After nearly six months in Houston’s Harris County Jail, the first thing 30-year-old Jorge S. wanted to do after he was deported to Mexico was find a phone and call his US-citizen wife, Kaitlynn.

“I need to find out what is going on with my baby,” he told us as he sat down at a desk with a phone at the Tamaulipas Institute for Migrants, a Mexican state agency that is the deportees’ second stop after Mexican Immigration. “I had about four months when I had no contact with them at all.”

Jorge S. speaks with Human Rights Watch researchers at the Instituto Tamaulipeco in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. © 2017 Human Rights Watch

Jorge went from Mexico to Houston five years ago, and after working eight months at a carwash, worked his way up to to earning more than US$120 a day building wooden fences. He met Kaitlynn a year after arriving, when she came to help Jorge and his roommates with housekeeping and laundry. Because she has a grandmother from Mexico, she spoke a little Spanish. When they first got acquainted, they used the internet’s automatic translators to chat, teaching each other their native tongues.

Their baby, Ja,dan – Kaitlynn wanted a unique name – was born prematurely in Houston in February 2016, but he was soon off the respirator, and was crawling around by 8 months, following Jorge around, and amazing his parents with his rapid development. He was smiling, as his father remembers it, “all the time.”

Jorge sometimes worked six days a week, but the family would walk to the Parker Road park. On weeknights, Kaitlynn and Jorge would help each other understand TV shows in English or Spanish – La Rosa de Guadalupe was a favorite of Kaitlynn’s.

On November 22, Jorge was arrested – he says for the first time in his life. He was drinking a beer while driving the car, he told us ruefully, and went through a stop sign in Houston without waiting the requisite three seconds. An officer stopped him, got him out of the car, and later accused Jorge of hitting him. “I didn’t,” Jorge says. “He pushed me to get my arms up, and I ducked. He told me to turn around, shoved me to the ground – smashing my mouth – cuffed me, and took me to jail. But he said I resisted.”

Jorge received a reduced, misdemeanor sentence of six months and served his time in maximum security, earning privileges that eventually allowed him to work in the laundry, washing the orange uniforms. That entitled him to receive an extra plate of food and – above all – free use of the phones, so that he could talk with Kaitlynn. At the end, when he was delivered to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), he signed up for voluntary repatriation because he couldn’t afford a lawyer to fight deportation.

When we saw him, Jorge was first planning to go to his parents in Tuzantla, Michoacán and then attempt to return to Kaitlynn and Ja,dan. “I had wanted to get citizenship, but now, with the misdemeanor, getting papers will be more complicated,” he told us. “I want to be with my baby. If God’s willing… a friend I met in jail knows how to get guides for crossing.”