Mi Amor

Love Letters

The Boston Globe

Relationships, Society & Culture

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nexan Asencio Corado was 20 when he left Guatemala and crossed into the U.S. illegally. He wound up settling in Massachusetts and built a life there. Within a decade, he was working in construction and framing. He fell in love with Christina Toledo and married her. They had two twin sons. In May, Nexan – who had started the process of seeking lawful permanent residency in the U.S. – was arrested by ICE agents and brought to a Federal Correctional Institution. From that moment, Nexan and Christina faced important choices about how to stay together, care for each other, and protect their family. In this episode, Boston Globe immigration reporter Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio tells the story of Nexan and Christina, using recordings from their life and phone calls, with their permission. We love feedback and questions at Love Letters – and with this episode, there’s a lot to talk about. After listening, please send your thoughts to loveletters@globe.com. You can always email us a voice memo. We’re also a relationship advice column. You can send your anonymous questions to loveletters@globe.com. To learn more about this story and Love Letters, in general, sign up for the Love Letters newsletter at Boston.com/Meredith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everybody. Just a warning for today. We'll be talking about immigration, ice raids, and
0:11.6	separated families. I just wanted to let you know before you listen. For the past year, I've watched
0:17.9	reporters all over the country and in my own Boston Globe newsroom
0:22.4	cover immigration with a new, all-encompassing kind of focus. I've seen these reporters
0:29.4	show up to ice raids, try to figure out where a family member's loved ones have been detained.
0:35.9	They've investigated who gets flagged as a possible threat to this country, and why.
0:40.9	I've worried about the well-being of these reporters, because the stories they tell can be
0:46.0	complicated, personal, and devastating.
0:49.0	And the work seems never-ending.
0:52.2	I've also thought a lot about the specifics of what they've seen, how families and
0:57.5	people in love cope with being separated and the threat of being pulled apart. That's why today I am so
1:04.9	grateful to welcome a coworker who said she'd come on love letters to talk about this and tell a specific
1:10.4	story that's been on her mind a lot.
1:14.0	My name is Julia MacDonald, Nieto del Rio. I'm the immigration reporter for the Boston Globe.
1:21.2	Tell me, how long have you been a reporter? I've been a reporter for about seven years, and I've been
1:26.5	covering immigration specifically for around five of those years.
1:30.9	As a journalist, when people say to you, like, do you go in with a view of this?
1:36.6	Do you go in with an opinion about what should be happening?
1:39.1	How do you explain to them what the reporter's lenses of this?
1:46.0	Yeah, I often get this question, whether it's on panels or out reporting.
1:52.0	And I really view my job as going in to find, you know, the truth and what has happened at a very, you know, simple, basic level.
2:05.0	And then obviously stories evolve from there.
	...

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