Reading Time: 9 minutes

This story was originally published by The 19th.

Yessenia Ruano’s home in Milwaukee is in a state of limbo. Some of the family’s belongings have been sold. Some were gifted, out of necessity, to friends and family, including plants Ruano offered to her coworkers. The most essential — clothing, her daughters’ American birth certificates — were packed into suitcases. 

Ruano’s husband, Miguel, is now contending with the rest: two cars in their driveway waiting to be sold, travel documents for their dog, boxes with additional household items he promised to pack up and ship before he, too, departs for El Salvador in a few weeks. 

In May, The 19th wrote about Ruano’s fight to remain in the country despite a pending order of deportation. Ruano, a teacher’s aide at a local public school and the mother of twin daughters who are U.S. citizens, argued that her deep roots in her community and her pending application for a visa should at the very least buy her more time. 

Ruano was among the millions of immigrants living in the United States who lack permanent authorization. They now face the Trump administration’s intensifying efforts to drive up the number of immigrants deported or otherwise removed from the country. That includes many immigrants who, like Ruano, have been in the country for a decade or longer, who have no criminal record, and whose ties to the country include young children — some of them U.S. citizens — and also careers and community. 

Before her first check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) following Trump’s inauguration, Ruano decided to make her struggle public, summoning the help of her local community to avoid deportation. A petition in her support gathered 2,800 signatures within its first 24 hours, and a fundraiser for the family had raised close to $16,000 as of the week of July 1, with the average donation hovering under $60. 

The Trump administration’s message has been that the focus of its efforts is on people who have committed crimes and pose a threat to public safety. In order to reach their ambitious deportation goals, immigration officials have also targeted immigrants who are among the easiest to locate and remove: people like Ruano, who regularly attend check-ins with ICE. 

As of last month, Ruano had attended 19 in-person check-ins with ICE over her 14 years in the United States, in addition to logging dozens of virtual check-ins and, for a time, submitting to 24-hour monitoring. 

Ruano appeared for her last check-in at the end of May, holding a much-awaited “receipt number” from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency showing that her visa application for victims of human trafficking was being processed. Before Trump, such an application would have likely paused deportation proceedings. Instead, Ruano was told she was expected to depart the country within days and given instructions for how to confirm she had arrived in El Salvador through ICE’s monitoring app. Failure to do so could lead to her immediate detention. 

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Ruano and her daughters, Eli and Paola, 10, boarded a United Airlines flight scheduled to leave Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport on June 17 at 11:35 a.m. local time. The girls’ first time on an airplane was with a one-way ticket out of their first and only home. 

Ruano, who by the time of her departure had captured the attention of many people in Milwaukee and elsewhere in the country, spoke to news cameras and a group of supporters in the hall of the airport. She pleaded for a fix to the nation’s immigration system for herself and millions of immigrants in a similar situation.

“For the good of the United States, given this ongoing chaos, our political parties need to have serious conversations about our immigration system — and stop treating it like political soccer,” Ruano said. 

As Ruano started to speak, she was interrupted by an automated message from the mayor that rang over the intercom, reminding travelers that in Milwaukee, “there’s so many opportunities to live, work and have fun.” 

Ruano continued, thanking her school community and her broader community in Milwaukee for their support. 

“To my immigrant community, 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.” 

Ruano exchanged hugs with many of the people gathered: relatives, colleagues, supporters. Then, she joined her daughters to go through airport security. 

Hours before their scheduled flight, Ruano said that the girls were experiencing a convoluted mix of emotions. They vacillated between afraid and sad, and somewhat excited, “as if they were going on vacation.” Ruano chalked it up to their age and the fact that the flight coincided with the end of the school year and the start of summer.

At the terminal, Ruano sat between her two daughters, chatting and sending messages to loved ones until it was time to board. 

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The family’s departure bore a hole in the community they had built in Milwaukee.

With most of their relatives in El Salvador, Miguel, Yessenia and their twin girls came to lean on his sister and her family, who in turn, leaned on them. They would trade rides to school, handiwork around their homes when something broke and child care — all of the normal beats of extended families. 

