausing at a scenic overlook before continuing on their way. But the next few images unsettle that reading: rain spilling off a corrugated metal roof, water pooling outside rooms without walls; a plastic bag placed over a pile of wood to stoke a fire from a makeshift pit. No kitchen.
In the last photo, Ruano sits alone on the ground, looking directly into the camera. She looks tired, but still offers a faint half-smile. It’s an expression of willed optimism — maybe for her daughters, maybe for the lens. Or maybe, for herself.
