Diego Armando Escalona Polanco had just finished a 17-hour shift as a cook at a Chipotle in Orlando when he decided to make one last stop before going home.
He picked up a friend. They went to McDonald’s, and he drove home after dropping off food for his girlfriend.
A few minutes from his front door, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper pulled over the 19-year-old from Venezuela, citing a problem with Escalona’s registration.
A few months later, Escalona was back in his home country.
The mass deportations under the Trump administration have been heavily chronicled, including the arrests, detainments, shotgun legal process, midnight flights back to countries of origin and elsewhere — with Florida among states with the most immigration arrests and removals.
But what happens to those after they have been forcibly returned from the U.S. or who, under enormous pressure, chose to self-deport?
Here are stories of three erstwhile immigrants sent home from Florida. Today, all find themselves thousands of miles away from the state where they had been building lives, making a living and raising families.
Left with little choice but to self-deport
For Escalona, his removal felt less like a legal process than a slow dismantling of his ordinary life.
The officer told him there was a problem with the registration sticker on his license plate, although he had renewed it with his mother two months earlier. Once the officer saw his temporary license, Escalona said, the routine stop became something else altogether. Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived and took him to jail in Orlando.
“I was clean,” Escalona said in Spanish during an interview with Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. “No criminal record. I had never been arrested. I had never even gotten a ticket.”
He had been in the U.S. for 11 years after his mother had paid a coyote — a human smuggler — to get them both across the border.
After he was detained, the cost of an immigration lawyer felt out of reach for Escalona’s family, and the slim odds of success did not seem worth it. Escalona signed the paperwork to self-deport.
“I didn’t even let her explain,” he said of the official who presented the self-deportation agreement. “I took the pen, signed, and left.”
Escalona was transported to Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, which he described as crowded, loud and humiliating.
“You don’t sleep, you don’t eat,” he said. “It’s psychological pressure.”
He spent 42 days there then was transported through four states in shackles. Eventually, he was put on a flight to Venezuela with hundreds of other deportees.
He was going home. But returning, he said, was not simple.
The streets of his home in Maracaibo looked smaller than he remembered. His childhood bedroom in his grandparents’ house did, too. He could reach up and touch the ceiling now. He was a child the last time he slept there.
His parents remained in the United States, but in Maracaibo, Escalona reunited with relatives and friends he had not seen in years. He said he is happy to be back, even if the path home was brutal. He speaks of Venezuela as a place where he can start again.
Escalona said he wants to study chemical engineering, pursue graduate work related to petroleum, strengthen his English and help grow family businesses while launching ventures of his own. He talks about staying.
“I’ll die here,” Escalona said. “I never wanted to leave. I had to leave because of economic situations outside of my control, but I hadn’t felt as happy as I did returning to Maracaibo in a long time.”
Returned to a country she left 40 years ago
Johane Morel, 47, and living in Titusville — known as “Space City” for its views of space launches — was attending an order of supervision when she was detained and deported to Haiti two weeks later.
Morel had come to the U.S. when she was 5 years old; she has no memory of her previous life in Haiti. Struggling with what she described as bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders, she remembered being in and out of mental institutions when it came time to apply for a Green Card, so she kept missing letters and paperwork.
With an arrest for child neglect in 2004 and misdemeanor charges in the following years, Morel, who was in the U.S. illegally, knew she was at risk of deportation when President Donald Trump took office to begin his second term in 2025.
Morel was attending an order of supervision appointment in June 2025 when she was detained at the Baker County Detention Center in Macclenny, Florida, just a few miles from the Georgia border, before being sent to Cap-Haïtien, Haiti.
“I don’t remember anything about Haiti,” Morel said. “I never realized my transition until I became older. I always assumed I was an American.”
She didn’t understand or speak Haitian Creole and had no family members in Haiti. She also doesn’t communicate with her family in the U.S., who include four grown children between 32 and 26.
Stranded in a city she had no idea how to navigate, Morel felt vulnerable. A man from the city offered to help her transition to life in Haiti soon after she arrived. She said he sexually assaulted her.
She began making TikToks describing her situation, and she raised enough money to afford a year’s rent. But the language barrier bars her from getting a job. She worries about how to afford a new life, she said.
“I spend 23 hours a day indoors,” she said. “I’m afraid of my environment. I suffer from bad dreams.”
She eats rice and beans for meals and collects water in a bucket for a daily shower. Now, Morel is trying to raise money to relocate to Brazil, which offers humanitarian and family reunion visas for Haitians.
“I miss a shower, a warm shower, the internet, the laws, the protection, the safety,” Morel said.
In the aftermath of “Operation Tidal Wave,” a joint operation between Florida law enforcement agencies and ICE that led to tens of thousands of arrests across the state, the non-profit Guatemalan Maya Center has remained a pillar in Lake Worth Beach.
Lindsay McElroy, the center’s lead immigrant justice organizer, said the center is focused on reuniting children who were separated from their parents by ICE.
“We’re having to be there for the people who are going through everything,” she said. “A lot of our time is diverted just to providing support.”
Recently, for instance, center volunteers arrived at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport with a group of young children to be flown to Guatemala to be reunited with their parents, who had been deported. The kids carried stuffed animals and bags of treats, final reminders of their childhoods in the U.S.
“It’s really scary for them,” McElroy said. “They’re excited to see their family, but they’re also nervous. They’re leaving people they love in the United States, and they’re going to a country where they might not even speak Spanish that well.”
Her husband was sent to Honduras, leaving a family broken
For Ashley, who lives in Broward County and who spoke on condition that only her first name be published so she would not jeopardize her husband’s ability to apply to remain in the U.S., rebuilding her life separate from her husband has been a challenge.
She began working with her husband to begin the process of obtaining a Green Card in May 2023. When her husband finally scheduled an interview in February 2025, Ashley remembered turning to their lawyer, asking if there was any possibility that her husband would be detained during the interview, as had happened to some others in similar circumstances.
“Impossible,” the lawyer had assured her.
He had no criminal record. He didn’t even drive, she said, too scared of getting even a traffic ticket on his permanent record.
Then, at the interview, Ashley’s stomach dropped when she was asked to step out of the room with their 10-month-old daughter. Her husband was detained and taken to Krome in Miami. He was eventually flown to his home country, Honduras.
A mother of four daughters, Ashley was burdened by the separation. She and her husband had been together for eight years.
“We were always inseparable, wherever I was, he was,” Ashley said.
Despite her husband’s video calls with his daughters every day, her children asked why their dad didn’t say goodbye.
She decided to take her family to Honduras as soon as she could, in March 2025. Her husband lives in a small town, and while Ashley said there aren’t many resources there, they tried to make their month-long visit fun for their daughters. They hope to be able to visit again this summer, but Ashley’s daughters are in school, and she is also dealing with other members of her family in the U.S. who are facing deportation.
“He has his mom and some brothers over there,” she said. “He has mixed emotions. He’s happy that he saw his mom after so many years, but at the same time, it feels like he doesn’t belong.”
Meanwhile, she shuffles between a fast-food job and delivering meals with Uber Eats, trying to provide for her family.
“No matter how hard I work, I’m never going to provide the stability my husband gave us,” Ashley said.
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This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at deliasauer@freshtakeflorida.com. You can donate to support our students here.