A dream deported: Parents who built lives in U.S. separated... Maria Mendoza-Sanchez raised four children in Oakland, built a nursing career and bought a home. Then came the election — and the most agonizing decision of her life.

A dream deported: Parents who built lives in U.S. separated... Maria Mendoza-Sanchez raised four children in Oakland, built a nursing career and bought a home. Then came the election — and the most agonizing decision of her life.

SANTA MONICA, Mexico — In a village two hours north of Mexico City, a girl stands on the patio of her adobe home, looking out on her family’s small plot of land. Maria Mendoza-Sanchez is just 13, but on this day, as she watches her parents drive up in a rush, the path of her life is shifting.

Her 15-year-old sister has become pregnant, and her father is enraged. He steps from his truck, picks up a rope he uses to discipline horses, and barrels through the door. As her sister absorbs the lashing, Maria cries out: “Don’t hit her! She’s going to have a baby!”

Soon Maria is a target, too. “If your sister did what she did after being so quiet and responsible, what can I expect from you?” her father shouts as he hits her. Maria turns silent, knowing anything she says will frustrate the man who’d hoped to have boys to work the land, not four girls.

In their tiny village, wealth is measured in land and sheep. Maria wants more. An education, some independence. Even as the rope strikes her, she thinks: I will prove you wrong. You will see how far I go. I’m not what you think I am.

In this moment, she can’t imagine all that lies ahead but commits herself to seeking a different fate. In time, she will move north to the U.S. She will start as a sidewalk fruit vendor and house cleaner, but make her way to college, become a highly paid nurse, buy a home in Oakland, raise three daughters and a son, and save money so that they can go to college, too.

And then she will lose everything.

What is a mother without her children?

The thought consumes Maria, now an accomplished woman of 46, as she sits in a truck transporting her across the Mexican state of Hidalgo. Dark clouds fill the sky, but the landscape is familiar. She can make out Cerrito de la Cruz, the green hills that surround Santa Monica and its several hundred residents.

It’s Aug. 17, 2017. More than 30 years after her father beat her, more than 20 years since she moved north of the border, she and her husband, Eusebio Sanchez, have been deported amid President Trump’s tightening of immigration. They are on their way back to the village of her childhood. The village she resolved to leave so long ago.

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To give up the life she had built was wrenching. Worse, though, is thinking about how the path she chose has led — inescapably, it seems now — to an agonizing decision: to split up her family.

Left behind in Oakland are her three daughters, ages 16, 21 and 23. They can still pursue their futures there. The oldest, Vianney, is legally protected as a “childhood arrival” to America; Melin and Elizabeth are U.S. citizens by birth.

Her youngest child, 12-year-old Jesus, has come with her and her husband to Mexico. Born a citizen, he could have stayed in Oakland, too. But a boy his age needs his mother, she reasoned. And perhaps she needs him, too.

Just days ago, Maria was still a full-time nurse and mother in a busy household. Her family was not so unusual: More than 4 million U.S. citizens younger than 18 have an undocumented parent, the U.S. census estimates, and more than a quarter of those live in California.

Maria and Eusebio had held a slim hope of staying in the U.S., thanks to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who called the removal of law-abiding parents “a travesty” that contradicted Trump’s stated goal of targeting immigrants with criminal records. But her efforts failed. There would be no last-minute reprieve.

Instead, the couple have come to embody weighty questions confronting American society: What do we expect of our immigrant communities? How do we judge their lives and the fateful decisions they’ve made? What do we owe them?

Instead, Maria finds herself packed into a truck that her younger sister uses for delivering meals of roasted sheep, or barbacoa, to clients in Mexico City. Crowded into the truck are relatives she’s used to speaking with only by phone. Behind them is a caravan of five more cars filled with dozens of others, fresh from a bittersweet reunion at the Mexico City airport.

Maria watches as Jesus takes breaks from video games on his iPhone to peer out at the countryside. Already she’s worried about him, about how he will cope in a land he’s never known, speaking a language he doesn’t know well.

