Homeless in Arizona

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U.S.-raised woman deported to Mexico

She was seated with a group of women at the end of a long table. But she could not talk to them.

When a Catholic nun led the room in a prayer of thanks for the food they were about to receive, she could not follow the words that made other women drop their heads in their hands and weep.

When it was time to eat, she could not join the murmured conversations.

The rest of the table where she sat and the full length of four or five other tables were filled with men who dipped their tortillas in beans, drank orange-colored beverage from plastic cups and rested in the refuge of the Kino Border Initiative's soup kitchen for the recently deported in Nogales, Sonora.

Like them, she is Mexican by birth. But unlike them, Zayra Aca knows nothing of the language or culture of a country she is now expected to call home.

When she was a month-and-a-half old, Aca's mother took her to the United States. She lived in Phoenix for 27 years. She attended Central High School. She worked. She got married. She gave birth to two children, now ages 4 and 6.

One day, she got pulled over. The cops checked her immigration status, and her life changed.

"They sent me to a country I don't know and don't belong to," she says. That was after she spent 14 months in the Eloy Detention Center trying to get an immigration judge to let her stay in the country she does know.

If she'd waited a little longer, Aca might have been eligible for deferred deportation under President Barack Obama's administrative Dream Act-lite program.

But Aca says she saw no hope and was tired of being locked up. She signed the deportation papers.

Aca's husband left her while she was in jail and dropped the kids off with her mother. A week after she arrived in Mexico, her mother died. Aca's children went to stay with her brother. If he is detained and deported, these U.S. citizen children could wind up at Child Protective Services. Aca says she doesn't want to bring her children to Mexico until she is able to take care of them and herself.

When will that be? She has no idea.

This young woman is grieving on many levels. She has no answer to questions about what she plans to do next.

The Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, who run the shelter in conjunction with Jesuit priests, didn't think she was ready to talk to me. They said she was too fragile. Her pain too raw. But Aca sought me out when I visited the shelter. She wanted me to tell her story.

Because of her circumstances, she's been allowed to stay in the women's shelter beyond the usual one-week limit. Recently deported men come only for meals or first aid. They have to find shelter elsewhere as they decide whether they will try to cross the border again or return to their homes in other parts of Mexico.

Aca says that the nuns have been kind and that U.S. humanitarian groups No More Deaths and Samaritans have helped, too.

"Thank God. If not for them, who knows where I'd be," she says. "The government of Mexico is not prepared for people like me."

Neither is the government of the United States.

It's ironic that her life is tougher now because she did what many people in the United States insist that Spanish-speaking migrants, legal and illegal, don't do.

Aca learned English -- only. She assimilated utterly into a country she thought of as her own.

It's also ironic that many people who say they value families remain mute about immigration policies that rip families apart.

Some people will dismiss Aca as an "illegal" who has no rights in the United States and deserves no sympathy. But she is a human being who grew up American while politicians failed to reform immigration policies that were broken before she was born.

Aca says the United States makes a big deal about human-rights abuses in other countries, but it failed to see the injustice in what was happening to her.

"The United States doesn't care," she says. "They kick you out of the country where you were raised."

That's the biggest irony.

Reach Valdez at linda.valdez@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter @valdezlinda and read her blog at valdez.azcentral.com.