The call came around 10 a.m. on February 25, 2025, just as Fabiana A. was making spaghetti. Outside, the winter morning in the Bay Area was crisp, the sun filtering through the dawn’s early layer of mist. Inside, steam rose from the simmering water, filling Fabiana’s apartment with heat.
Fabiana, then 29, shared the apartment on the southeast side of Oakland’s Lake Merritt with her husband, Armando, two brothers, and her 7-year-old daughter, Marta. The space was filled with small remnants of Marta’s childhood: her toys, backpack, school assignments, a bicycle she was learning to ride. The family’s life orbited around the cheerful girl and the rituals they shared together. In the evenings, Marta’s uncles would supervise her homework assignments, nudging her to finish when her attention wandered. Weekends were spent together, cooking and eating, watching movies, buying the occasional ice cream on neighborhood strolls. Fabiana’s 23-year-old brother, Juan, described the moments they shared together as “beautiful, inexplicable. We looked out for each other.”
Then came the call. When Fabiana picked up the phone, she heard Armando’s voice on the other line, telling her to retrieve Marta from school and go to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in San Francisco for a check-in. “I just got a call from immigration,” he told her. “They want us to show up today. Please get ready, and go pick Marta up from school.”
Standing in the kitchen, Fabiana began to worry. The three-person family was in limbo as they pursued an immigration case in the U.S. In the summer of 2021, they fled their hometown in Guatemala’s rural highlands after receiving death threats from a man who shot Armando during a botched robbery. They immigrated to the U.S. and applied for asylum, but a judge denied their claim and issued an order of removal in April 2024, according to immigration court records — a decision they appealed, but was dismissed. Their attorney submitted a request for a stay of deportation in February 2025 as she worked on a new case for the family. But just a few weeks later, the request was denied, and the family was called to check-in with ICE. That’s when Fabiana found herself in the kitchen, processing the news of the family’s unexpected summons to San Francisco.
“But they always tell us we don’t have to bring the girl,” she told Armando. “I don’t know,” he replied, “but this time they told me, ‘Please bring the girl.’” Anxiety rising, Fabiana hurried to school, calling her mother in Guatemala along the way.
“Mom,” she said, “we have an appointment with immigration, and they told us to get Marta, which is something they’ve never told us before.”
Her mother’s reply was cautious. “Don’t go. Maybe it’s a deportation.”
Fabiana assured her all would be fine; after all, the family’s lawyers would be with them.
“Ok,” her mother said. “But please take sweaters. Because I have a feeling that’s how it’s going to be.”
Two days later, the warning proved prescient. Fabiana, Marta, and Armando were back in the country they had fled only three years before.
For Fabiana, the idea of returning to their home country was fraught not only with fear but with historical weight. Her nuclear family immigrated to the United States in 2021, from the Guatemalan state of Huehuetenango, in the country’s western highlands. All the members of her family are Indigenous Maya whose primary language is Mam, one of the 22 officially recognized Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. Despite growing up in a Spanish-speaking nation, neither Fabiana nor Armando learned the country’s official language in their hometown of Santiago Chimaltenango, where Mam is the dominant language. Fabiana, in fact, only picked up Spanish after resettling in Oakland and finding herself living and working among many Spanish-speaking immigrants.
Fabiana and her family moved to Oakland to join her brother, who had resettled there a few years earlier. Like many other Mayan immigrants who have moved to the region, they were drawn to the Mam-speaking community’s deep roots in the Bay Area, which has become a hub for the Maya Mam diaspora. Many began arriving in the 1980s, fleeing the genocide perpetrated against Indigenous Guatemalans during the country’s 36-year-civil war, during which more than 200,000 people were killed or forcibly disappeared between 1960 and 1996, 85 percent of them Maya.
Up to 1.5 million Guatemalans were displaced during this period, many finding their way to California and eventually the Bay Area. Over time, cities like Oakland and San Francisco developed a robust social-service infrastructure for Mayan immigrants, including hospitals, immigration courts, and local nonprofits employing interpreters to guide families through medical visits, tax filings, and immigration court hearings.