The caravan makes its way into Santa Monica, down one of the few paved roads, past fields of unkempt grass, yellow wildflowers, mesquite trees, cactus and the occasional stray dog. It’s still the place she recalls from her childhood, but things, she knows, will be different.

Even her name is different here. Lupe, they call her, short for her given name, Maria Guadalupe.

The truck finally stops at the end of the dirt driveway of her parents’ bright blue home. Maria’s father has died; the livestock he raised is gone. Her mother, Juana, 69, smiles and greets her with a bouquet of flowers. She can’t quite remember the last time she held her daughter, more than two decades ago.

Inside the house, relatives and friends have prepared a breakfast of quesadillas and champurrado, a thick Mexican hot chocolate. A pink sign surrounded by balloons announces “Bienvenidos a Casa.”

“Welcome home,” Maria’s mother says, embracing her, rubbing her back and sobbing. “I’m sorry you had to come back this way. I wanted you back, but not like this.”

Maria’s path to the life she has lost is built from moments of luck, good and bad, and determination.

At age 14, she moves to Mexico City to be with an uncle, only to discover that she must care for his home and children for little pay while attending school. At 19, while an office assistant at a hospital near Santa Monica, her work with a plane crash victim leads the man’s uncle to offer her a more lucrative job at a cancer hospital in Tijuana.

After a 31-hour bus ride north, she steps into the bus station and immediately feels unsteady. No one is there to greet her. There’s no job, and she can’t afford the return trip. She checks into a cheap hotel, worried that she may soon have to sleep in a park. God, she asks, why are these things happening to me?

That night, a hotel attendant hears of her plight and tells the owner, who offers her a room indefinitely. But there’s a catch: The man, who lives in San Diego, wants her as his Tijuana mistress. The hotel worker instead helps her escape, offering her refuge with his family.

As she gains her footing, finding work as a secretary in a bank and renting an apartment, she begins to correspond with a longtime family friend from Santa Monica. In 1989, Eusebio Sanchez had crossed the border and found his way to Oakland in a bid to make a better life.

Eusebio Sanchez and his daughter Vianney, 2, at the beach in Alameda in 1996. Eusebio Sanchez and his daughter Vianney, 2, at the beach in Alameda in 1996. Photo: Handout, Courtesy The Mendoza-Sanchez Family Photo: Handout, Courtesy The Mendoza-Sanchez Family Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close deported old photos slideshow 1 / 9 Back to Gallery

Using a tourist visa, Maria visits him repeatedly. During one visit, in 1992, she realizes she doesn’t want to leave. Later that year, she hikes through the hills near the San Diego border crossing, this time without a visa.

Like many Mexicans, she goes north for opportunity, but she also follows her heart.

In Oakland, the young couple are both invisible and recognizable.

He’s the one who waits in parking lots with other laborers in sweatshirts and blue jeans hoping to be picked up for odd jobs. When she isn’t babysitting, she’s the figure parked on Fruitvale Avenue, selling bags of cherries from her car trunk as her young daughters sit in the car. On a good day she makes $80.

They marry during a trip to Mexico and soon have two daughters. In a fateful decision, Maria gives birth to Vianney in 1994 in Mexico, wanting to be near her family in case of complications. Melin is born two years later, back in Oakland.

Acquaintances who learn of their immigration status offer to help them become legal by arranging straw marriages. Raised in a strict Catholic household, Maria can’t accept.

But in a place like the Bay Area, it’s possible to build a life without citizenship that is full, if tenuous. In 2000, while cleaning houses, Maria is offered a job at a nursing home in Alameda. With a government-assigned tax identification number, she starts as a housekeeper but earns promotion after promotion and becomes an administrative assistant. She makes $12 an hour and pays taxes.

Around 2002, Maria and Eusebio begin stepping out of the shadows. They seek to legalize their status through the immigration courts under a process called cancellation of removal. It has a high burden of proof, requiring them to show, among other things, that their removal would cause “exceptionally and extremely unusual” hardship for their U.S.-born children.