“We were there for each other for anything the other needed, a tool, a favor,” Miguel said. “It was just the two of us.”

Days before Ruano and the girls boarded their flight, the family got together for what was supposed to be a 10th birthday celebration for the twins. It was the last occasion they got to mark together, and with Ruano’s departure imminent, the focus shifted in part to goodbyes. 

Miguel said he and his sister will continue to lean on each other during his final days in the United States. Her close circle of support will be permanently altered once he leaves.

Arriving home from the airport without his family to an empty house, Miguel said, was one of the hardest moments of his life. 

“It’s an ugly feeling. I’ve never been alone without them,” Miguel said. 

Before he joins them later in the summer, Miguel is packing up boxes to ship to El Salvador. Each box costs $450 to ship. Some boxes hold his tools. Others hold extra clothes and shoes for his daughters, along with some of their toys and trinkets. Miguel is packing pots, pans and other kitchen items for Ruano, “so she can feel like she has her things, like she’s home.”

The first box to be packed and ready is covered in a criss-cross of duct tape. “One of three boxes holding 14 years of dreams and hard work,” Miguel said. “Sometimes I think this was all just a nice dream that now we have to wake up from, but it’s not fair, not for my girls.” 

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The heart of Ruano’s support was her school community at ALBA School, a bilingual public school in Milwaukee known in Spanish as Academia de Lenguaje y Bellas Artes. Sarah Weintraub, a middle school teacher at ALBA, said she became invested in Ruano’s plight, and in the lead-up to Ruano’s February appointment with ICE, began rallying community support from organizations like the local teachers’ union.

Weintraub and Ruano had worked together over the years and connected over the looming threats and challenges facing immigrants in the United States. Weintraub said she has loved ones in a similar situation. Weintraub’s daughter also attends ALBA and bonded with Ruano even though she was never her student. 

Weintraub described ALBA as “a very tight-knit school.” Ruano’s absence will be sorely felt. 

“Many of us have our own kids at the school. I have my kids there. Her kids are there. So, much of the staff is just very close in general,” Weintraub said. “My daughter loves her so much and has never been in any of her classes, just knows her from the school and the cafeteria.”

Weintraub said Ruano’s absence is a significant loss for the school as a workplace. 

“Right now, it’s summer break, so we’re not in our usual routine. But I know already, just thinking about going back and her not being there will be — her absence will be very felt.”

Ruano, she said, was the type of colleague who “jumps in right away” when there’s a need, and “you don’t just find the energy every day.” The school district, like the rest of the country, is struggling with a shortage of teachers — especially bilingual educators. “I don’t even know if her position will be filled right away,” Weintraub said. 

Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant advocacy group, worked closely with Ruano and her colleagues at ALBA to elevate Ruano’s story as they worked to avert her deportation. Through events, news releases and outreach to elected officials, her story reached many people who didn’t know her, but saw themselves in her situation.

For Milwaukee’s immigrant community, Ruano’s departure brought home the reality of life under the new administration, said Christine Neumann-Ortiz, co-founder and executive director of Voces de la Frontera. “It definitely highlights that we’re in a new time,” she said, adding that there’s a “cruelty” and “senselessness” to the way the administration is handling immigration enforcement. 

For the members of Voces de la Frontera, Neumann-Ortiz said, “there’s a feeling of sadness because it’s not what people want, or fought for.” During a meeting following Ruano’s departure, many members said they wanted to find ways to stay in touch with immigrants who are removed and deported, including Ruano. 

Ruano also left behind her church community at Nuestra Señora de la Paz, where she was an active member of the prayer group and a mentor for a group of children preparing for their First Communion. 

Blanca Cisneros, 70, said Ruano was a constant presence at the church’s community activities, always willing to volunteer when help was needed. “She’s really special: She’s both really humble and really strong,” Cisneros said. “Her situation just breaks my heart. It will be a big loss for our group because she has a strong desire to serve.”

