Many deportation stories focus on the experience of being forced out of your country, but what happens after?

The deportation was traumatic, but it doesn't break me.

Binge In Perfect Paradise, Return to Mexico, wherever you get your podcasts.

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You're listening to imperfect paradise, the show about Hidden Worlds and Messy realities.

I'm Antonia Cérejido.

As we've been producing this story about Daniel Samora and his return to Mexico.

I've been thinking about my six years as a producer on NPR's Latino USA,

where we covered a lot of immigration stories.

And there was one story in particular that my former colleague Fernando Chabari reported on that kept coming up for me.

Another story of a family separated by the border.

It was about a family in Tucson, Arizona that had been split up in 2009.

The dad and all four kids, ages 4 to 16, were all U.S. citizens, but the mom, Gloria, was undocumented.

And in the process of trying to get her green card, she was required to travel to Mexico,

where she was barred from returning to the US for 10 years.

The 10-year bar to reentry is the punishment for being in the states without documentation

for over a year.

And it doesn't mean you could automatically come back in 10 years. It just

means you have to wait 10 years before you can legally try to apply.

...