The bid is a long shot. But as their appeals work their way through a system backlogged with hundreds of thousands of cases, they provide a benefit: They are given work permits and Social Security numbers.

In their family, Maria is the backbone and Eusebio the fun dad — always joking, buying meat-filled pupusas for the kids on Saturdays and planning trips to festivals, the zoo or Lake Tahoe. He drives trucks and works in shifts staggered with his wife’s so someone’s always home.

Working the front desk of the nursing home, conversing with the elderly residents, Maria discovers her calling. She wonders how they ended up there instead of with their families, and decides she wants to help care for them.

She earns her license as a certified nursing assistant, then studies at City College of San Francisco to be a vocational nurse, all while working full-time night shifts and taking care of her children, now three after the birth of Elizabeth in 2001. Her days are long, and she sleeps as little as two hours a night.

When she gets pregnant again, there are complications. Her doctor tells her to abandon her classes for bed rest. Instead, four days a week, Maria arrives at school an hour early to park as close as possible to class and walks backward up the stairs to avoid causing contractions. Jesus is born a week after she graduates.

Soon, Maria realizes her pay is not enough; a nurse assistant can’t put four children through college making $22 an hour. So in 2011, she goes back to school at Holy Names University in Oakland to become a registered nurse. The payoff is a six-figure job at Highland Hospital, Oakland’s trauma center. It’s 2 miles and a world away from her makeshift cherry stand near Fruitvale BART Station.

Maria and Eusebio now own a three-bedroom house and three cars. They have four healthy kids, four dogs and numerous friends. But their unsettled immigration status is never far from their thoughts.

Vianney Sanchez, 23 (left), comforts her mother, Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, after the family met with Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Vianney Sanchez, 23 (left), comforts her mother, Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, after the family met with Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 16 Caption Close deported oakland slideshow 1 / 16 Back to Gallery

For more than a decade, the couple’s quest for citizenship moves through the courts, piling up repeated denials and appeals. Finally, in 2013, a judge orders them removed.

For two years, though, the Obama administration grants them one-year stays of deportation. In late 2014, Obama unveils a program known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, which seeks to protect parents of citizens from deportation, as long as they arrived before 2010. Maria and Eusebio qualify, but opponents defeat Obama’s effort in the courts.

In 2015, federal officials tell them they no longer have to obtain stays, as the Obama administration’s move to more targeted immigration enforcement means they are not priorities for deportation.

So, twice a year, Maria and Eusebio report to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in San Francisco. The meetings take no more than 20 minutes and end with an official signing their papers, extending their work permits another six months.

For years, Maria has kept this part of her life secret, even from her children. What good will it do to tell them? she thinks. Won’t they just be anxious, as I am, and struggle in school?

On Nov. 8, 2016, Maria cries as her family watches the election returns. She has heard the new president’s disparaging words about Mexican immigrants, about building a wall and increasing deportations.

“What happened tonight is not good at all for us,” she tells her children. They comfort her, and as a group make promises to each other: We’ll be prepared and we’ll do our best. That’s all we can do.

Soon after taking office, Trump signs an executive order making nearly every undocumented immigrant a priority for removal and limiting the discretion that can be used in enforcing the law. Immigration experts point out that people like Maria and Eusebio, who are engaged with the government and not hiding, have become an easy target for boosting deportation numbers.

From Inauguration Day in January through August, immigration arrests of noncriminals will jump to more than 28,000 — nearly triple the number from the same period in 2016. Overall, removals of undocumented people picked up by ICE will rise 37 percent.

It’s not long before Maria sees news of people being deported at their immigration check-ins. Her next appointment is in a few more months. She begins working extra hours at the hospital and tells her children of the plan to split up if she and their father are deported. In May 2017, Homeland Security officials give the couple three months, until mid-August, to arrange their departure.

As her deadline to leave the U.S. approaches, Maria is invited to defy the order, to take refuge in a church for sanctuary. She declines.