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On a recent Monday, Ruano woke up early to help her sister prepare grains of corn for milling, setting a large pot over a wood fire on the patio that was still glowing red hours later. In a video call from a rural community in Comasagua, El Salvador, where they’re living, Ruano said her family is slowly adjusting to their new life. 

Ruano and her daughters were reunited with her mom, a grandmother whom the girls had only met through video calls. They’re also spending time with aunts, uncles and cousins; Ruano’s sister lives next door, and they take turns cooking for the entire family. There are no playgrounds or parks nearby, and shopping options are very limited. But recently, Ruano took the girls on a hike near the vast mountain range she grew up calling home. They picked guavas right from tree branches, a highlight of the last few weeks for the girls, and, Ruano said, “a lesson in living more with Mother Nature and less with things that are artificial.” 

In many ways, the adjustment has been hard for all of them. 

Ruano says she feels blessed to have been able to purchase a small, modest home for her mother last year, a home with a bright blue door that they now all share. But the roof leaks when it rains — which is nearly every day — so at night, Ruano and her girls move their bed from one end of their room to another to avoid the largest drips. They have to walk across the yard at night to use the nearest bathroom, which Ruano says no one has gotten used to. 

“They got here happy, telling me they were relieved I wouldn’t be sad anymore and that we were all together,” Ruano said. “But after a few days, seeing how life is — it’s nothing like Milwaukee — they started to cry. And that breaks my heart.” 

As for Ruano, a huge weight was lifted off her shoulders as soon as she boarded their plane out of Milwaukee, having shed the worry of being detained by ICE. 

“I traded one burden for another,” she said. 

Now, she and Miguel have some difficult decisions to make: where to send the girls to school, how to find gainful work. “I’ve already felt that feeling again that I felt when I was young, the feeling of wanting to flee,” Ruano added.

In a video recorded shortly after taking off in Milwaukee, one of Ruano’s daughters says in the background, “Las casas parecen casas de muñecas” — the houses look just like doll houses — while the camera points to the city’s skyline. 

“Adiós, Milwaukee,” Ruano then says, popping into the frame. “Es mi segunda casa, donde vine a madurar, donde vine a aprender más, a realizar mis sueños económicos y familiares.”

Goodbye, Milwaukee. This is my second home, where I came to mature, to learn, to realize my dreams financially and for my family.

This story was originally reported by Mel Leonor Barclay of The 19th. Meet Mel and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Photos and additional reporting from Milwaukee by Jamie Kelter Davis.

‘Adiós, Milwaukee’: A family uprooted, a hole left behind is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 15 minutes

This story was originally published by The 19th.

MILWAUKEE — When Yessenia Ruano walks through the door of her home after work, her husband, Miguel, is in the kitchen, shredding chicken with two forks, and her twin daughters are in the living room, playing on an iPad. The sound of “Primer Impacto” fills the background. 

Ruano opens the fridge to keep the dinner prep going. On the top shelf, there are more than 150 corn tortillas lying flat in their plastic bags. On the bar counter, near unopened mail and trinkets, is a pack of zinnia seeds waiting for the last frost to pass before Yessenia and the girls plant them in the patio across the driveway. 

This doesn’t look like the home of a family on the verge of being uprooted, until Ruano and her husband — one rolling chicken into tortillas over hot oil, the other tending to a pile of dishes on the sink — start talking about the questions suddenly pressing on their everyday lives. 

In February, during a check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agent told Ruano that the government would accelerate plans to deport her. Save for a change in her immigration status, the agent said, she should report back to ICE in two months with a plane ticket back to El Salvador set for 50 days out. 

It’s April now; her next appointment with ICE is coming up in just a few weeks. “She said I should buy just one plane ticket,” Ruano, 38, tells her husband, recalling a conversation with a colleague at the local public school where she works. Her colleague reasoned that if Ruano bought a fare for everyone in the family and her deportation was averted, they’d be throwing a lot of money in the trash.