Today, the Bay Area is home to one of the largest Maya Mam diasporas outside Guatemala. Of the roughly 80,000 Mam speakers living in the United States, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 live in the East Bay. Outside of California, Maya communities displaced during the war also established roots in states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona, according to Emil’ Keme, a K’iche’ Maya scholar and a professor of English and Indigenous Studies at Emory University.
Following the 1996 peace accords that ended the country’s civil war, a newer wave of migration to the U.S. followed after the Guatemalan government adopted policies opening the nation up to international mining and palm oil corporations. These industries have since expanded their operations onto Indigenous territories in Guatemala, leaving human rights abuses and environmental damage in their wake – and ultimately, displacing Maya communities once again.
“These transnational companies are being allowed to enter the country, contaminate our rivers, devastate our homelands and basically kick us out, and we have no option but to migrate,” Keme explained. “The trend that you see now is a lot of Maya people being expelled from their homelands, and they end up migrating to the United States.” Today, Keme said, there are Maya communities in nearly every state in the country.
Experts say these same communities are being affected by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, but a lack of official data has made it impossible to understand the scope of the federal government’s deportation campaign on Indigenous immigrants.
While tens of thousands of people have been deported to Guatemala since Trump took office, neither U.S. nor Guatemalan government data provides a clear picture of how federal immigration enforcement is affecting the country’s Indigenous communities. The Guatemalan government’s migration agency, IGM, has offered the most detailed snapshot to date, reporting that the U.S. deported 37,375 people to Guatemala between January and October 2025. But the agency does not specify which deportees are Indigenous. Nor does the United States, which categorizes immigration enforcement data strictly by nationality, not by Indigenous identity or language group.
Because of these omissions, the stories of families like Fabiana’s have been rendered invisible by official data. Yet they face an additional set of challenges when they return: a society structured around “pervasive racism and discrimination” towards Guatemala’s Indigenous peoples, according to the United Nations. “Those of us who belong to the Maya Mam culture are always looked down on by Spanish speakers,” Fabiana said. “There’s a lot of racism, a lot of discrimination, here in Guatemala.”
Experts note that the absence of data illustrating the impact of immigration enforcement on Indigenous communities reinforces their erasure in both the U.S. and Guatemala. “In terms of actual data that shows the number of ICE apprehensions of Indigenous peoples, and the number of Indigenous families impacted, there is no comprehensive place because that data is not captured,” said Juanita Cabrera Lopez, who is Maya Mam and the executive director of the International Mayan League, an Indigenous nonprofit based in D.C . Despite the lack of federal data, Cabrera Lopez said there are “many Indigenous peoples” who are being impacted by the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
“What we are hearing in a lot of the raids that are occurring across the country is that there are a lot of Maya people who are being affected,” she said. “But their stories as Indigenous peoples are completely missing from the larger narrative because their identity is not being recognized.”
Without official records, advocates have relied on reports and firsthand accounts from community organizations. Both Cabrera Lopez and Keme pointed to anecdotal evidence suggesting that Indigenous immigrants—particularly from Mexico and Guatemala—have been detained in Georgia, Ohio, and Maryland in recent months, amongst other states. One of the few publicly documented cases involving Mayan immigrants came in August 2025, when the Trump administration attempted to deport hundreds of Guatemalan unaccompanied minors, the majority of them Maya, before their immigration proceedings had concluded. The move was later blocked by a federal judge. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, more than a dozen men from Mexico’s Indigenous Zapotec community were reportedly detained during an ICE workplace raid targeting garment workers in June.
For Indigenous-language speakers who are not fluent in Spanish, challenges can begin as soon as they are apprehended. Due to a lack of interpretation services, Indigenous-language speakers in immigration detention may find themselves confronted with a significant language barrier. The problem gained visibility under the first Trump administration, when at least six Guatemalan Maya people—five of them children—died along the border while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In December 2018, Jakelin Caal, a 7-year-old girl of Maya Q’eqchi’ descent, and Felipe Gomez Alonzo, an 8-year-old Maya Chuj boy, died while detained by CBP within weeks of each other: Jakelin from severe dehydration, Felipe from the flu. Neither child nor their families spoke English or Spanish as a primary language. Jakelin’s family spoke Maya Q’eqchi’; Felipe’s spoke Chuj.