Instead, for a week in August, Maria conducts media interviews in her living room, meets with Feinstein, and applies for an 11th-hour reprieve. Co-workers and others protest on her behalf outside Highland Hospital and raise nearly $22,000 for her children. But the stay is denied.

In the hours before the couple’s red-eye flight to Mexico, they, their children and a few of Maria’s nursing colleagues gather in the family’s living room to take a picture, then form a circle and pray.

“Lord God, right now I lift this family up to you!” one of the nurses cries out. “Lord God, put your hand of protection on these girls!”

At a security checkpoint at San Francisco International Airport, Maria and her husband hold each of their daughters one last time. Maria wipes away their tears, traces a cross on each, and whispers her goodbyes.

“Promise me you will take care of them and be patient with them,” she tells Vianney, adding, “We will see each other very soon.”

But Vianney knows better. She can’t leave the U.S. And for at least 10 years, her parents’ deportation order says, they can’t enter again.

Maria Mendoza-Sanchez washes a rag in a concrete washbasin behind her mother’s home. Maria Mendoza-Sanchez washes a rag in a concrete washbasin behind her mother’s home. Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 19 Caption Close deported mexico slideshow 1 / 19 Back to Gallery

At a party near Santa Monica for the christening of a family friend’s daughter, a band pumps out folk music, tables are dressed with pink linens and balloons, and children zigzag giddily throughout.

Partygoers feast on barbacoa, beer and pulque, a traditional alcohol made of the fermented sap of agave. Maria’s mother, nephew, niece and sister sit together sharing drinks and laughing at the kids.

Maria, though, sits apart, despondent. Six weeks have passed since her deportation.

“I’m missing my kids,” she says, wiping away tears. “I think about them every minute of the day.”

In Santa Monica, long days without a purpose have left her with too much time to worry. What is Vianney doing as the new head of the Oakland household? Is Elizabeth doing her homework? Are they locking the doors at night?

This tiny village is nothing like Oakland. There is a school and a church, but little else. People walk in the middle of the dusty streets, as likely to cross paths with a herd of sheep as a car.

Those in the village work in farming, or they seek labor in Mexico City or the U.S. Maria could pursue a nursing job, but the pay here is minuscule; $80 a week will do little to help her children back in Oakland.

While Maria is overwhelmed by anxiety, Eusebio has a different approach to dealing with his pain, one that sometimes frustrates his wife.

“You know, we can’t do anything,” he tells her. “I try not to think about it. You have to keep your mind focused on something else.”

“I can’t. They’re my kids,” Maria says. “It’s different. I’m the mother, I carried them, I spent the most time with them, I ran with them back and forth to hospitals, schools ...”

Eusebio nods and looks away; he doesn’t know what else to say. The deportation has strained their relationship. He spends his days caring for his elderly parents and their livestock and running errands for relatives.

For now, she lives with her family, and he with his.

Even as he grasps for connections with his former life, messaging friends back in Oakland over text and Snapchat, Jesus is like a celebrity in his first weeks in Santa Monica.

At the village school, where his mother was once a student, everyone knows he’s the boy from the United States. He’s a hit with his cousins and the neighborhood girls. They all want to learn English from the American.

“Pimple. It’s pimmmple,” he instructs them.

“Piiimple,” his cousin Francisco responds.

“No! Pimmmmmple!”

But Jesus must travel even the short distance to school with a cousin, to guard against a kidnapping. A few months before he arrived, his aunt’s family was tied up at gunpoint in their home until they handed over their barbacoa delivery money. The new youngster from the U.S. is a natural target.

There are some new things, like the school’s strict dress code, that Jesus can get used to. Others are harder. His classes are all in Spanish. Often, his teacher reads a story he can’t follow, or ticks off instructions he can’t understand. He feels slow, and his grades slip far below the high marks he’s used to earning. He grows to hate Mondays.

