Immigrant America

As Barack Obama considers ways to enforce immigration laws "more humanely," VICE News travels to Guatemala to meet a deportee named Ray Jesus, who lives apart from his American wife and 5 American children. When Ray lived in the U.S., he was the family's breadwinner. Now they rely on welfare to get by. It turns out that deporting parents costs much more than the price of a one-way ticket home.

There are soldiers and marines that have served the United States even though they were not born in the country. Some of them entered the US by crossing the border illegally, but after being promised citizenship in exchange for their service, they enlisted. Some of them have risked their lives on the front lines in wars like Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. Today they find themselves deported to Mexico after having committed a crime, like cashing checks without funds, shooting a firearm or driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after having served the United States on the ground and have, since their deportation, lost the right to receive medical attention.

Tijuana, Mexico, is a limbo for deportees from the United States. People keep showing up in the city while U.S. immigration policies get tougher. Between 2002 and 2012, deportations to Mexico more than doubled, from 122,058 to 306,870, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Many were deported for non-violent or relatively minor infractions.

Milking cows is a dirty, monotonous job, and as we found out in our latest episode of Immigrant America, it's not a job many unemployed Americans are willing to do. But for some reason the government doesn't give dairy farms a way to recruit foreign workers legally, so most feel forced to hire illegal immigrants. This makes the farms and their workers easy targets for immigration authorities looking to fill deportation quotas. We went to upstate New York to try to understand the cat and mouse game going on between dairy farms and immigration authorities. We found a lot of wasted taxpayer money, racial profiling, and a broken system that unnecessarily treats family farmers and hardworking immigrants like criminals.

Between October 2013 and May 2014, authorities at the US-Mexico border began detaining underage migrants at an alarming, never-before-seen rate. During this period, thousands of underage migrants ended up in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention facilities along the border.

Last summer, Americans were stunned by images of children and families from Central America turning themselves in at the US-Mexico border. More migrants are now coming from the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula and surrounding areas than anywhere else in Central America. The society there has yet to recover from a 2009 coup that crippled the economy and unleashed extreme levels of violence and inequality.

With a new administration in place that's attempting to remove Title 42, a provision enacted in 2020 by the Trump administration, some Conservatives are arguing that Democrats are systematically trying to replace them with immigrants. Segment originally from VICE News Tonight.

Tens of thousands of migrants have made their way across the U.S. border over recent months, a number that has begun to slow after the Biden administration announced changes to the Venezuelan asylum process, and the City of El Paso announced they would be halting their bussing program. For those who did cross, they found themselves thrust into a controversial, and highly-political, plan to bus them out of town. VICE News followed one family as they journeyed from El Paso to New York City. Segment originally from VICE News Tonight.