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In the spring of 2024, Hernán Portela and Karen Umaña sold everything they owned and moved from Bogotá, Colombia, to the United States. They wanted their children to get a good education, grow up in safety and be with family members who had lived in Los Angeles for decades.
After crossing the border from Mexico, they surrendered to the Border Patrol, which gave them ankle monitors and let them continue on.
They settled in quickly. Karen’s minimum-wage job and Hernán’s work washing cars enabled them to enjoy their new life in Los Angeles and even send money to family back in Bogotá.
But then that life was upended. Last December, Hernán was detained at a routine immigration appointment (he would eventually be sent to a facility in Louisiana); soon after, Karen and their children were sent to a detention facility in Dilley, Texas. On Feb. 16, Hernán was deported.
By now, the stories of family separation and of people sent to countries they had never been to have become routine. Less familiar is what happens to the hundreds of thousands of people, including almost 22,000 Colombians in the first three months of this year, who have been deported back to the places they were desperate to leave behind. How do they rebuild their lives there?
Photographs by Juan Arredondo Text by Jaime Lowe
But the same day Hernán arrived in Bogotá, Karen, Mateo and Christopher were unexpectedly deported to Bogotá as well.
Later that day, Karen’s parents, Omaira and Mario, came to visit Hernán.
In Los Angeles, they had lived with four members of Hernán’s family in a two-bedroom house. Once they had jobs — Hernán washing cars and driving for Uber, Karen working nights at a tortilla factory — they helped with the rent.
There were also bright moments in those early days: soccer, family meals, visits to the arcade.
In the years before their move to America, Hernán and Karen had run a coffee cart together to make money. Hernán also worked as a taxi driver. During one ride, a passenger stabbed him 10 times.
A few weeks after they arrived back in Bogotá, Hernán returned to driving.
Almost two months passed before the local public school gave the kids an evaluation. Karen was worried that they were falling behind and considered private school, but it was too expensive — about $400 to enroll them and then $330 a month.
“I do believe the sun will shine for us again in the future, and I know we’re not doing poorly — we have a place to stay, we have food — but it’s so hard to have so little control, so little choice,” Karen says. She worries about crime and about having to move and pay rent. But so far they have been lucky, and stability might come with time.
Karen still dreams of leaving Bogotá. “Really, I want to migrate again, to move while the kids are still young and can be enrolled in good schools so that they can get a good education,” she says. “It might be Spain; it might be Canada. I can’t stop thinking about all the possibilities.”
Juan Arredondo is a Colombian American documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work focuses on human rights, migration and conflict across Latin America and the United States. Jaime Lowe is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of three books, including “Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires.”
