While the phone line remained open, she heard immigration police arresting him.
At that moment, she understood that her life would change forever. But what she didn’t imagine was that she would end up living in Mexico with her husband and two young daughters.
“There’s nothing more important than being together,” says Janie Hughes, an American who doesn’t speak Spanish, despite how difficult it is to start over in an unfamiliar country.
These kinds of decisions are being faced by families with mixed immigration status (one spouse is a U.S. citizen and the other undocumented), after Donald Trump increased the detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. since the beginning of his second term in January 2025.
Other couples, like Raegan Klein and Alfredo Linares, have chosen to voluntarily move to the other side of the border to avoid the risk of deportation.
“If something happened to him, I could never forgive myself,” says Klein from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
BBC Mundo tells the story of these two American women who, along with their husbands, are beginning a new chapter in their lives in Mexico.
Alleged gang members, dressed in white, with shaved heads, masks, and chained up, sit in plastic chairs in the central corridor of one of the modules at the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) in Tecoluca, El Salvador, attending a mass hearing against them on April 20, 2026. (Reuters, photo provided by a third party)
“I had tears of happiness when I saw him again.” He left the house at 6:30 a.m. for work on October 23 of last year.
Alejandro Pérez said goodbye to his wife, Janie, and their two young daughters, Luna and Lexie, before closing the door.
What he didn’t know at that moment was that that morning would be the last time he would be in his home in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
About 15 minutes later, Janie received a call from her husband saying, “I think ICE is here,” referring to agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
At that moment, she heard an agent say, “Alejandro Pérez, we have an arrest warrant for you.” Then the call was cut off.
“I fell to my knees and cried uncontrollably,” the 29-year-old American woman recounts.
As a cook, Alejandro was going to prepare tacos al pastor that very night at the Presbyterian church they had attended for years.
The dinner had to be canceled after news of the arrest broke.
Being undocumented, they both knew that the most likely outcome was deportation to Mexico. And that’s exactly what happened.
The idea of separating her family, says Janie Pérez, was “simply inconceivable,” even though it meant leaving her life in Missouri behind and starting a new life in a country completely unknown to her.
“There’s nothing more important than being together,” she emphasizes in an interview with BBC Mundo.
For the Pérezes, religion has been a fundamental part of their relationship since they met in 2019, when they worked at the same café where he cooked and she was a waitress.
“He was also a man of faith, and that was very important to me,” says Janie.
Over time, they decided to get married, and since Alejandro was undocumented, they consulted a lawyer to try to regularize his status.
The efforts were unsuccessful, and although they knew he was at risk of being arrested, they tried to continue their lives as normally as possible.
From then on, Janie says, it was clear that her husband’s next stop would be Mexico. But how long would he be detained awaiting deportation?
While they waited for the judge’s decision, one Sunday she surprised him by visiting him at the detention center. “Since we couldn’t touch each other, we held hands face to face, separated by a glass partition,” the American woman recounts. “And we cried together.”
Source: bbc
