Why some Georgia immigrants self-deport: 'I'm not going to live in fear'

ATLANTA — At the start of 2025, Ataulfo was living in Gwinnett County, where a job in landscaping made him feel on track toward achieving his version of the American dream.

Now, Ataulfo is back in Guatemala, picking beans and corn for sustenance and confronted every day by the poverty he tried leaving behind six years ago when he crossed illegally into the United States.

But Ataulfo wasn’t deported. Instead, he chose to return to his homeland because he says daily life under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown had become untenable.

President Donald Trump’s White House has made immigration enforcement and mass deportations a centerpiece of his second term — signing executive orders that make more immigrants subject to an expedited removal process, bypassing immigration courts and reversing a policy that prevented “sensitive locations” like churches from being a target for immigration enforcement operations.

Ataulfo asked The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to withhold his last name to avoid jeopardizing future immigration cases should he attempt a return to the U.S. The AJC connected with Ataulfo though Stacy Ehrisman, an Atlanta-area immigration attorney whose office handled his case.

“I took the decision to come on my own so that they wouldn’t grab me as I was getting off work or wherever else,” Ataulfo said. “I couldn’t go outside without being scared that they would arrest me. You walk around with a kind of fear that, from one moment to the next, they could catch you. It’s uncomfortable. You’re uncomfortable.”

“My objective was to do many more things, work there for longer,” he added. “There are things I never got to achieve because of Trump. The plans of many people were ruined.”

To federal immigration authorities, Ataulfo’s return is a success story.

Hampered by caps on staffing and resources that make the logistics of rounding up, detaining and removing immigrants difficult to scale up, the Trump administration needs increased self-deportation to realize its vision of massively reducing the country’s undocumented population.

Immigration lawyers and advocates say authorities are trying to do this by cultivating fear. In recent months, there have been high-profile removals to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador and to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“Some people are choosing not to go to work,” Ehrisman said. She noted that immigrant parents are coaching their U.S.-born children about how to interact with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents should they run into them at school.

“You know, it’s: ‘Don’t tell ICE that Mommy is at home,’” she said. “It’s affecting the children. It’s affecting the parents … (Trump) is controlling people with that terror.”

Increasingly direct exhortations for unauthorized immigrants to return on their own accord are becoming more common.

In what the Department of Homeland Security has called a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, Secretary Kristi Noem has been warning of consequences for immigrants who do not self-deport.

“President Trump has a clear message for those who are in our country illegally: Leave now. If you don’t, we will find you, and we will deport you. You will never return.” she says in a widely circulated ad. “If you leave now, you may have an opportunity to return.”

Trump himself relayed that message in a different ad.

“People in our country illegally can self-deport the easy way or they can get deported the hard way, and that’s not pleasant,” he said, speaking from the Oval Office.

The administration has also ratcheted up the pressure on hundreds of thousands of immigrants granted temporary legal status under Biden. It is effectively canceling the Social Security numbers they had lawfully obtained, making them ineligible to work in the country and cutting them off from using basic financial services, such as credit cards or bank accounts.

At a press conference earlier this month, the Atlanta ICE field office deputy director, Kristen Sullivan, said that self-deportations from Georgia are “happening,” though she shared no numbers.

“We’re encouraging self-deportation,” she said. “So if you self-deport, you can go back to your country on your own terms. We won’t be coming out to your house and arresting you, arresting family members or people that you associate with.”

According to Ehrisman, several of her clients have made the decision to leave.

“They’ve just said, ‘I’m not going to live in fear,’ and returned home,” she said.

The Rev. Ventura Ruiz is at the helm of the Primera Iglesia Bautista Hispana de Lawrenceville, which in recent years attracted many new immigrants from the border.

He said one parishioner had already self-deported to Nicaragua and that others are thinking of following his example, especially as recent arrivals who came under Biden lose their temporary status in the country.

“They need to decide what to do. Are they going to leave? Are they going to stay? It depends on what their plans were when they came,” he said. “If they wanted to come here only for a while and then go back, well, that’s what they can do. But if they wanted to stay here permanently, they need to make a decision. Things have gotten complicated for them.”

According to Ehrisman, the more likely candidates for self-deportation are younger immigrants who arrived to the U.S. relatively recently and don’t yet have children. Anyone with deeper roots in the country is likely less mobile.

Carolina Antonini, a local immigration attorney, has had many conversations with clients open to returning home but who she said “could not bring themselves to (leave) because of their situation.” Among them is a mother with a disabled U.S.-born child. She is worried that she won’t be able to find the specialized medical care the child needs back in her country.

Meanwhile, another client, a man from Nicaragua, tried returning home earlier this month but was ultimately unable to board his flight because it turns out the government of Nicaragua canceled his passport and stripped his citizenship — not an uncommon fate for Nicaraguan exiles opposed to authoritarian president Daniel Ortega.

In Guatemala, Ataulfo sometimes feels nostalgic for the life he once led in metro Atlanta, which allowed him to support himself and his parents back home.

“I miss the work, which I liked. I miss my friends and so many other things,” he said. “But I miss it before, when there was more freedom and you could live without fear.”