Erased by deportation data

The Weekly Dispatch

Community-powered immigration news from the Bay Area.

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Welcome back to El Tímpano’s Weekly Dispatch. I’m Erica Hellerstein, senior immigration, labor, and economics reporter.

After the turbulence of the past year, somehow, it’s already 2026. And while I’m grateful to be entering 2026 with the feeling of a psychological clean slate, the year has already gotten off to a shocking start.

We kicked off 2026 with the stunning news that U.S. military forces captured and brought Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to New York to face charges of “narco-terrorism” in federal court. The move, which sent shockwaves across Latin America, was reminiscent of the U.S. government’s 1989 invasion of Panama and arrest of General Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges. It has also raised fears in the region of Trump reviving the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 geopolitical strategy that claimed the U.S. government’s hegemony over the Western hemisphere. The world, and many Venezuelan members of our community in the Bay Area, are still processing this unprecedented turn of events, uncertain what the future will hold for the country and the U.S’s role in it.

Meanwhile, closer to home, came the news of the death in Minneapolis on Wednesday of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent following the deployment of immigration agents to the city as part of a massive enforcement operation. Good, unarmed, was shot in her car while serving as a legal observer during an immigration raid, according to witnesses. Good’s killing, reportedly roughly a mile away from where George Floyd was killed by a police officer in 2020, has set off protests throughout Minneapolis, and other cities, including Oakland and San Francisco. We’ll continue to monitor local demonstrations and how this news is affecting community members in the Bay Area.

Now it’s time to turn to our newsroom. As the year starts off, and with such big headlines dominating the news already, I want to first flag a piece published by my colleague Vanessa G. Sánchez this week, which breaks down state and federal changes to the health care system in 2026 that will significantly impact immigrant communities in the Bay Area and across California. 

We’re also revisiting an article I published right before the holiday break. It’s a sweeping piece that spans the temporal landscape, from 1980s Central America to present day Oakland. And it all started with a simple phone call. 

A few months ago, I got a tip from Nelly R., an ESL teacher in the East Bay. She wanted to tell me the story of one of her students, Fabiana A., who was recently deported from Oakland back to Guatemala, along with her husband and young daughter. Nelly was extremely distressed by her student’s sudden disappearance. At their last session, Fabiana had left behind a journal filled with class notes and doodles by her daughter. And then all of a sudden she was gone. “It affected me for weeks,” Nelly told me. 

Nelly graciously agreed to put me in touch with Fabiana. And thus initiated a months-long dialogue, over a shaky WhatsApp connection from Oakland to the rural highlands of Guatemala. The story Fabiana told me raised questions that, despite spending a year covering immigration under the Trump administration, I had never seen addressed or answered in mainstream reporting. That’s the story I set out to tell.

During our first call, Fabiana mentioned that her native language is not Spanish, but Mam, one of the 22 officially recognized Mayan languages in Guatemala, and all of them much older than Spanish. Fabiana and her family are Maya, from an Indigenous region of the country that was devastated during Guatemala’s civil war. During this period, from 1960 to 1996, the Guatemalan military committed genocide against the country’s Indigenous population, killing or forcibly disappearing an estimated 200,000 people, 85 percent of them Maya.

Up to 1.5 million Guatemalans were displaced, and many found their way to California and eventually the Bay Area. Today, the region is home to one of the largest Maya Mam diasporas outside Guatemala. 

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. Both countries categorize immigration enforcement data strictly by nationality, not by Indigenous identity or language group. As a result, we know how many people have been deported to Guatemala since Trump took office (37,375), but not how many among them identify as Indigenous or speak a language other than Spanish as their first.

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 discrimination towards Guatemala’s Indigenous peoples. “Those of us who belong to the Maya Mam culture are always looked down on by Spanish speakers,” Fabiana told me. “There’s a lot of racism here in Guatemala.”

This data gap has made it impossible to understand how many Maya families are being sent back to Guatemala and what support, if any, is available to them when they return. So we set out to tell the story of just one family erased by the data, and the migration history of the Maya community in the Bay Area. I hope you’ll give it a read.

Ear to the Ground

Over the summer, El Tímpano convened a listening session with Mam-speakers in Oakland to inform California’s Racial Equity Framework. During the meeting, we invited participants to share the main challenges they face and the resources they’d like to see. Here are some responses we heard—translated into English from Mam:

I wish there were more resources and support from the government for the Mam community. 

We work, we pay taxes, but those tax dollars don’t reach our community.

We need to work, but there is no work…we can’t live if we don’t have a job…working two to three days [a week] is not enough to pay rent and buy groceries.

Our community needs support. We need support for our kids’ education and our own education.

The first thing we think about is to support our children, but we forget to support ourselves…if there is a school for adults it can help us succeed.

From the El Tímpano Newsroom

This week, we bring you several stories from the newsroom that may have gotten lost in the holiday shuffle and the new year’s headlines:

These new state and federal policies will reshape health care access for immigrants in 2026

El Timpano’s Vanessa G. Sanchez breaks down state and federal changes to the health care system in 2026 that will significantly impact immigrant communities in the Bay Area and across California.

At a South Alameda County bakery, Dia de los Reyes is a time honored tradition

El Tímpano’s Gabriela Calvillo Alvarez and Hiram Durán spent the dawn hours of Jan. 6 – Dia de los Reyes – inside a Hayward bakery that for 20 years has baked hundreds of the famous Rosca de Reyes cake for its customers.

Bravery in the face of uncertainty: Our year in photos

El Tímpano photojournalist Hiram Durán reflects on the newsroom’s year in photos, sharing images that illustrate the community’s bravery in the face of fear and uncertainty.

Without a rent control ordinance, San Pablo mobile home park residents face unchecked hikes

El Tímpano’s Gabriela Calvillo Alvarez reports on residents of a mobile home community in San Pablo who are calling on the city for a rent stabilization ordinance in the wake of a recent proposed rent hike.

California

• Family of Orange County man who died in ICE detention sues prison operator
  
• California is banning masks for federal agents. Here’s why it could lose in court
  
• Immigration raids linked to significant California job losses, analysis finds

National

• We Pressed Trump on His Conclusion About the ICE Shooting. Here’s What He Said.
  
• Trump admin can share immigrants’ Medicaid data with ICE, judge rules
  
• Federal Judge Blocks Trump Move to Revoke Deportation Protection for Thousands of Migrants

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