According to Keme, these issues persist today. Based on conversations with advocates who have visited detainees in Georgia, he said, “the people that are suffering the most are Indigenous immigrants, especially immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico, precisely because of the language barrier. Within these detention centers, they don’t have anybody to communicate with.”
In the Bay Area, the impact of the administration’s enforcement operations on Mayan immigrants remains difficult to measure, because no federal dataset identifies Indigenous peoples in immigration custody. While community groups are left on the frontlines of tracking their stories, certain cases can still fall through the cracks.
The deportation of Fabiana’s family has not yet received any media coverage, and most of the individuals and community organizations that work closely with the East Bay’s Mam-speaking diaspora said they were unaware of the incident. El Tímpano was made aware of what happened through Fabiana’s former ESL teacher, Nelly R., who asked to be identified by her first name and last initial due to immigration concerns.
Nelly, who described Fabiana as a “very good student who was dreaming of a better life” said she struggled to recover from the emotional fallout of the family’s deportation. She had grown close to both Fabiana and Marta, who sometimes attended classes alongside her mother. Nelly learned what happened only after Fabiana, a typically diligent student, failed to show up to class and a few days later sent an email explaining that the family had been deported. Fabiana’s sudden disappearance unsettled Nelly. At their last session, Fabiana had left behind a journal filled with class notes and doodles by Marta. “It was very sad for me,” Nelly said. “It affected me for weeks.”
In Alameda County, the most complete picture may come from ACILEP, the county’s rapid-response phone hotline for people affected by immigration enforcement. About 250 Mam speakers have contacted ACILEP since it launched in February 2025, according to Christopher Martinez, the executive director of the East Bay Spanish Speaking Citizens’ Foundation, which partners with the hotline. Although the service does not yet have any dedicated Mam-speaking staff, Martinez estimated that Mam speakers have accounted for roughly ten percent of its call volume over the past ten months. Of those calls, he said, dispatchers learned of roughly eight Mam community members who had been detained or deported.
Even without hard data, people who work with the community emphasize that they are nonetheless feeling the effects of fear and anxiety, especially in the aftermath of high-profile ICE raids in Los Angeles. Ana Pablo, who is Maya Mam, works as a financial coach for the Oakland-based nonprofit Unity Council, offering advice on budgeting, reducing debt, and improving credit. Before the administration’s immigration crackdown, Pablo said it was easier to connect with members of the Mam community, who were interested in learning more about financial literacy. But since Trump took office, she explained that the organization has seen far fewer Mam speakers walk through its doors. “It feels so empty,” she said. Some clients have opted out of applying for food stamps and Medi-Cal benefits out of fear the organization will share their personal information with ICE. “It is a hard time,” she added. “We have noticed that it’s affecting the community. And sometimes we don’t see any Mam speakers here because they’re afraid.”
Esmeralda Mendoza is an immigration legal services advocate with the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant’s Voces Maya team, which connects Mam-speaking families with legal and social services. Mendoza, who is Maya Mam, said families began contacting the organization shortly after Trump won the election. “By the second month of him being in power, we had twice as many phone calls as we had last year,” she said. “They’re like: What am I supposed to do? Should I go to my ICE check-in? Can someone accompany me? People have been frightened by this.”
The Voces Maya team, along with East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, holds free legal clinics most Saturdays for Mam-speakers in the East Bay. At the clinics, attendees can ask attorneys questions about immigration cases and request assistance for work permit applications, among other services. The week after the election, Mendoza recalled, people lined up outside the clinic, seeking red cards containing information about their rights in the event of an ICE encounter. Others will show up looking for help finding an attorney, or applying for asylum.
Among those who fear returning to Guatemala, “it’s sad that that’s something the government doesn’t see,” Mendoza said. “These people came fleeing, scared. And now they have to face a new reality. To go back to something that they thought they had escaped.”
