Before she was deported to Mexico last December, Olga Lidia had always been fairly active on Instagram. The 33-year-old mother of three never had a large following, just a small circle of friends in Las Vegas where she lived, to whom she’d broadcast details of her day-to-day. “I used to love showing my life, where I would go to have dinner, what my kids would wear,” she says. But after five months in ICE detention, a flight to the border in Tijuana, and another flight to Oaxaca to move into the abandoned childhood home she hadn’t visited since she left the country at 5 years old, the last thing she felt like doing was posting. She didn’t know how to talk about the brutal experience with friends, only some of whom knew she was undocumented. “It was embarrassing, if I’m honest, for me to hop back on after six months of being absent and then just be like, ‘Well, I’m in Mexico.’”
Lidia was forced to leave everything behind: her three children and fiancé, her job as an office manager, and the home in which she lived and cared for her mother, who is legally blind. In Oaxaca, she slowly started picking up the pieces. Over the course of a couple months of working at her uncle’s greenhouse, growing cucumbers and tomatoes, she saved the $15 a day she made to bring her two youngest kids — a 14-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son — to join her in Mexico. From a spare room at her aunt’s place, she cooked tlayudas and cheeseburgers and sold them to her pueblo to support her family. “My close friends were like, ‘You should get on TikTok and share your story,’” she recalls. At first Lidia sat on the advice, still reeling from the shock and pain of her deportation. “One day, I just decided, Hey, you know what? I’m going to give it a shot.” Her first post, an 11-second clip titled “From City Girl to Rancho,” got a little over 400,000 views. Her next one, a single bare-bones photo of the facility where she’d spent her first hour in Mexico, got more than 1.6 million.
Six months later, Lidia has 80,000 followers and is a thriving content creator in the fast-growing #LifeAfterDeportation TikTok genre. Here, deportees document being forced to find new homes and jobs in unfamiliar countries, and share the occasional silver lining of leaving an increasingly hostile America. Lidia was deported under the Biden administration after living in the U.S. for 28 years. Many others are being forced to leave now as the Trump administration continues to carry out the largest mass-deportation program in U.S. history. During the first six months of that, social media was flooded with shocking footage of ICE raids and arrests. What Lidia and others like her are showing is the complicated, everyday reality of those who have survived the experience — and creating a community for those already on the other side of it.
When Sam Rojas, a 33-year-old from Queens, moved to Cuenca, Ecuador, with her husband after he got deported in 2020, she didn’t know how to tell her network of acquaintances. “Oh my gosh, where is this? It’s so pretty,” colleagues from her old office would DM her when she posted Instagram stories of the green mountains in El Cajas National Park. On the anniversary of the day she and her husband arrived in Ecuador, Rojas made a TikTok about what happened. “One year ago today, my husband took what will likely be his last steps on U.S. soil,” Rojas narrates over snippets of their old life in New York, from family dinners to dog walks overlooking sunny views of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. “Since we were both raised in Queens, we never really considered living outside of New York, until, that is, the morning that ICE agents knocked on our door and took my husband away.” Rojas woke up to millions of views and comments from those in similar situations. Some people from back in New York sent supportive messages, wishing the couple well and apologizing for what they’d been through. Others she never heard from again.
Most #LifeAfterDeportation creators are not cast out to countries where they have no connections. Many of them make content about how to support yourself in a place where you may have roots but where opportunities are few, old skills don’t translate, and it’s difficult to make enough money in local currency to stay afloat — if you can even navigate the circuitous process of getting approved to work in a different country. In an Instagram morning-routine video, a lash technician who was recently deported from Texas to Mexico films herself cleaning the empty house her aunt is letting her live in, one of the few tasks she turns to in her efforts to keep busy. “There’s really nothing much I can do out here,” she tells followers. “It’s a small town, there’s not a lot of people, and I definitely cannot do lashes.” Deportees like 41-year-old Marlen Islas support themselves by doing remote work for U.S.-based companies and use their TikToks to teach others how to do the same.
Some deportees have managed to use TikTok as a source of income. But only creators with over 10,000 followers, who made their accounts in the countries eligible for the platform’s creator-rewards program — U.S., the U.K., Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, and South Korea — can actually profit off views, provided they get enough of them and that videos meet length and quality requirements. Rojas, who created her account while still in the U.S., can make real money; she once made $2,500 from a video. Likewise, Lidia, who also made her TikTok account in the U.S., made $4,000 from one. Creators who start their accounts after they left the States in countries like Mexico aren’t eligible for rewards.