“I’ve always thought we should buy four tickets,” Miguel tells her, hunched over the sink. A few months ago, Ruano went on a ladies’ retreat with her church for two nights and left him and their two children to fend for themselves. The girls cried and cried and barely slept. Their dog — a fluffy, white Bichon Frisé who was named Snowflake before the family adopted him and is now named Copito, short for snowflake in Spanish — barely ate. 

Ruano agrees that the family should stay together, but most days, she’s convinced they’ll never use any of the plane tickets in question. Ruano, for 14 years, has clung onto hope that the immigration powers that be will eventually see that she belongs in the United States. She has checked in with ICE 17 times, worn a GPS monitor. She’s also built the life she shares with her husband and their Milwaukee-born daughters, a job at a local school and volunteer work at her local Catholic parish. 

Through it all, she has searched for ways to create roots in the United States. Recently, she petitioned for a visa created for human trafficking victims, based on her experience of forced labor when she first entered the country. That petition is stuck in the growing backlog at the agency that handles visa applications, one that has accelerated since the start of the Trump administration.

“Of course, practically speaking, they can do whatever they want,” Ruano says. “If they’re a little human, then I can prove I belong here. If they just care about detaining people to meet a certain quota and deport them — if I’m just another number — then I can already hear them saying, ‘Ma’am, I don’t care about your case. We’re so sorry, but we’re going to send you back to your country.’” 

Ruano is among the millions of immigrants living in the United States who are facing deportation as the Trump administration ramps up the removal of people with no permanent immigration status. That includes immigrants who, like Ruano, have been in the country for more than a decade and have no criminal record, and whose ties to the country include young children — some of them U.S. citizens — and also careers and community. 

Ruano’s precarious situation isn’t entirely the product of Trump-era policies. Like millions of immigrants living in the United States, she entered the country at the southern border, lured by the promise of safety and stability. Like thousands of others, she asked for asylum and was allowed to stay as she waited for a resolution on her petition, as long as she followed the law. Even after her petition was unsuccessful, the U.S. government allowed her to remain in the country provided that she checked in regularly with immigration officials. 

Under the United States’ broken immigration system, one in which laws that haven’t been updated in decades no longer align with the reality of immigration patterns, the country’s reliance on the immigrant labor force or even the government’s ability to enforce such laws, immigrants like Ruano have always lived at the discretion — at the whim — of whoever is in power, from the president down to the ICE officer who is looking at their case that day. 

When President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January, that dynamic changed again, fueled by an agenda that seems to be taking shape day by day. 

Ruano remains in this limbo, bracing for her life to be upended while fighting for a different outcome. She follows the countless news stories about people who are in ICE detention, or who have been swiftly deported back to their home countries. Hundreds of thousands more are living just like her, navigating the shifting sands of American immigration policy. 

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Ruano’s day usually starts early, and by 6:15 a.m., her daughters Paola and Eli, 9, are in the dining room, ready for their mom to brush their hair. Back in El Salvador, Ruano didn’t think she would ever have children. The world seemed dangerous and broken, and life was expensive. “With the cost of living, I always thought, how?” she said one morning while brushing Eli’s hair and finishing it with a braid.

Ruano and her husband went to high school together in El Salvador and reconnected again in Milwaukee at the frozen pizza manufacturing plant where they both worked. Eventually, they started dreaming of growing their family. Soon there were four of them. Juggling two babies was hard, but they both landed steady work and were able to buy the duplex they live in, an older home they’ve improved slowly. Here, they are watching Eli and Paola thrive. 

Eli loves art. She loves to take clay-like dirt from the backyard and shape it. In their living room, Ruano points to a little bowl made of coiled clay, brown and crumbly and beautiful. A bucket holds dozens of small figurines made with air-dry clay, detailed and complex. 

Paola is much more interested in building with Legos, and Ruano says proudly that she is ahead of her peers in math. Barely older than her sister, Paola has also taken on a caretaking role in the family that Ruano says came to her naturally.

Ruano’s daughters have been learning the violin and the viola. They’ve been debating whether to keep going with the string instruments or move on to another extracurricular activity.

“All of those special skills and talents, we can’t really tend to them in my country,” Ruano said. “It’s like they’re trying to rip away my dreams, and also those of my two girls.”

