Many young people have returned to Mexico, continuing their quest for a better life

After graduating high school, Maggie Loredo was faced with a seemingly impossible choice. As an undocumented immigrant, she could stay in the United States with her family and friends, get a false social security card and work in the carpet industry, all while  hoping and waiting for the laws to change so she could go to college.

Or she could move back to her birth country of Mexico, where she knew no one, but at least would have citizenship, legal status, the ability to go to work and attend a university.

“At the time, I was the most anti-Mexico, but that was the only opportunity,” Loredo says via Skype from her home in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. “I thought, ‘I am Mexican, I have rights, I can go to college and maybe I can find a way to come back to the U.S.’”

It wasn’t until her second year in high school that Loredo understood what it meant to be undocumented. She came to the U.S. when she was 3 years old. She went to elementary school in Texas, then middle and high school in Dalton, Georgia. But as she wanted a part-time job, her driver’s license and to apply for college, her legal status became increasingly apparent.

“Before that I had no clue about it, I just thought I was as normal as everybody,” she says. “Through my junior year and my senior year I was battling with myself.”

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