After more than a decade of living in the United States without incident, 19-year-old Emerson Colindres, a budding soccer star who had just graduated high school, was arrested this summer during an immigration check-in and spent two weeks in a county jail before being deported to Honduras.
Days later, his mother and sister made a decision that likely pleased the Trump administration: They followed Colindres out of the United States.
Colindres’ mother, Ada Bell Baquedano Amador, told Spectrum News 1 that she and her two kids had left Honduras to escape rampant violence in the country. In 2023, an immigration judge denied their asylum application and issued a final order of removal. Now, Baquedano Amador was wearing an ankle monitor, and the Trump administration had given her 30 days to leave the United States. With her son gone, she decided to return with her daughter to the country they’d once fled.
“Thank God, this is all going to be over,” Baquedano Amador said.
That sentiment, variations of which have reverberated across the country, is exactly what President Donald Trump wants. There are millions of undocumented people in the United States ― far more than Trump will likely be able to deport on his own. So the administration is working overtime to create a pervasive atmosphere of punishment, uncertainty and fear that it hopes will convince people in the immigration legal system to leave the United States on their own.