Eli and Paola are U.S. citizens. Their lives would be significantly different in El Salvador, where economic opportunity, gender-based violence and more could alter the course of their lives. Their father, Miguel, has no legal immigration status. The 19th is not publishing his last name to protect his privacy and employment.

Both times Ruano has appeared before ICE this year, agents have alluded to her daughters. During her February appointment, the agent said Ruano should buy plane tickets for her girls as well because she “would hate to see the family separated,” Ruano recalls. During her April appointment, Ruano’s lawyer at the time recalled that the agent scanned Ruano’s plane ticket and asked why she hadn’t bought plane tickets for the girls.

Ruano has spent time talking to each daughter about the different possibilities ahead for their family, including a new life in El Salvador. 

“I tried to focus on the positive things, things I liked as a girl,” Ruano said. Ruano explained that the school day in El Salvador would be shorter — the country has one of the shortest school weeks in the world. There would be more time for play. 

“I told them that they’d see mango trees, orange trees,” Ruano said. “Things we don’t have here.” 

They’d still get to sleep next to each other, as they do in Milwaukee.

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Ruano has a trove of files documenting her immigration journey in the United States, but one piece of paper worn thin from years of use tracks every check-in she’s had with ICE since she entered the United States from Mexico in 2011.

At the time, Ruano petitioned for the only form of relief she was told she was eligible for, a form of asylum called “withholding of removal,” which requires immigrants to prove that there is at least a 51% likelihood of suffering persecution in their home country. 

When her case finally came up for review a decade later, a judge told Ruano that her petition would be denied and said Ruano could withdraw it to avoid having the denial on her record. During the hearing, the judge told Ruano through her then-lawyer that the U.S. government wasn’t actively deporting people like her, who had no criminal record. She could explore other avenues for legal status. 

By 2024, she was running out of alternatives and time. ICE placed her in a monitoring program called Alternatives to Detention, or ATD, and told that her deadline to file for a different path to legal status was near. 

ICE advertises the ATD program as having been designed for immigrants who were “thoroughly vetted” and deemed not a risk to public safety. To enroll someone in the program, ICE officers consider their ties to the community and status as a caregiver or provider. Ruano checked all of the boxes. 

Ruano’s participation in the program left a mark: She has a band of pale skin around her wrist, where ICE secured a GPS device. 

The device tracked her location, had facial-recognition software for regular check-ins with ICE, and had messaging capabilities between the agency and Ruano; “Please call your officer” was a regular prompt. Ruano could swap the batteries to make sure the wrist monitor was powered at all times. Sometimes the backup battery wouldn’t work, so she was left to plug the monitor — still attached to her wrist — directly into a wall outlet. When it became loose and couldn’t read her pulse, it would blare loudly. “I would be in the classroom with kids, trying to fix it,” Ruano said. 

At home, Ruano pored over the internet and eventually found a firm in Chicago that helped her file for a T visa as a victim of human trafficking. 

The application was almost complete when Ruano was asked to report to ICE for a check-in on Valentine’s Day. Ruano’s lawyer at the time told her that she feared there was a better-than-90% chance she would be detained. Ruano felt that the time she was promised to finish her application had been suddenly taken away.

She spent most of the week of the appointment working furiously to make sure her T visa application was in the hands of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, that her personal documents were in order, that there was a care plan for the girls beyond Miguel. She did all of that while juggling calls with reporters and advocates from Voces de la Frontera, the local immigrant advocacy group supporting her. She watched herself get to the brink of an emotional breakdown. The voice inside her head begged for surrender: “I’m done. I can’t keep going. I’ll go back to my country and start over, from zero. The fight is over.”

It’s a shift from her default, a hope and belief that things will work out. 

“It’s been 14 years and I’ve suffered a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety. Every week before one of my hearings with a judge or a check-in with ICE, those are nights of no sleep,” Ruano said. “I’ll wake up at one in the morning needing to vomit.” She’s had 17 appointments over that time span, and 17 sleepless weeks.

