Immigration raid | Back in Mexico, tough reality for deported woman

Dispirited and depressed, Ana Reyes-Velasquez spends her days bouncing between her parents' and brother's homes in Mexico City and a boyfriend's home a few hours away — with no job and no apparent prospects for work.

In late June, she was one of seven illegal immigrants rounded up by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement fugitive-operations team — accompanied by a Times reporter and photographer — in an early-morning raid. It came during a year when immigration again became one of the most heated topics in national and local politics.

The raid happened on Reyes-Velasquez's 41st birthday, a day she had planned to spend watching her daughter graduate from elementary school. A week later, she was deported to Mexico after 17 years in the United States. The Mexican government paid for her U.S.-born daughters — ages 13 and 4 — to fly to Mexico to join her.

While living in Burien, Velasquez had worked as a housekeeper at a South King County hotel and sent money to help her aging parents in Mexico City. Now she depends on them, she says.

She said she's too old to find work in Mexico's overpopulated capital. Her teenage daughter has not been going to school because she doesn't speak Spanish and Reyes-Velasquez says there's no money for an English school.

The children cry all the time now, she says. "They want to go home."

— Lornet Turnbull