One day in class, the teacher disciplines an unruly student by tying the boy’s hands tight to his desk. Another time, a teacher grabs scissors and cuts off a misbehaving student’s long hair.

“This teacher is crazy!” Jesus texts a friend in Oakland.

After one such incident, Jesus runs from school to his grandmother’s house. He pleads with his aunt and grandmother to tell his mother to let him leave: “Give me my passport, and send me home to my sisters!”

After a few hours and many hugs, he calms down. He knows his mother is worried about him, about whether he really belongs here. He doesn’t really want to leave, he tells Maria. He’s too worried about her.

From 2,000 miles away, Maria continues to mother her girls back in Oakland.

Over the Internet, she handles the family’s banking, pays the mortgage and other bills, and reminds her daughters to use her medical insurance before it runs out. Sometimes she goes shopping with them, using FaceTime to consult on which clothes they should buy. Or the girls prop up a phone at the dinner table so Maria can join them.

I have to be present even when my body is absent, she thinks. I’m a long-distance mother.

Her main concern is Vianney, who at 23 has been thrust into parenting Elizabeth, a sophomore in high school, and Melin, a senior at UC Santa Cruz who travels home on weekends via buses and BART.

If Vianney goes out with friends in the evening, Maria can’t sleep. Visions of a car crash or worse flash through her mind. “If something happens to you, who the heck is going to be there?” she asks her.

“It’s like I’m her now,” says Vianney, a UC Santa Cruz graduate. “I think I can do it. Thanks to her. Even though she’s gone, she’s still looking out for us.”

The first morning after her parents’ deportation she has a stack of school papers to sign — immunization records, medical releases and a form allowing her baby sister to eat lunch off campus. Maria would never have signed the last one. But Vianney sees an opportunity to establish trust, to extend an olive branch — with a warning.

“I know the tricks. Don’t pull them on me,” she tells her sister. “I invented them!”

She yells when her siblings forget to lock the front door. Once, fed up that Elizabeth has shirked her chores, she reminds her sister of her sacrifice.

“Mom told me that if you guys were giving me a hard time, you would go to Mexico with her,” Vianney scolds.

“Then do it!” Elizabeth yells.

Vianney misses her parents’ presence. Her father banging around Saturday mornings in the backyard, fixing the engine of his old truck, or rustling them all awake on Sundays for church. Her mother holding court at the kitchen table, coffee in hand, asking about everyone’s plans for the day and what they want for dinner.

“Everything is falling on my shoulders,” she says. “I feel like I’m the one who has to be strong for everyone. It gets really hard. I try to not to be sad, because if I let myself be sad, how am I going to take care of everyone else?”

In her choppy phone and Internet calls with Maria, she notices that her mother sounds more depressed each time. Some days, Maria tells her, all she does is sit and worry.

The only moments when Vianney can relax come during twice-monthly Friday night hangouts with her best friend in Hayward. They drink wine, play Nintendo, eat spring rolls and gossip. For a few hours, she feels free again, like everything is back to normal.

Vianney, who has a psychology degree, knows she needs a job, and has applied for several positions at offices and schools. The money Maria saved for them will not last forever, and they will need health insurance soon.

And then there is the matter of her own immigration status. Having been born in Mexico, she is not a U.S. citizen like her younger siblings. Instead, she is one of nearly 800,000 young people who gained legal protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created in 2012 by President Barack Obama.

In September, the Trump administration began phasing out the program, even as it urged Congress to come up with a solution for the “Dreamers.” Unless some compromise is reached, Vianney’s DACA status will expire in August.

She could be deported, too.

Maria often compares herself to a large tree, overseeing everything and taking care of everyone. But in Santa Monica she feels uprooted, exposed, not the person she was.

“That’s the thing about people who tend to be very strong so other people won’t see how broken you are in reality,” she says. “But then it comes to a time where you just break apart.”

One day at a party at her in-laws’ house, barbacoa cooks over hot coals buried in a pit in the ground in the backyard. A sign on the wall reads “#FamiliaUnida.” A special bottle of Tequila is passed around. Though Maria generally doesn’t drink, she takes a sip. The liquor feels soft on her throat, and she takes a few more sips.

