Her family said her South Los Angeles mother was deported to Mexico last week after living in the United States for 36 years, amid raids and forced deportation by federal immigration agents.
The woman’s daughter, Julia Ier, documented the entire experience and posted a video to Tiktok. The family drove from Los Angeles to Tijuana on June 7th, but demonstrators took them to the streets of downtown Los Angeles, protesting against the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and ongoing raids by immigration and customs enforcement.
Ear told CBS News that her mother, Regina Higra, 51, had chosen to take a self-swap after seeing an increase in immigrant attacks and decided she didn’t want to be deported by her will.
“She was scared of this decision,” Ear said.
Fear is a motivator for some, but the Trump administration provided $1,000 for undocumented immigrants if they voluntarily returned to their home country. Anyone using the Customs and Border Protection Home Mobile App to notify the government that the government is planning to return to the country will receive a $1,000 payment after the government confirms its return. The number of people who used this program is unknown.
Higuera’s family took her to the airport in Tijuana where she was on a plane to Mexico City and drove for five hours to the state of Guerrero, where she was planning to retire.
“In my mother’s complicated legal status, she decided to do this in her own words,” Ear says in a Tiktok video. “She has no criminal history and is a hardworking taxpayer who has been shifting 12 hours since she was 15 years old and has been shifting 12 hours since six days a week.”
Higuera first moved to the United States when she was 15 and had not seen her mother in 22 years, Ear said in a video. Along with her children, she left three grandchildren behind in the United States. My husband had planned to join Mexico in a few months.
“She asked me not to cry, to make her peaceful, to take care of her, to not trust all these new people I met,” Ear said in the video.
As of early June, around 51,000 undocumented immigrants were under ice custody, the highest since September 2019.
