At eleven o’clock every morning, Adrian Bernal Rodriguez sets up a well-used charcoal grill on the beach in Tijuana and starts cooking shrimp. He will spend all day standing in the sand, often in the scorching sun, over a fire—a task made all the more difficult by Bernal’s orthopedic walking boots. He broke both of his ankles, in May, when he fell off the steel border wall between Mexico and the United States, which ranges in height from six to eighteen feet in different places.

Bernal, who is forty, spent most of his adult life on the north side of the border. He first crossed into the U.S. at the age of twenty-five and lived in San Diego, working as a cook at a Mexican restaurant and sending money home to Acapulco, where he had two children, who were five and seven years old when he first left. In 2013, he got a parking ticket—his first—and couldn’t figure out how to pay it. He didn’t realize that he could get arrested for not paying. When he was arrested, the police handed him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. An immigration attorney told Bernal that, because he had been attacked and badly beaten in San Diego, he could qualify for a U visa—a nonimmigrant visa that allows victims of violent crime to stay in the United States if they can provide information helpful to prosecuting the perpetrators.

While his application was pending, the government allowed Bernal to continue living in San Diego as long as he checked in every two or three months, as directed by an ICE officer. Earlier this year, Bernal finally got his hearing. The immigration judge denied his visa application. The judge told him that he had the right to appeal but would no longer be allowed to live in the community. ICE took him into custody.

After two months in immigration detention, Bernal decided to drop his appeal and asked to be voluntarily deported. In April of this year, he returned to Mexico. For about a month and a half, he tried to figure out how to get back into the United States. A lot of people around were waiting for a foggy night—some planned to climb the border wall, others hoped to swim around it. On land, the wall, which was built in 1994, is actually two walls—concrete bars and chicken wire on the Tijuana side, steel bars on the San Diego side. In the water, the Tijuana side of the fence juts out about a hundred yards. On May 23rd, someone Bernal had met climbed the wall successfully. The next day, Bernal fell off.

When he could walk again, wearing orthopedic boots and using crutches, Bernal decided to start his business. He was staying at a shelter that may be the northwesternmost building in Mexico—where the Tijuana boardwalk meets the border. In a city of many shelters, this one, called Esperanza—meaning “Hope”—is one of the oldest. Migrants have been landing here since 1989. For the past five years, Border Angels, a nonprofit based in San Diego, has helped run the shelter. Among other things, the organization built three-tier wooden bunks so that people no longer had to sleep on a concrete floor. Of Esperanza’s thirty or so current inhabitants, all but five are Mexican—some are recent deportees from the U.S., others are not-so-recent, and at least two people, a sixty-two-year-old woman and her thirty-five-year-old son, were displaced from Mexico City by last year’s earthquake.

There are a lot of venders on the beach: people selling sliced mango with plum sauce, fresh-cut potato chips on a stick, and superhero figures riding plastic tricycles. Bernal saw a man selling grilled shrimp and figured that he could sell even more by adding a special sauce of his own making. He told me, through a translator, that he lucked into a vender permit. He started with the grill and has since added an old bulky wooden cart that serves as a counter, two large beach umbrellas—an older blue one and a newer red one with the Coca-Cola logo—and two plastic tables and four chairs.

When I visited the stand on Wednesday, a pair of Tijuana policemen were buying shrimp. Several other men from the shelter were helping out, setting up shop and then heading off to hawk the shrimp—which are slathered in Bernal’s special sauce and served on thin wooden sticks—directly to the beachgoers. Bernal’s crutches were lying on the sand behind the counter. He told me that last week he made five thousand pesos, which is about two hundred and fifty dollars, in just three days. He said that with business this good, he might just stay in Tijuana, even though the judge at his hearing in the United States told him he would be entitled to a tourist visa because he had no criminal record—and even, Bernal said, suggested that he could marry a United States citizen and stay in the country that way.

As deportation stories go, this is not a tragic one. It is ordinary in its gratuitousness. Under a previous Administration, Bernal would have been allowed to continue living in San Diego as his appeals dragged on—and even if he had lost, he would not have been considered a high priority for deportation. Because of the Trump Administration’s policies of aggressive detentions and deportations, Bernal’s life has been split in two: he is sleeping at a shelter in a strange city; his ankles are broken; and his indomitable entrepreneurial spirit, the stuff of America’s most hackneyed immigration clichés, has been exiled to the other side of the border.