Fabiana and her family arrived at their ICE check-in in San Francisco nervous, but reassured by the presence of their legal team. Just weeks earlier, the family’s attorney had filed a request for a stay of deportation after their asylum application was denied. Their lawyers were preparing to submit a U-Visa application to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which originated from a crime Fabiana witnessed and was a victim of in Oakland in September 2023, according to her legal team. A U-Visa is a temporary visa available to noncitizen victims or witnesses of violent crime who cooperate with law enforcement. Fabiana’s attorneys believe she is eligible for the status because she was a “direct victim of a felonious assault” who cooperated with the Oakland Police Department while it investigated the crime.
When the family was summoned to the ICE office on February 25 for their check-in, they were told to bring their passports. They were not especially troubled by the request, assuming immigration officials needed the documents to process their stay of removal application.
Both Fabiana and Armando were born in the mid-1990s and grew up in Santiago Chimaltenango, a rural region flanked by green mountains. Their childhoods were shaped by poverty. At eight, Armando began working on a coffee plantation. By fifteen, the cost of schooling forced him to drop out. Fabiana’s family carried the scars of the civil war: her uncle was killed in the early 1980s, and her father narrowly survived an ambush by soldiers.
Three decades after her uncle was killed, Fabiana’s family was targeted yet again. In 2016, Armando was shot in the chest during an attempted robbery, according to court records. Included are hospital reports from Huehuetenango, photographs of the gunshot wound, and reports from Huehuetenango’s police unit detailing the assault. Police visited Armando in the hospital where he gave a description of the attacker. Investigators soon identified a suspect—a decision that would come to haunt the family. Three months after the shooting, the attacker appeared at their home and threatened to kill them if they did not drop the case. The family complied. Shortly afterward, the attacker left town.
For several years, life was quiet. Then, in 2021, Armando unexpectedly crossed paths with his attacker in town. The man hurled a bottle in his direction and laughed. A new wave of fear washed over him. He worried the harassment would begin again, or worse, and neither Fabiana nor Armando trusted that the authorities in Guatemala cared enough about the Mam-speaking population to keep them safe. In her asylum declaration, Fabiana stated, “the police do not view us as important, so they do not put enough time, effort, or resources in helping Indigenous Mam people like us.” She added that the family could not safely move elsewhere in the country “because Mam people are are not protected and we suffer severe discrimination.”
“Because of all the threats, we decided to flee,” Fabiana said. “We decided to go to the United States.”
In the summer of 2021, the family left Guatemala for the U.S., traveling under harsh conditions through Mexico. It was an exhausting journey that involved sleeping on ranches, drinking water from rivers, and treating Marta’s frequent heat-induced nosebleeds. They reached the border in July, turned themselves in to immigration officials, and shortly after began the asylum process. They settled in Oakland, joining Juan, who was already living there, and adapted quickly. Fabiana began taking English classes. Marta enrolled in transitional kindergarten. Armando found work in construction. For the first time in years, they felt safe. Armando, in particular, “was very happy to be there because he thought he was free from the person who had hurt him so much,” she said.
But in April 2024, the judge in San Francisco presiding over their asylum case denied their claim. They were not alone—this judge’s denial rate of 65 percent exceeds the national average of 58%. After the ruling, they sought new legal representation. Their new attorney believed the family qualified for a U-visa and had begun gathering the required documentation from the Oakland Police Department when, on February 25, the family was summoned for a check-in with ICE.
At the ICE office, Fabiana watched as her attorney got into a back-and-forth with an officer there, unable to make out what they were discussing. Minutes later, her lawyer delivered the news: the stay had been denied and the family was being deported back to Guatemala. The scene after was chaotic, Fabiana recalled. “My husband said, ‘oh no, how did this happen to us? I don’t want to go back.’ Everyone is crying, my daughter is crying too because she already had a life there. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.” The former paralegal who worked on the case, Jennifer Rodriguez, described the incident as “one of the hardest days” of her professional career. But the legal team was unable to put the deportation on hold. By February 27, the family was already in Guatemala.
