This town was built on migrants' cash. Now it fears Trump's deportations.
FRANCISCO VILLA, Mexico — Over the past 30 years, this corn-growing hamlet in central Mexico emptied out. About half the 3,000 residents moved to the United States. As the migrants went north, the dollars flowed south.
They were construction workers and gardeners, cooks and nannies. They became the saviors of this village of tiny adobe homes. They helped establish the town’s first high school. Their donations paved the dirt streets. They bought computers for the classrooms. “The kids had no idea what they were,” recalled one of the town’s migrant benefactors, Rubén Chávez.
Now, a current of fear is running through a village tethered to Illinois, California and Oregon by the flow of remittances. President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history” — taking aim at more than 11 million people living illegally in the United States. Nearly half are Mexican.
Trump “is coming in with full force,” Chávez told a meeting in the village hall on a recent afternoon. He looked around at men he’d grown up with, suntanned workers in baseball caps, who’d returned from the United States for the holidays. Many were now legal U.S. residents. But their neighbors and cousins weren’t. “What will we do?” he asked. “How can we react as a community?”
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