Leticia Stegall owned a business, paid taxes and had a teenage daughter who was a US citizen, but Ice deported her anyway

Leticia Stegall still runs the Blue Line bar. Drawing up the rotas. Ordering barrels of beer. Encouraging the staff to put the TVs on, the umbrellas out and clear the tables quicker.

But now she does it from exile, peering at her laptop and a video stream from cameras dotted between the ice hockey memorabilia lining the bar close to downtown Kansas City.

“I still have the income from the bar. I’m not trying to live on 200 pesos ($10) a day. But it’s still a nightmare,” Stegall said by video call from the Mexican port city of Veracruz, where she currently lives after being deported and leaving her popular city bar – and her family – behind in America.

Stegall had long feared the moment that arrived one morning in March 2018 when her car was surrounded by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) as she pulled out of her driveway. She told herself they wouldn’t deport a woman with a teenage daughter who is a US citizen, and who jointly owned a business with her American husband that created jobs and paid hefty taxes to the US Treasury.

Stegall, 42, was still making the same arguments as she was pushed across a bridge back to Mexico four days later.

More than a year on, she’s fighting to get back to the US and grappling with anger at what she sees as the futility of ripping apart a family to make a political point.

“They’re not deporting the cartels, the criminals, because they can’t find them. They’re deporting the wrong people because we’re in the system. They know where to find us, the easy targets,” she said.

Sitting at a table at the Blue Line, her daughter, Jennifer, and husband, Steve, accept that Letty, as she’s known in the family, had been in the country illegally for nearly two decades after paying a smuggler to bring her across the border.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Leticia Stegall’s husband, Steve, and daughter, Jennifer. Photograph: Courtesy Leticia Stegall

But they said she built a life, and her family needs her.

“She’s running this bar. We’ve got a house together. We’ve got a family together,” said Steve. “What’s the point?”

Stegall managed to evade detection by immigration authorities until she was arrested for drinking and driving in 2012 and sentenced to three days in jail. The jail spotted she did not have residency papers and reported her.

The order for her removal came in December 2016. Jennifer, who was 14-years-old, wrote a letter to the immigration court explaining why a teenage girl needs her mother.

“Obviously I need my mom to be here with me. For my mental health, and to pay for things. I wrote everything she’s done for me,” she said.

The immigration judge ruled deportation did not mean the family had to be split up because Stegall could take Jennifer to Mexico, a country she has never lived in. Stegall appealed and lost.

She turned to the federal courts but that process was still making its way through the machine when Ice arrived.

Stegall was held in the county jail. Four days later, her lawyer obtained a writ from a federal judge requiring she be brought to court. By then she was shackled and on a plane stuffed with deportees.

“To fly me with chains around my waist and ankles as though I was a criminal was awful,” she said.

Obama did things that started this crackdown on immigrants. But he wasn’t attacking people the way Trump is doing it. Leticia Stegall

Stegall and her family insist that Ice was aware of the court order and defied it. The immigration service said it only received it after she left the country.

By evening Stegall was standing at the frontier in Brownsville, Texas.

“They dropped me off on the border and said, ‘Now you can go’. I said, ‘Where? I don’t know anybody here on the border’. The guy was, ‘If you knew how to cross the border to get here 20 years ago, you should know your way back’,” she said.

Stegall made her way to Veracruz where her parents live.

“I didn’t have time to say goodbye to my daughter. She went to school and I was gone. I can’t imagine how she felt when they tell her mom is not coming home,” she said. “I started getting sick, losing my hair like crazy. I had bald patches everywhere. I missed my daughter’s graduation and signing for college.”

The separation has taken its toll on Jennifer too.

“I’ve always had good grades and they were so bad. I told my mom. She was mad,” she said.

Jennifer eventually graduated from high school and begins studying to be a nurse next month. She visits her mother during the holidays but struggles with her absence.

Stegall is aware that much of the legal process to remove her from the country took place when Barack Obama was president.

“Obama did things that started this crackdown on immigrants. Yes, it’s true. But something changed. They say Obama built the cages but he wasn’t attacking people the way Trump is doing it,” she said.

So how does she respond to a president who says, correctly, that she came to the country illegally?

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“Who’s going to cut the tomatoes? Not his family. And isn’t his wife an immigrant? Aren’t her parents immigrants? Who’s going to do the roofing? Who’s going to wash dishes in the restaurants? This country was built up by immigrants,” she said.

At the Blue Line, Steve steers clear of politics with his customers. He knows there are plenty of Trump supporters among his patrons.

“They hate it that Letty’s gone. They think Letty’s one that needs to be here, but… They always have the ‘but’,” he said.

Stegall is not without hope. She can apply for an immigrant visa through her marriage to Steve. But because of her deportation she faces a bar on returning to the US for a decade. Stegall is appealing, but she is afraid.

“I don’t know how much worse things are going to get. Not just for me but all the immigrants in the country,” she said.