Unlike many immigrants without authorization to permanently live in the country, Ruano has not and does not live in the shadows. The U.S. government knows exactly who she is, where she lives, where she works. Ruano said she was not — and is not — willing to defy a deportation order.

“It wouldn’t be worth it,” she said. “I would rather go back to my country, whatever may happen there. Because when I think about living in the shadows, not being able to use my real name, never being at peace … I don’t want to live in hiding, waiting for the day they knock on my door.” 

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At the bilingual public school where she teaches, in Milwaukee’s heavily Hispanic South Side, the chaos of Ruano’s immigration limbo dials down. 

“I feel like I’m in my own world,” Ruano said. “My problems stay back home.” When she walks into a classroom full of kindergarteners, she tells herself, “Vamos a echarle ganas a este dia.” Let’s do this. 

It’s an easy place for her mind to wander to the version of the future she has dreamed for herself. She’s an assistant teacher supporting the youngest learners with the most challenging needs. “I’m always thinking about getting my teaching license,” Ruano said, “so I can have my own classroom.” 

Milwaukee has for years struggled with a shortage of teachers, falling victim to the nationwide teacher shortage. The district’s superintendent announced recently that the next school year would start with 80 vacant teaching positions, and that’s with a recent decision to thin the district’s central office by moving more than a fifth of its administrative staffers with teaching certifications into classroom positions. 

In El Salvador, Ruano graduated from high school and worked her way through college to become an upper-grade teacher. She looked for work in education and wound up cleaning houses instead, joining other teachers with training but no place in the workforce. “You just end up having to do other work,” Ruano said. “I got here and saw that there’s so much opportunity. Here, they need teachers.”

Ruano’s workday begins outside the school, where her job is to welcome kids getting dropped off by their parents. On a frigid April day — she does this same job on frigid January days, too, just with extra gear — most of the interactions are quick hellos and good mornings. One little boy in a Minecraft backpack is refusing to walk in. He’s sad, and he’s asking for his mom. Ruano leans down to chat with him for a minute, a hand on his shoulder, a warm smile beaming. Eventually, he decides to go inside. 

Ruano’s job at this public school has anchored her firmly in this community. As part of Ruano’s public plea to immigration officials, teachers and parents from her school have written letters about the value she brings to her community. One parent wrote that their child had been upset for days, worried about the fate of his favorite teacher. Ruano read one of these letters during a news conference before she walked into her February check-in, surrounded by TV cameras and supporters from Voces de la Frontera. Within 48 hours, they collected 2,800 signatures in an online petition supporting Ruano.

When Ruano walked out of the courthouse that day, she went to the school to drop off her girls. Students filled the hallways and stairwells, erupting in cheers, relieved that she had not been detained. 

“What was really sweet was that she led them in singing our school song. They’re usually quiet and shy when we sing it during our school assemblies. That day they were not,” said Brenda Martinez, who helped found the school and acts as its principal. Martinez has been worried about Ruano’s case and said the school can’t afford to lose her. 

“She has a lot of patience to work with the littlest learners. That’s who she is,” Martinez said. “To lose her is like losing a member of our family.” 

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One of the most remarkable aspects of Ruano’s journey, she’ll say herself, is her own outlook in the face of so much upheaval. “La esperanza no se me quita,” Ruano said. For the most part, she can’t shake the hope that someday, things will inevitably work out. 

When she reached a point of desperation earlier in the year, she said the thought that pulled her out was a Bible verse she’d memorized. “I could hear Joshua 1:9 in my head: ‘Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.’”

Ruano and her family are devout Catholics and also involved with a local Evangelical church. Faith runs through their lives, though the urgency with which Ruano prays lately is new. 

During a recent Spanish-language Mass at the parish the family attends — the large hall filled quickly to capacity — the Rev. Javier Bustos opened the service with a prayer that asked God for “justice for the nation’s immigrants.” Bustos said in an interview that since the start of the Trump administration, fear has become palpable in his community, and Ruano’s family is just one of the many whom he prays for. 