Back in Oakland, when Fabiana’s brothers learned of the arrest, they rushed home to find everything exactly as it had been before they left. The family had not been allowed to retrieve their belongings before they were deported, according to Fabiana, so when the brothers came home, they were immediately confronted with everyone’s stuff: their clothes, Marta’s toys, even the pot of the freshly cooked spaghetti waiting to be eaten. Surrounded by the remnants of their shared life, the brothers began to cry.
The Guatemalan government has touted its newly established Plan Retorno al Hogar, or “Return to Home” plan, as a means of helping deported Guatemalans reintegrate into society. Implemented last February, the program pledges “dignity, reunion, and inclusion” for deportees, and promises to connect them with an array of social services to support their return. The plan outlines two phases for deportees arriving in Guatemala. The first, an initial intake, is conducted as soon as they land, during which officials collect documentation and distribute clothing, food, and hygiene kits. The second phase is aimed at providing deportees with longer-term support, including connecting them to job placement, health services, and housing assistance.
When Fabiana’s family arrived at the military base in Guatemala City where deportation flights are sent, they were ushered into a room where, she recalled, an airport employee took down her phone number. But according to Fabiana, no one from the government has contacted her since. “We haven’t received any calls,” she said. When told about the Return Home plan, which she had never heard of, Fabiana was doubtful. “I don’t believe it’s true,” she said.
Adam Isacson, the Director for Defense Oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, traveled to Guatemala over the summer to research the experiences of deportees in U.S. immigration detention and their reintegration after return. He said that most government contact with deportees ends soon after they arrive. “Guatemala’s government does not have a lot of resources for reception, much less integration, especially in the numbers that they receive,” he explained. “And so really, the contact they have with the vast majority of returned migrants is just in the first several hours.”
He added: “The vast majority, they just lose track of them. And that may include people who fled threats, or people who are way below the poverty line. It’s a really bad situation.”
Keme, who recently traveled to Guatemala with Cabrera Lopez, described a similarly bare-bones approach.“There is not a real plan in place to help people that have been returned to Guatemala.” He recalled a conversation with a Q’eqchi’ Maya journalist who has been reporting on the experience of returnees in the country. “And he was saying that the welcome package that Guatemala gives them is a little bag with a pound of rice, toothpaste, a toothbrush and a little towel. And then they say: ‘Welcome back to Guatemala.’”
For Fabiana, distrust in the government’s plan is rooted in history: a centuries-long legacy of violence, racism, and land theft directed at Indigenous communities. She was born just one year before the country’s thirty-six-year armed conflict came to an end. From 1982 to 1983, the military, under the U.S.-backed dictator General José Efraín Ríos Montt, carried out a “scorched earth” campaign against the country’s Maya population, destroying villages, massacring men, women, and children, and displacing hundreds of thousands in a matter of months. The bloodiest period was concentrated in a handful of Indigenous regions, according to a UN-backed truth commission, including Huehuetenango, where “whole villages were burnt.”
The commission concluded that the Guatemalan government committed “acts of genocide” against the Indigenous population during Ríos Montt’s rule. He was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity in 2013. Specifically, Rios Montt was charged for the massacre of 1,771 Ixil Maya women, men, and children in 15 villages. Trained at the U.S. School of the Americas, Rios Montt cultivated ties with prominent American evangelical figures, including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. In 1982, Ronald Reagan, a vocal supporter, described him as “totally dedicated to democracy” and said he was “getting a bum rap on human rights” in response to allegations of atrocities. The U.S. government provided money and training to the Guatemalan military throughout the course of the war.
The end of the conflict did not resolve the country’s structural inequities. Today in Guatemala, “the inherent inequalities that caused us to have to leave with our families have not been resolved,” Cabrera Lopez said. “What we have today are the systems of colonization in our health care, in our education, in our legal and in our political structures, and those systems continue to perpetuate structural racism and discrimination against Indigenous peoples.” Indigenous communities continue to face high levels of poverty, inequality, displacement, and discrimination. Roughly seventy percent of the country’s Indigenous population lives in poverty, and eighty percent of children living in Indigenous areas are malnourished.
