Christina Toledo embraced her son Damian while video calling with her husband, Nexan Asencio Corado, who had been deported to Guatemala. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe staff) Published Feb. 23, 2026This story was reported over two months in Massachusetts and Guatemala.It was just the start of the journey, and Christina Toledo couldn’t stop thinking about the end. It had been four months since her husband, Nexan Aroldo Asencio Corado, had been deported by ICE. Now, before sunrise on a December morning, she was rushing through Logan Airport with their twin 4-year-old boys to catch a flight to Guatemala so they could be together for Christmas.Toledo, desperate to keep their family whole, had started the process to apply for legal residency in Guatemala. This month-long visit, she knew, would be a test. Could she really live there permanently? Was it really the right place for her American sons to grow up?“I’m excited, I’m nervous,” said Toledo, 39, keeping an eye on her boys as they waited near the Spirit Airlines counter at Logan. “I’m, like, all emotions right now.”Across the US, almost 10 million American citizens like Toledo live in households with undocumented people, according to an analysis of data from 2022 by the Center for Migration Studies, a policy group. ICE’s swift removal of immigrants from mixed-status families has pushed thousands of Americans into an excruciating dilemma: If they want to keep their family together, they must leave the US.Though Homeland Security officials say they’re after the “worst of the worst,” about 40 percent of those arrested by ICE in President Trump’s first year back in office had no criminal record, and many have lived here for years or decades. Like Asencio Corado, many have American children, jobs, neighbors, spouses. They have little hope of ever being allowed to return.Toledo traveled with her twins, Damian (pictured) and Jhon, to visit their father in Guatemala. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)Toledo and Asencio Corado had spent nine years in Milford together, about four of them married. She drove a bus for the school district for years and now helped manage a construction company, and he fixed up houses as a skilled carpenter. Their identical twins, Jhon and Damian, were baptized at Saint Mary of the Assumption Church, attended pre-K in the district, and went to soccer camp at a park near their house. Just last spring, the couple had started a business to serve Asencio Corado’s expanding clientele. Then came May 30, the cloudy morning when ICE arrested him outside their home. He had been in the US for a decade without legal status, and had already been deported once before after crossing the border without authorization. But the federal government had approved his petition to establish a qualifying relationship with Toledo, the first step toward getting his green card. His application to remain in the US during that process was pending. As their father was handcuffed, the twins watched, wide-eyed, from an upstairs window. “Daddy,” Damian said. “Arrest, arrest.”Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that Asencio Corado “chose to commit a felony by illegally reentering our country,” adding that he “physically resisted arrest” when he was detained on May 30. Toledo says he was trying to get back home to tell her what was happening. Parents living here illegally can request a free flight to their home country, along with $2,600, to “reserve the chance to come back the right legal way,” McLaughlin said in early February, before she announced she would step down from her post. If they come back illegally, she added, “we will find them, we will arrest them and they will NEVER return.”After the arrest, Toledo’s once orderly suburban life unraveled in a blur of visits to an ICE detention center in New Hampshire, consultations with lawyers, and anxious calls with her husband. “Truly, I’m sorry,” Asencio Corado told her on one call. “I feel guilty because you got married to someone who is illegal.”“And it was the best decision of my life,” she said, “don’t you understand that?”At home, Toledo saw reminders of their former life everywhere — in the family photos on the walls, in the bird feeder Asencio Corado built and painted with the boys’ names hanging in a tree outside. His clothes still hung in their bedroom closet. Toledo couldn’t bear to pack them up.Toledo laughed with the twins as they waited at the gate for their flight to Guatemala City. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)On the flight to Guatemala, Toledo turned the situation over in her mind. Should she stay in the US and keep the home they rented, her modest but steady income, the kids’ strong schools, all the opportunities that are open to children growing up in suburban Boston? Or should she move to Asencio Corado’s remote Guatemalan village, so she could be with her husband and their sons could grow up with the father they adored? After more than eight hours, their plane flew over a stretch of mountains and volcanoes. “Look, look! Guatemala!” Toledo pointed out the window. The twins were ecstatic.