Deported from US, these influencers are monetizing their misfortune

The Herald Scotland

14 hours ago

Expelled from the United States, young Mexican immigrants like Garcia, 35, are documenting the aftermath of their deportation online. Their videos - raw grief over what they lost in America, surprise and gratitude for what they've found in Mexico - are rapidly gaining them tens of thousands of followers.
At least a dozen of these deportees-turned-influencers, Garcia included, have started over in Mexico's west coast beach gem, Puerto Vallarta.
"If there's one thing I wish my content could embody it's how much life there is on this side of the border," Garcia wrote June 15 on Instagram. "Our countries aren't what they were 20 or 30 years ago when our parents left."
Returning to an unfamiliar 'home'
More than 70,000 Mexican nationals were deported from the United States to Mexico in the first six months of 2025, according to Mexico's Interior Ministry.
That's down from the more than 102,000 deported during the same six-month period in 2024, when people were being deported after crossing the border. Now, the people being deported are more likely to have built lives and families in the United States.
With President Donald Trump's aggressive mass deportation campaign underway, Francisco Hernandez-Corona feared being detained.
So he self-deported to Mexico, accompanied by his husband. He started vlogging. The 30-something Harvard graduate and former Dreamer had been taken to the United States illegally as a boy, he explained on TikTok. Multiple attempts to legalize his status in the United States failed.
In June, he posted his migration - and self-deportation - stories online.
Between photos of golden sunsets and mouthwatering tacos, he posted in July: "Self-deporting isn't always freedom and joy and new adventures. Sometimes it's pain and nostalgia and anger and sadness. Sometimes you just miss the home that was."
'Life in the pueblo is not easy'
Mexico remains a country of extremes, where stunning vistas and limitless wealth can be found in big cities and beach resorts, while hardship and poverty often overwhelm smaller communities.
Olga Mijangos was deported from Las Vegas in on Christmas Eve 2024, two years after being charged with a DUI. She returned to the Oaxaca state pueblo she had left when she was 5.
Mijangos, 33, has tattoos on her neck, stylized brows and long lashes - all part of her Vegas style.
Back in her hometown, she began posting videos of goats being herded through the streets; the community rodeo; the traditional foods she began cooking. She posted videos from her first job: harvesting and cleaning cucumbers, earning 300 pesos a day, or $15.
"I clearly understand why my mother decided to take us when we were little. Life in the pueblo is not easy," she said in a video of the cucumber harvest. "There is hard-living. There is poverty."
Struggling to make ends meet for her family, including two children with her in Mexico and one in the United States, she moved to Puerto Vallarta where she met Garcia and Hernandez-Corona.
They began forming an in-real-life community of deportees-turned-influencers and others who left the U.S. They meet up for dinner at least once a month, and they create content. In their videos, they're having fun, drinks, laughs. But they're also celebrating what binds them to each other and to their parents' migration stories before them: their capacity for reinvention, and their resilience.
"I'm very proud to be Mexican, and I'm learning to love a country I didn't get to grow up in, but I shouldn't have had to leave the home I knew to find peace and freedom," said Hernandez-Corona, a clinical psychologist, in a July post on TikTok. "This isn't a blessing. It's resilience."
Spanish skills, savings and support all matter
A lot of their content has the draw of a classic American up-by-their-bootstraps success story, with a modern social media twist: from hardship to sponsorship.
But the reality is that deportees' experience of building a life in Mexico can vary dramatically, depending on their earning capacity, language and cultural skills, and other factors, said Israel Ibarra Gonzalez, a professor of migration studies at Mexico's Colegio de la Frontera Norte university.
Deportees with savings in U.S. dollars and a college degree, those who speak Spanish and have supportive relatives in Mexico, may have an easier time than those who don't, he said.
Others may face life-threatening risks upon their return, from the violence of organized crime to political persecution or death threats.
"However much violence they've lived with in the United States, it's not the same as going back to a war zone," Ibarra Gonzalez said, referring to certain Mexican states where drug cartels are actively battling for territorial control.
Wherever they land - with the exception of some cosmopolitan cities - deported Mexicans have faced local prejudices, too. They've often been viewed as criminals, or their deportations as a failure.
"Did I feel a lot of judgment? Absolutely," Mijangos said of her return to Oaxaca. "Even though it's my roots, I basically came from a different world. I have tattoos. I lived my life a certain way that they don't. I could feel people talking."
But friends back home in Vegas, and new friends in Mexico, started encouraging her to share her deportation journey. It took her a few weeks to work up the courage. She posted a video of sending her U.S. citizen son to a Mexican school.
It racked up nearly 14 million views and 2 million "likes" on TikTok, she said. Suddenly, TikTok was asking if she wanted to join the app's content creators rewards program.
'Your criminal record doesn't follow you'
By taking their stories online, deported content creators say they are dismantling longstanding taboos around deportation in Mexico, shining a light on their experiences as Mexicans who didn't grow up in Mexico, and on their past mistakes.
Garcia speaks openly on her social media about the financial crimes she committed in her 20s, for which she was charged and convicted, and that ultimately led to her deportation.
She migrated to the United States when she was 4 years old, "out of necessity," she said. Her mother married an American citizen in Salt Lake City, Utah, and she and her mother both became legal permanent residents.
But when Garcia began acting out as a child, the state intervened. "I was taken from my mother at the age of 12 because I had behavioral issues," she told USA TODAY. "I was separated from my family, and I grew up with other juveniles with behavior (problems)."
As a young single mother, she would steal from her employers when she couldn't pay the bills, she said.
In Mexico she found a clean slate. "Your criminal record doesn't follow you," once you've paid your debt to society in the United States, Garcia tells her followers. "You can pursue higher education. Any debts you had in the U.S. do not follow you here."
As Trump's immigration crackdown widens, Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo has been publicly offering moral support to Mexicans facing deportation. She has called them "heroes and heroines" who "have contributed to the United States their entire lives."
"We're going to keep defending our brothers and sisters there," she said in a June 25 news conference.
'Maybe ... things will change'
Garcia's social media accounts have grown so popular that she's earning a living, in part, from content creation. She is doing research on reintegration after deportation for an American university. And she has "tunnel vision," she said, on completing a law degree in Mexico.
The pain of her deportation, and the losses it brought with it, are mostly in the past. Except when she catches news of the immigration raids in the United States.
The memories of her detention, and her separation from her five children, including an infant, remain fresh. It took Garcia more than a year after her 2017 deportation to win custody of her children, to bring them to Mexico.
"It's very, very triggering to me to see what's going on up there," she said. "It's a bittersweet feeling. I feel safe. I feel relief. We're here. It doesn't affect us any more. But it feels heartbreaking to see other families living through it.
"When I first started sharing my story my idea was, 'Maybe if I talk about this, things will change'" in the United States, she said.
She kept at it, despite facing hate and trolls online. She kept posting, even after losing two jobs in Mexico for openly discussing her deportation and criminal past on social media.
She kept sharing, thinking, she said: "This is what is going to change things one day: us putting our stories out there."