That is the sociopolitical backdrop against which Fabiana and her family returned to Guatemala, a country where, in her words, “discrimination is still the norm.” She recalled experiencing marginalization from Spanish speakers outside her primarily Mam-speaking town, looked down upon for speaking her native language and for wearing traditional Maya clothing. When Armando left their town for work, he described feeling ashamed and inferior for speaking Mam, unworthy of the opportunities given to Spanish speakers, according to court records.
Moving back to the country from Oakland, which has developed a strong infrastructure of support for Mam-speakers, can be jarring. East Bay Sanctuary Covenant’s Esmeralda Mendoza said she experienced that dichotomy herself. In 2012, she moved back to her hometown of Todos Santos, Guatemala, where she lived for several years before resettling permanently in the U.S. Even though Mendoza spoke Spanish when she moved back to Guatemala, at age 16, the school she attended tried to place her in elementary school because they said her Spanish wasn’t good enough. Ultimately, they made her go back to sixth grade, while her former classmates in the U.S. were in their junior year of high school.
“It was hard,” she said. “The racism that Indigenous people witness in Guatemala is so big. The Ladino people, hearing you not speaking Spanish or looking at your clothing, they’ll make you feel less than in an instant,” she said, referring to the primarily mixed Mestizo majority population in Guatemala that speaks Spanish, does not generally identify as Indigenous, and is an officially recognized ethnic group.
In the first few weeks after the family’s deportation, the two brothers who remained behind found themselves crying often, and unpredictably. The tears came when they passed Marta’s bicycle in the apartment, propped up next to her helmet and backpack. “I’m a man, but I cry too, and it affected both of us a lot,” Juan said. “It feels very ugly when your family is taken away from you.”
Eventually, they left the apartment they all shared. The memories had become too painful to confront in the course of their daily routines: waking up, getting ready, and then catching sight of some small reminder of the family’s absence, of the rupture that began on February 25.
Sometimes, in his new place, Juan will take out his favorite photos of Marta — her celebrating Christmas with the family, dressed up for Halloween — and talk to them. He misses her “terribly.” Misses the ways her little personality threaded itself throughout their household, her glee, her enthusiasm for school, her easy adjustment to her new home. He worries about what opportunities will await his niece, who took to her English and Math classes in Oakland, back in Guatemala, where pathways for continued education are limited for Indigenous children.
In Guatemala, Marta has found solace in pictures of her own. Each night, she takes out her old school photographs and studies the faces of her classmates. She misses them, Fabiana says. She wants to go back to her old life in the U.S.
In Oakland, the legal team representing the family at the immigration law firm Adelante Legal is trying to make that possible. On December 12, attorneys submitted aU-Visa petition on behalf of the family with USCIS, as their stay of deportation was denied before they were able to file the petition and its supporting documents. Their goal is to bring the family back, managing attorney Carly Stadum-Liang says. It’s a legal process likely to take years to play out, given the current U-visa backlog of 248,108 applications, according to USCIS data.
In the meantime, the family is keeping a low profile in Santiago Chimaltenango, fearful of crossing paths with the man who attacked Armando. They are managing to stay afloat with the help of relatives who have pitched in to support them as they get settled. Marta is back in school, now learning in Mam. She is doing well — first in her class, Fabiana says — but it is unclear how, or whether, she will be able to continue her studies beyond sixth grade. Most schools in Guatemala charge tuition fees for secondary education, a reality that has left just 25% of Indigenous girls over sixteen enrolled in school. “That’s what I’m thinking about right now,” Fabiana says. “What am I going to do with Marta?”
Since the family’s deportation, Marta has begun imagining a different future. She used to tell people she wanted to grow up to become a pastor or a teacher. Now, she has a different idea: an attorney. These days, “she says, ‘Mommy, one day I’m going to be a lawyer,” Fabiana said. “’I’m going to defend immigrants in the United States.’”
