More than 70,000 Mexicans were deported from the United States during the first six months of the year. Now they live south of the border.
Deported influencer Annie Garcia builds life and community in Mexico
Social media influencer Annie Garcia shares how life after deportation led to healing and connection.
Deported alone, Annie Garcia landed in Mexico in her $40 pocket. There was an American criminal history behind her, and an unknown future in a country she barely remembers.
Fast forward to the present to a video shared with over 500,000 social media followers in August. Her hair blows in the wind as she speeds up on a boat through the emerald sea. She tagged the clip: #lifefterdeportation.
Young Mexican immigrants, like Garcia, 35, who was expelled from the United States, document the aftermath of their deportation online. Their videos – the raw sadness for what they lost in America, the surprise and gratitude for what they found in Mexico – are rapidly gaining tens of thousands of followers for them.
It includes at least dozens of deportee Garcia, starting at Puerto Vallarta, Mexico’s West Coast beach gem.
“I hope my content can be materialized. That’s how much life there is on this side of the border,” Garcia wrote on Instagram on June 15th. “Our country isn’t they 20 or 30 years ago when my parents left.”
Return to the unfamiliar “home”
According to the Mexican Ministry of Home Affairs, over 70,000 Mexican citizens were deported from the United States to Mexico in the first six months of 2025.
This is because more than 102,000 people have been deported after crossing the border in the same six months in 2024. Those currently deported are more likely to have built American lives and families.
A aggressive mass expulsion campaign for President Donald Trump is underway, and Francisco Hernandez Corona feared he would be detained.
There he self-reported to Mexico with his husband. He started vlogging. A Harvard graduate and former dreamer in his 30s were illegally taken to the US as a boy, he explained in Tiktok. Several attempts to legalize his position in the United States have failed.
In June, he posted his transition and deportation of himself online.
Between a golden sunset and a photo of tacos, he wrote in July, “Self-promotion isn’t necessarily a freedom, joy and new adventure. Sometimes pain and nostalgia, anger and sadness.
“Living in Pueblo is not easy.”
While Mexico remains an extreme country, great scenery and endless wealth can be found in large cities and beach resorts, difficulties and poverty often overwhelm small communities.
Olga Mijangos was deported from Las Vegas on Christmas Eve 2024, two years after being indicted for DUI. She returned to Pueblo, Oaxaca, where she left when she was five years old.
Midangos, 33, has a tattoo on his neck, stylized brows and long eyelashes.
Back in her hometown, she began posting videos of goats swarming the streets. Community Rodeo; traditional foods she began cooking. She posted a video from her first job: harvesting and cleaning cucumbers, 300 pesos a day, or $15.
“I clearly understand why my mother decided to take us when we were little. Living in Pueblo is not easy,” she said in a video of the cucumber harvest. “There’s a hard life. There’s poverty.”
Having struggled to communicate for her family, including two children in Mexico and one in the US, she moved to Puerto Vallarta, where she met Garcia and Hernandez Corona.
They began to form existing communities of people and others who left the United States and met at least once a month for dinner. In their videos, they have fun, drinks and laughs. But they also hold them in custody of each other and celebrate the previous moving stories of their parents: the ability and reinvention.
“I am extremely proud to be a Mexican and I am learning to love a country that I couldn’t grow up with, but I should have had to leave the home I knew to find peace and freedom,” clinical psychologist Hernandez Corona said in a July post by Tiktok. “This is not a blessing. It’s resilience.”
Supports Spanish skills, savings and all problems
Much of their content has a modern social media twist and portrays classic American bootstrap success stories, from difficulties to sponsorship.
However, the reality is that the exile’s experience of building a life in Mexico can change dramatically depending on Mexican ability, language, cultural skills, and other factors, says Israeli Ibaragonzales, a professor of immigration studies at the University of Collegio de La Fronteranorte in Mexico.
He said that exiles who saved US dollars and university degrees, who speak Spanish and have supportive relatives in Mexico might spend easier time than those who don’t.
Others can face life-threatening risks upon return, ranging from organized crime violence to political persecution and death threats.
“The much of the violence they’ve lived in the United States is not the same as returning to war zones,” Ibara Gonzalez said.
Where they land – with the exception of a few cosmopolitan cities, deported Mexicans also face local prejudices. They have often been seen as criminals, or as deportation and failure.
“Did I feel a lot of judgment? Absolutely,” Midjangos said he returned to Oaxaca. “It’s basically from a different world, despite it being my roots. I’m tattooed. I lived my life in a certain way that they don’t. I could feel people talking.”
However, friends returning home in Las Vegas and new friends in Mexico began to encourage her to share her deportation journey. It took her several weeks to get courage. She posted a video of her sending her son, a US citizen, to a Mexican school.
She said she has earned nearly 14 million views and 2 million likes on Tiktok. Suddenly, Tiktok was asking if he wanted to participate in the app’s Content Creators Rewards program.
“Your criminal history is not following you.”
By filming their stories online, the creators of deported content say they’re dismantling the long-standing taboos around Mexican deportation, shedding light on their experiences as Mexicans who hadn’t grown up in Mexico.
Garcia openly spoke about the financial crime she committed in her 20s on social media, which led to her being charged and convicted, which ultimately led to her deportation.
She “inevitably” moved to the United States when she was four years old. Her mother married an American citizen in Salt Lake City, Utah, and both she and her mother became legal permanent residents.
However, when Garcia began acting as a child, the state intervened. “My mother took me to me when I was 12 because I had behavioral problems,” she told USA Today. “I was separated from my family and grew up with other boys with actions (problem).”
As a young single mother, she said she would steal from her employer when she couldn’t pay the bill.
In Mexico she found a beautiful slate. “Your criminal history doesn’t follow you,” Garcia told her followers when you paid debts to American society. “You can pursue higher education. The debt you had in the US will not follow you here.”
As Trump’s immigration crackdown spreads, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Paldo has publicly provided moral support to Mexicans in the face of deportation. She called them “heroes and heroines.” They “contributed their lives to the United States.”
“We’re going to protect our brothers and sisters there,” she said at a June 25 press conference.
“Maybe… things will change.”
Garcia’s social media accounts are becoming so popular that some make a living from creating content. She is conducting research into the reintegration of American universities after exile. And she has a “tunnel vision” with her law degree in Mexico, she said.
The pain of her deportation and the losses it caused are mostly in the past. Unless she catches news of an immigration attack in the US.
Her memories of her detention and her separation from the five children, including the toddler, remain fresh. Garcia was needed more than a year after her 2017 deportation to gain custody of her children and take her to Mexico.
“It’s very, very triggered to see what’s going on there,” she said. “It’s a bittersweet feeling. I’m safe. I feel safe. We’re here. It won’t affect us anymore. But it’s heartbreaking to see other families living through it.
“When I first started sharing my stories, my thoughts were, ‘Maybe if I talked about this, things would change,'” she said.
Despite facing hatred and trolls, she continued it. She continued her posts even after losing two jobs in Mexico due to openly debate about her deportation and criminal past on social media.
She continued to share and think.