As the drink hits her, Maria breaks down, crying, screaming. She tracks down Eusebio and yells at him. “Take me home now! I want to see my daughters now! Where are they? Are they OK? Do you know where they are?”

Eusebio tells his son: Get Vianney on the phone.

“Mom!” Vianney tells Maria. “I’m here! I’m here. We’re OK. Mom?”

Maria rushes out of the party, her son hustling along with her.

Jesus is her baby, her “little man,” and Maria can’t imagine life without him. Being separated from her daughters is too much already. Caring for him, making his meals, helping with homework is what gives her purpose here. She can still be a mother to one child.

Jesus knows this. When he plays with his cousins, he will take a break to find her and hug her, ask if she’s OK or if she needs something. Maybe I can distract her from her sadness , he thinks.

But for him, things in Santa Monica are only getting worse. His Spanish is a little better, but his grades are slipping. The school says Jesus must stay back a grade.

Maria now knows what she has been unable to face: Her youngest child needs to be back in America, too.

On an October night, their last together in Santa Monica, Maria and Jesus talk over dinner. Be strong, she tells him. Do your homework, eat healthy and listen to your sisters.

“I need you to promise me you’re going to be OK,” Jesus tells her. “That you’re not going to be sad and you’re not going to cry, Mom.”

But as he boards his plane the next day in Mexico City, she weeps.

Once he’s gone, she tries to stay busy. In the late fall she shuttles back and forth to the state of Puebla, three hours to the south, to care for an aunt who is sick. She makes plans to take courses at a local university to earn a specialty in intensive care. She follows news from the U.S. on Facebook, and makes arrangements for a holiday visit from Jesus and Elizabeth.

But when she’s not occupied with something else, Maria often just stares out the window of her new home.

It’s quiet here, unlike at her bustling Oakland hospital or in her old living room, where passing cars would blast music as her girls gabbed about a favorite new TV show.

She thinks about the family rituals she’s missing, like going to church most Sundays or gathering to watch “Stranger Things” on Netflix. When her younger kids go trick-or-treating on Halloween in Alameda, it’s Vianney who keeps watch nearby with the other parents.

Her children spend Thanksgiving at Feinstein’s house in San Francisco, eating with the politician who calls the Sanchez family “the epitome of the American dream.” The food was so good and the house so nice, they tell Maria later, like a five-star hotel or a palace from a movie.

“You guys deserve all these good times,” Maria tells them.

A private bill by Feinstein would grant Maria, Eusebio and Vianney permanent U.S. residency, but it has little chance of passage, despite more than 80,000 people signing a petition of support. Maria has come to accept that she won’t be able to reverse their deportations anytime soon.

A doctor tells Maria she has become depressed, and she’s not surprised to hear it. Still, she is not resigned to remaining in the village she escaped once before. Instead, as the holidays approach, she eyes another potential refuge: Canada.

I may not be able to be the mother I was before, she thinks, but what if I can get a work visa and a job as a nurse? She could make money, pay off the house. Send Elizabeth to college and Vianney to graduate school. Melin, who volunteers at Highland Hospital, could achieve her dream of going to medical school and becoming a doctor.

Maria begins looking into whether she can obtain a Canadian visa. Despite her history of living undocumented in America, her attorney is hopeful that immigration officials in Canada will understand her plight — that all she wants to do is make money to support her children. But she’d need a job offer, among other things.

Maybe, she thinks, her life’s path can shift once again. For now, she will continue to care for her family, to hold them all together, as best she can.

“OK, you guys,” she tells her four children as they talk on Thanksgiving night. “Now go to bed, dream of your beautiful dinner, get some sleep and make sure your doors are all locked. We talk tomorrow. OK, sweethearts?”

“OK,” they tell her. “Goodnight, Mom!”

Hamed Aleaziz is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: haleaziz@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @haleaziz