“See daddy!” Jhon said.Once through Customs, they rushed into the arrivals area. A crowd of families held balloons and flowers. Jhon spotted his father and was so excited he threw his stuffed Spider-Man into the air. Asencio Corado swooped the boys up in his arms, which were tattooed with their names and Toledo’s. The couple embraced, squeezing Damian between them.In moments like this, Toledo’s doubts melted away: Her family should be together, whatever it took. But a part of her knew things could never be as simple as that. Asencio Corado and Toledo reunited at the airport in Guatemala City, after months apart. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)The boys clambered into their father’s Toyota 4Runner. His family lived about five hours away from Guatemala City, over dangerous, narrow roads that twisted through the countryside. They stopped at a Walmart to stock up on bags of rice and other groceries. Whenever the boys lost sight of their father in the aisles, they looked around nervously. Where’s Daddy?Asencio Corado wished he could buy them everything they wanted, but money was tight. They relied mostly on Toledo’s income now, and she was missing weeks of work for this trip. They decided the boys could get one toy each. Jhon settled on a blue plastic car, Damian chose red. Asencio Corado bent down to scoop up Jhon at Walmart, where they'd stopped before traveling to his small town near the border of El Salvador. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)It was dark when they reached El Amatillo, a mountainside village of small brick and adobe homes in southeast Guatemala, less than ten miles from the Salvadoran border. Asencio Corado’s family had lived here for generations. Many of his relatives harvested corn used to make masa for tortillas, earning about 7 dollars a day.The family pulled up through the village streets around 8 p.m. They were greeted by a crowd of grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles. Asencio Corado’s parents lived in a white one-story home with a red brick tiled roof. It had once been dilapidated. The wages he’d sent back from the US over the last decade had let them add rooms, fortify the walls against frequent earthquakes, and make other improvements. Next door, Asencio Corado and Toledo were building their own home, but it was still unfinished. Only one bedroom was in any shape to live in, and they’d all crowd into it during their visit. The second-level flooring was bare concrete, and the stairs leading up to it had no railings, which they’d need for the twins. There was still a lot of work to do.Jhon and Damian navigated the stairs in the unfinished home his parents are building near family in their village, El Amatillo. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)Damian played with his toy car on the roof of his father’s home. Jhon (right) rode on the front of a dirt bike with a family friend as Damian rode behind.The boys loved being back in Guatemala. They’d been here once before with their mother, shortly after their father was deported. This time they rode on the back of their cousins’ motorcycles, shrieking with glee. Asencio Corado took them on drives in his SUV, and they stuck their heads out the window to feel the breeze.Toledo was relieved. It was nice to have built-in support after managing on her own in the US. Toledo speaks fluent Spanish — her mother is Puerto Rican and her father is from Ecuador — and calls her mother-in-law “madre.” She’d become close with her husband’s siblings and nieces, who adored the twins. Still, Toledo noticed how she and the boys stuck out here. She spoke mostly English with them, though they knew some Spanish. The twins were both fascinated and frightened by the dogs, horses, and other animals. They ran away from the chickens when they got too close. Toledo was born and raised in New Jersey, and moved to Massachusetts in 2007. She missed the comforts of life in the US — dependable running water, a washing machine, a dishwasher. Maybe she could get used to living without them, she thought. There was so much love here. They began to settle in, setting up family pictures Toledo brought from Milford, a TV for the boys. “We still have things to get done and fix up a little bit, so I’m just trying to do that,” Toledo said as she walked through the house a day after their arrival. “And then, enjoy the time here.”Asencio Corado, though, found every day unexpectedly taxing. He wanted to enjoy the time together as a family, desperately. But as the boys played, he felt a pit in his stomach. One night, the extended family sat down to dinner. Asencio Corado was missing. As the family ate under a sunset of bright orange and red, he sat in his darkened home next door, scrolling through videos on his phone. Damian and his father during a visit to a family friend. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)He kept slipping away like this, taking off in his Toyota or on his motorcycle, heading to a nearby soccer field to clear his head. Toledo wondered where he’d gone, but she tried not to press him too hard. They both knew the deportation had pushed their marriage onto shaky ground — but neither wanted to say it.Alone on the couch, Asencio Corado was thinking. He treasured the time with his wife and kids, but he knew they would have to leave again, and he couldn’t be sure when they’d come back.“When I’m happy, I don’t want to get used to that,” he said.Sometimes he wondered whether everything would be easier for Toledo and the children if they stayed in the US, and didn’t worry about him here.“I don’t want to be a burden,” he said. Early on a warm morning, about 15 people from the area were working in a corn field. Some had been there since 4 a.m. Asencio Corado’s 20-year-old brother was running the operation, dumping ears of corn into a large machine that ripped off the husks and delivered the kernels out the other end for the workers to package and load onto trucks. A 7-year-old relative of the twins, Carlos, dashed around the machine, lugging large plastic crates of corn. He was tiny, and sometimes tasked with the most dangerous job: squeezing under the rumbling machine to grab any ears of corn that had fallen through.Asencio Corado’s father gestured toward Carlos. “That’s how Aroldo used to work,” he said, using his son’s middle name. “He worked hard.”Carlos, a 7-year-old relative of the twins, wiped his face as he worked. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)Families in El Amatillo largely make their living harvesting corn for tortillas. The pay is around 7 dollars a day. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)In Massachusetts, Asencio Corado often rose for work before dawn and returned after dark. He was a proud new business owner. But in his first few months back in Guatemala, he rarely joined his family in the fields. As time passed, confronted with the scarcity of other work, he had begun to show up more often. But not today. He couldn’t do it. He was 30 years old. He had come to the United States to help his family out of extreme poverty, and remembers growing up with a single pair of shoes that had to last the whole year. The money he sent home transformed the lives of his parents, his siblings, his niece. He was proud of that. What was his purpose now? “This isn’t how I thought things would turn out,” he said.Toledo kept trying to imagine a new life here. On nights like this, she could see it.Christmas was six days away, and they’d driven a half hour to the town of Atescatempa, for a holiday outing. Jhon and Damian raced around a playground under twinkling lights, chased by their laughing father. He helped them off the slides, tied their shoelaces, and bought them chicken tenders near the town plaza. Asencio Corado had spoken by phone to his mother-in-law in Florida. “She told me to try and not think about when they leave,” he said. He was doing his best.Asencio Corado embraced his twins. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)On a visit to a playground, Jhon (right) emerged from the slide as Damian climbed back up. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)In front of the town Christmas tree, he took selfies with Toledo — she wore a silver necklace that spelled “Aroldo,” his middle name — and pulled the boys in close for pictures. Their family felt whole again.As the twins trotted over to the angel statues outside a Catholic church, Toledo thought about the last time she’d been to church, in Framingham, six months ago. Her husband was still detained in New Hampshire then, and she prayed for his release. For a time, she thought that if she had “more faith, maybe something would change,” she said. But it hadn’t. Now, the questions nagged at her again. What would they do for money? What about her own hope to earn her G.E.D. and go to college? She’d like to be a social worker or counselor. What about the boys’ education?If it wasn’t for all of that, she said, “I would live here, with no problem, no hesitation.” The boys’ grandmother, Dora Alicia Corado Quiñónez (left) watched as Jhon (center) and Carlos played together in El Amatillo. (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)The twins had been born prematurely and spent a week in the neonatal intensive care unit at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester. They had partial hearing loss, which caused significant speech delays. But they had individualized education programs at pre-K in Milford, including speech therapy, and were making tremendous progress. Could they get that kind of help here?Some of Asencio Corado’s relatives had talked about how dissatisfied they were with their kids’ education. One of his sisters, Didia, had two school-age children. “The schools are all deteriorated,” she said. She wished the local government would invest more in them.Toledo wanted her twins to grow up and be anything that they wanted. If she moved to Guatemala, she worried she would be taking that opportunity from them.Asencio Corado had the same dreams for thei