The Border Commuter

The Border Commuter

Photographs by Alejandro Cegarra

Text by Brooke Jarvis

Audio reported and edited by Adolfo Guzman-Lopez

October 11, 2017, was the day that Silvia Ocampo didn’t come home. It took her by surprise: The appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement was scary but routine, and though she’d been fighting her deportation for almost a decade, she’d always maintained faith that she would be able to stay in the United States, where she had lived for 25 years and where she had raised four children, two of whom were still in school. But eight days later, released from detention, she arrived in Tijuana, a city she didn’t know, with no phone and no money. Her car, left in downtown San Diego by the ICE office, was covered in parking tickets.

When her 17-year-old son, Jair Cortes, came home and found his mother missing, he felt a rush of anxiety. But he didn’t feel surprised. He was 7 years old when he found out that his father was being deported. He had been trying to prepare himself for this day ever since. Ocampo tried to make a life for herself and her 9-year-old daughter, Kayla, in Tijuana — it wasn’t home, but it was close to San Diego. She made less money in a day than she used to make in an hour as a hotel housekeeper, and she frequently vomited from the stress of trying to get by. Cortes — an American citizen in his junior year of high school and a hopeful environmental engineer beginning to think about college admissions — would not follow. His life and his future were on the other side of the border. Cortes moved in with a cousin, and the family began a strange new life, split in two. The first time Ocampo and Cortes saw each other after the deportation was through a thick metal fence at the militarized border spot euphemistically known as Friendship Park. “My heart broke,” said Ocampo. “I’m banned from the country. I can’t go there. My children don’t want to live here, and I don’t want them to, either.”

On some weekends, Cortes crosses the border to see his mother and sister. After a year, he tends to think of himself as independent, a young man on his own, moving confidently between cities. “Though they’re only meters apart,” he said, “it’s almost like a separate dimension from each other.” Sometimes, he thinks about what he’s missing. “Other people just get to walk home, and once they enter the door, they see their parents. But because I don’t have that…” he said, trailing off. “In a way, it’s almost like a different kind of homesickness.”

Jair Cortes’s commute begins in San Diego, where he boards a bus, then a trolley, then walks through the border gate. Cortes; his younger sister, Kayla; and his mother share a meal before Cortes returns. There’s at least a 30-minute wait to cross back. “A lot of the memories with my mother isn’t exactly about seeing her as, like, a grand figure, but having her by my side,” Cortes said. “I never really thought of making a home in Mexico. I felt like home isn’t exactly a place so much as a feeling. So I felt like wherever my mom is, or at least where I feel comfortable, that’s my home.”