In many ways, Ruano’s journey to the United States is not unique. She watched violence escalate in El Salvador, and grieved when her brother was kidnapped and later murdered. Her fear for her safety, combined with economic uncertainty, made a future in her home country look grim. 

Her first attempt to enter the United States resulted in her immediate removal. She tried again less than a year later, paying a group of coyotes to guide her way into the country safely. Once in the United States, Ruano said, she became trapped in a filthy home and forced to work for her captors. She was eventually released after they extorted more money from her family back home. This forms the basis for her claim for a T visa, which requires her cooperation with law enforcement. 

Bustos, Ruano’s priest, said in an interview that every immigrant’s story is different, but that losing closely knit members of this church community feels the same: “Like losing an arm, or a limb.” 

Ruano is an active member of the church’s prayer group and volunteers during Mass. This Sunday, she was tasked with a Bible reading in front of the several hundred gathered, including her husband and daughters, who smiled watching her walk up to the lectern. 

Later, she attended a training for members hoping to work with young children, focused on keeping them safe. Ruano is part of a group of members who have committed nearly every Saturday for the next two years to walking a group of children through an intense curriculum in the Catholic faith, up to their First Communion. 

Ruano already started the rigorous curriculum with her group of students. She hopes to be around to watch them reach the rite of passage.

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There’s a single Salvadoran restaurant in Milwaukee. Its owner, Concepcion Arias, says business has changed since Trump was elected. Fewer customers are coming through the doors, and even some of the regulars are asking for their meals to go. “People don’t want to be out and about,” she said. 

But Ruano and her family are here on a Sunday after church, one of their regular spots for a meal after Mass. Paola orders a plate of fries with ketchup, while Eli goes for traditional pupusas. 

On the cover of the menu is a picture of a beach in El Salvador. “That’s where my uncle lives,” Ruano says. The girls glance at the small photo of the sunny tropical landscape. When Ruano was a teenager, she moved to this coastal town to work at her uncle’s hotel, a job that helped her pay for school. The girls agree the beach looks beautiful, but then Paola chimes in: “I’m really scared I’m going to die on a plane.” She’s thinking about the prospect of ever traveling to El Salvador, a place she only knows through her parents’ stories. 

Little moments like this one remind all four that the threat of removal hangs heavily over their lives. When lunch is over, the family heads back home, and then Miguel goes out to meet with a contractor. Their home’s roof is overdue for a replacement — one of dozens of to dos that are suddenly urgent. Miguel is worried about leaving their home in less than good shape if Yessenia is removed to El Salvador.

Under the Biden administration, a pending T visa application would typically halt removal proceedings, but that guarantee no longer exists under the Trump administration. At the end of the Biden administration, the wait time for USCIS to confirm it had received a visa application averaged about four weeks. On the day of Ruano’s February check-in with ICE, the Trump administration fired 50 employees from USCIS. Within a few weeks, immigration lawyers were reporting that the wait time for visa application receipts had started to grow. When Ruano called USCIS to check on her case in early April, an agent said the average wait time was 10 weeks. When she checked in with USCIS in early May, they told her the wait had grown to four months.

Her lawyer, Marc Christopher, who has spent years working on immigration cases in the Milwaukee area, said he’s not sure why ICE hasn’t fast-tracked her deportation, but that in a multi-tiered system where so much is up to discretion, it’s not clear who will have the final say on her case.

She is due back for another appointment with ICE at the end of May. In an interview Tuesday, Ruano said she remains hopeful. She’s also started to sell household items they no longer use on Facebook Marketplace, a small step toward resignation. She hasn’t bought flights for her husband or daughters and hopes she won’t have to. The zinnia seeds are now one-inch sprouts.

Ruano’s daughters will turn 10 in early June. This year, they’re most looking forward to celebrating their birthday at school, with cupcakes in class, surrounded by their friends, their mom nearby. 

Ruano’s flight is scheduled to leave the United States the next day.

This story was originally reported by Mel Leonor Barclay of The 19th. Meet Mel and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Fourteen years in Wisconsin. A one-way ticket to El Salvador. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.