Families along U.S.-Mexico border face tough school choices

MATAMOROS, Mexico — When Princess Martinez saw her husband for the first time after he was deported, two thoughts crossed her mind: that she loved this man, and that she might have to leave him.

The only other option appeared to be moving with their six daughters — who, like Martinez, are all U.S. citizens — across the border to her husband’s new home in Mexico, with its mounting violence and troubled schools.

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 When a family divided by citizenship is faced with a deportation order, the choices are usually stark: Split the family between two countries and keep U.S. citizen children in American schools, or move together to Mexico, where the education is inferior and the language is often foreign.

“Everyone is coming to America, to the land of opportunity,” Martinez, 31, recalled thinking. “And here I am, thinking about taking my family in the opposite direction.”

There are more mixed-status families living in the United States than ever before — non-citizens and citizens under the same roof. Many of those families will be affected by the Obama administration’s aggressive deportation plans, with a record 400,000 immigrants expected to be returned to their home countries this year. It’s likely that more than 20,000 of those deportees have children who are U.S. citizens, according to experts who have analyzed federal data.

Parents are left to choose between dividing the family between two countries, to keep children who are U.S. citizens in U.S. schools, or moving together to Mexico or Central America, where the education is inferior and the language is often foreign to U.S.-born children.

But in the border region, there’s a third option, little known elsewhere, and now facing mounting opposition: living in Mexico but crossing the border each day for American schooling.

As the immigration debate has intensified and school budgets have tightened, some districts have sent photographers to the border to identify students crossing from Mexico. In Arizona, officials last year sued a district for not adequately vetting the residency of students.

Problems began for Martinez and her family when her husband, Marcos Perdomo, 34, was arrested for drunken driving in 2009. After a four-month prison sentence, he was deported to Mexico. On the day the family was reunited here in this border city, Martinez said she watched him scoop up their six daughters one at a time, letting them cry on his shoulder before wiping away his tears.

Martinez and Perdomo mulled their dilemma for days. Friends and relatives told Martinez she would be crazy to willingly move her family to Mexico, where violence was spreading amid an intensifying drug war. Perdomo said he didn’t know what he would do without the girls, now ages 4 through 13. Two of them had been diagnosed with learning disabilities — something U.S. schools, which on average spend five times as much as Mexican ones, typically manage better.

Martinez finally decided to move the family to Matamoros in early 2010 and make the daily journey across the Rio Grande with her daughters so that they could remain in the sleepy Texas school district of Port Isabel, where Martinez worked as a cashier at a grocery store. To evade residency requirements, Martinez registered her daughters for school using a relative’s address.

For months, the strategy appeared to be working.