For many, the real reward is just feeling a little less isolated, if only for the span of a minute-long video. Oscar Romo has been living in Guadalajara for about a month since his deportation earlier this summer. He’s found an apartment and works at a call center, but it’s been a lonely adjustment. This month, his son, who’s back in Wisconsin, will turn 2 without him. His parents, who are U.S. residents, flew down to help him get set up. “And then it was like, ‘You’re on your own until we come back to visit.’” Romo lives near an aunt and uncle he’s still getting to know. “It’s not like, ‘Hey, can I come over for Sunday dinner?’” He’s sure he could, but it feels odd.
Nights are the hardest. That’s when he turns to the comments and DMs he’s received about his videos on TikTok — he’s vlogged everything from his arrival in Mexico to line-drying laundry outdoors — full of support from the strangers who watch him. “I could show you 5,000 messages in my DMs of people praying on my success,” he says. “I sit there and thumb through.”
Sometimes the TikTok posts lead to in-person friendships that ease the transition. In the comments of Lidia’s videos, viewers tagged fellow TikToker Annie Garcia, a 35-year-old law student and mother of five living in the resort town of Puerto Vallarta, and encouraged them to connect. Garcia had been documenting her own deportation story on YouTube, TikTok, and Patreon for four years and knew what it was like to be separated from her children, who are now dual citizens and live with her in Mexico.
Lidia and Garcia had never spoken on the phone before they decided to hop on a TikTok Live together. An audience of 350 tuned in as the two shared their stories and flashed heart-hands at each other. “You know exactly what I feel,” Lidia told Garcia through a screen. “You lost everything.” They became friends, and in May, Garcia helped Lidia move to Puerto Vallarta, where the high concentration of tourism means more jobs for English speakers, especially in customer service and call centers.
The resort town is becoming something of an enclave for deportees. “It’s something I’ve longed for,” says Garcia. “A place of belonging.” In June, she posted a video of a hangout where ten of her new friends — deportees, spouses of deportees, and recent immigrants from the U.S. — cheers in a local sushi restaurant. Together, they do TikTok challenges and go out for movie nights. “Should we make a YouTube reality show?” one creator asks in one of her video captions.
And the group is expanding. Four months ago, 34-year-old Harvard alum Francisco Hernández-Corona self-deported there from Dallas, along with his husband, a U.S. citizen. They picked Puerto Vallarta because it seemed safe and LGBTQ-friendly. (“It’s gay mecca,” Hernández-Corona says.) One day, he ran into Garcia at the beach. He recognized her from TikTok. “I said, ‘Hi, I just self-deported. I just got here. I’m still afraid.’ She was like, ‘Why don’t you come hang out with me?’”
Through Garcia, Hernández-Corona met other deportees in the city. Before long, he was sharing his own story on TikTok. Once, a Trump supporter messaged him directly. “I disagree with some of the things you talk about, but I really love watching you and wish you hadn’t left,” she wrote. “I wish there was something we could do for someone like you. We need people like you.” He thanked her for watching.
Through their videos, Life After Deportation creators are still working to acclimate to unanticipated realities. “It’s been eight months now, but I still haven’t accepted it,” says Lidia, whose teenage daughter will soon return to the States to live with her grandmother and go back to school. Lidia recently vlogged the “emotional roller coaster” of planning the girl’s quinceañera, which will be held in Las Vegas next year, from Mexico. The two just went dress-shopping together, and Lidia’s been FaceTiming her sister, who lives in the States, to look at venues from afar. Lidia remembers asking Garcia, “At what point did you know Mexico was going to be home? Didn’t you feel like you couldn’t settle for this, like this isn’t your life? She told me, ’Absolutely.’ It took her years.”
Lately, Hernández-Corona has been depressed. He hasn’t posted or gone on TikTok Live for weeks. Messages pour in from viewers asking where he is and sending him “big hugs.” While in Mexico, he’s missed the wedding of a close friend, the birth of another’s child. He misses his sisters, his family, his old routines. He hates that he had to make the decision to self-deport, even as a quick doomscroll confirms it was a necessary one. “When I first got here, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it feels great, like this really nice vacation,’” he says. “I’m at the beach, there’s so many things to do, the tacos, the food.” As with any vacation, “at some point you’re ready to go back home. But I can’t go home.”
To cheer him up, his husband suggests he go to the beach. “I already got bored at the beach,” he says. He nudges him to go see the sunset, which is especially beautiful there. “And I’m like, ‘I already saw the sunset.’”