The Distance
We Carry

The border wall meets the Pacific Ocean in Friendship Park in Tijuana, Mexico, on March 9, 2025.

Recorded in Tijuana during the week of March 9, 2025, these are the stories of people navigating displacement — told in their own words, drawn from experiences of deportation and forced relocation. Their accounts trace broader regional patterns of family separation, economic collapse and political repression.

In the months leading up to these interviews, the Trump administration ended the CBP One appointment system, cut legal asylum pathways and escalated deportations under a national border emergency, leaving tens of thousands stranded in Mexico.


CLER

Cler
Narrated by Sofia Rangel

Cler, who requested her full name be withheld for her protection, left Colombia with a friend to seek better opportunities for her children, who remained in the country with their father. She decided to migrate after a surge in violence following the extradition of an accused crime leader to the United States.

After fleeing her hometown, Cler traveled by plane and bus across Mexico — from Cancún to Tuxtla Gutiérrez to Mexico City — before reaching Tijuana in January 2025. She secured a CBP One appointment, then the first legal step in requesting asylum at the U.S. southern border. But on Jan. 20, 2025, the day of President Trump's second inauguration, the administration ended the CBP One system, abruptly canceling roughly 30,000 pending appointments, including hers.

In Tijuana, Cler worked informal jobs while navigating legal limbo and waiting for a chance to reunite with her children. By April 8, 2025, she had returned to Colombia.


María Luisa

Facing rising food prices, political instability and poverty in Nicaragua, tens of thousands of people have fled the country in recent years. The United Nations estimates that more than 600,000 Nicaraguans have left since 2018, many traveling through Central America toward Mexico and the U.S. border.

María Luisa is one of them. In her own words, she recounts the journey she made alone — without documents, without money and often without food — after her children urged her to leave and try to help them from afar. Now in Tijuana, she waits, hoping to one day reunite with her family.


Tania

Tania
Narrated by Tania Mendoza

Friendship Park is a historic binational meeting place on the U.S.-Mexico border, located six miles west of the San Ysidro Port of Entry where the border wall meets the Pacific Ocean.

Established in 1971, the park initially allowed open contact between families separated by immigration status. For decades, visitors embraced through gaps in a simple fence, but after new barriers were built and mesh installed in 2011, physical contact shrank to touching pinky fingers through small holes. Beginning in 2011, U.S. Border Patrol permitted limited weekend access to the U.S. side.

Since March 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has fully closed the park, first citing pandemic concerns and later ongoing border wall construction. No reopening date has been set.

For deported parents like Tania Mendoza, whose daughter remains in California, the continued closure underscores how border policy extends into the most intimate corners of family life.


Javier

Javier
Narrated by Javier Salazar Rojas

Javier Salazar Rojas was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and grew up in Oakland, California, after his family brought him there as an infant. At 11, he discovered he lacked legal status when his family left him in Mexico after a visit.

In 2014, following a criminal conviction, Salazar was deported under U.S. immigration enforcement policies that prioritized the removal of noncitizens with criminal records.

Since then, he has lived in Tijuana, where he uses painting to document life after deportation and to advocate for others expelled from the United States. His portraits appear in the Playas de Tijuana Mural, part of a larger effort to give visibility to deportees often overlooked by U.S. and Mexican society.