A couple of weekends ago, as dusk was falling over the Escandón neighbourhood of Mexico City, Abel Ortiz was startled by the sound of two American women yelling at each other on the street outside his apartment.

They were nose to nose, screaming in English while bemused Mexicans looked on.

“I can’t believe you called my fucking mom!” said one.

“You should go back home!” bellowed the other.

What jarred Ortiz even more than the spectacle of two American tourists behaving badly was his own reaction. He wanted to run out and confront them.

“No, you don’t get to do that!” he imagined himself telling them. “Not in my country!”

His visceral response surprised him. Though Mexican by birth, Ortiz has spent a total of only nine months in the country. He was spirited away by his parents in search of a better life in the US when he was only two months old. He went on to live for 38 years in Los Angeles, rarely stepping outside the city.

Until Donald Trump came along, casting undocumented people like him as public enemy No 1, Ortiz perceived himself to be wholly American.

Last August, that changed. He packed two bags – clothes and a few cherished photographs – and left.

In doing so, he became a statistic in the brutal campaign against those Trump calls “illegal aliens”. The US government has made their lives so unpleasant, so imbued by fear, that leaving became the lesser evil. Trump likes to emphasize the supposed voluntary aspect of their departure by calling them “self-deportees”.

Others use a different phrase that stresses the cruelty driving such decisions: Ortiz and others like him have been “ICEd out”.

In his case, that meant saying goodbye to a thriving hair salon business, his best friend and a community he had cultivated over decades. He has returned to a country that he barely knows, and a language – Spanish – that he speaks only haltingly.

“I’ve done the hardest thing I ever could,” he says. “There are days when I feel literally insane with the duality of it.”

Since moving to Mexico City he has come to appreciate the city’s vibrant and verdant culture, and has rejoiced in a sense of liberation. But there is also deep and intensifying pain. The sadness of what he has left behind bears down on him. He is disoriented, and racked by existential questions.

“Who am I? What do I want?” he asks himself. “How do I live, when I’m neither here nor there?”

Ortiz quit the US on 4 August 2025. By then he had grown unnerved by the pervasive presence in Los Angeles of national guard troops, helicopters whirring overhead, and ICE agents ready to pounce in unmarked Fords and Chevys.

He was too afraid to risk LAX airport, so he travelled overland to Tijuana.

With him in the car as he crossed the border were a pair of film-makers, director Isabel Castro and her producer husband, Jamie Gonçalves. They lived over the road from LuXcy, the hair salon that Ortiz co-managed in Highland Park, LA, and Gonçalves was one of his clients.

When they learned that the hairstylist was preparing to leave the US they followed their instincts and instantly began filming. The result is a 14-minute short movie, published by the Guardian, that captures Abel’s poignant final moments in LA.

“It’s kind of crazy to think that I won’t see any of these places possibly again,” he says on camera as he drives one last time through LA streets.

The film ends as Ortiz’s plane from Tijuana lands in his new home: Mexico City. Seven months later, I meet him there to find out how his life as a so-called self-deportee is going.

In the early days, Ortiz enjoyed an almost tactile sense of freedom. It was partly that he was armed with a Mexican passport, allowing him to hop on planes to visit beach towns such as Puerto Escondido and Puerto Vallarta, something he had never been able to do in the US.

As a citizen, he no longer had to be looking over his shoulder for that idling Chevy. More nebulously, he no longer felt like an outsider.

“In LA there was always a part of me that was asking whether I belonged in a room. That has gone. In Mexico I’m surrounded by people with my own features. A part of my identity had been filled in. I feel lighter.”

We are sitting in the living room of his Escandón apartment. It is spacious and light, an attractive contrast to growing up poor sharing bedrooms with his nine siblings.

His father left school when he was 12 to sell candy on the streets of Aguascalientes, in central Mexico. The grinding poverty was what led him to take infant Abel to the US – to give his son a fighting chance.

As it happened, the clandestine journey across the arid border in 1987 almost killed two-month-old Abel. The boy was so dehydrated by the time they reached LA he needed hospital care.

When he was 13, Ortiz came out and ran away from home. As a teenager he picked up a felony conviction related to credit card fraud, and as a result was later deemed ineligible for the Daca scheme that offered work permits to undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children.

Through dogged perseverance, he still managed to forge a good life for himself in LA. He trained as a hair stylist and by the time he left the US was running a successful salon alongside his best friend since high school, Regina.

As a gay man, Ortiz has chosen to locate his new life in a supportive place. Mexico City was the first city in Latin America to legalise gay marriage, in 2009. His skills as a hair stylist, combined with his LA cool and a lively Instagram page, makes him highly employable. He earns a fraction of the income he made at LuXcy, and is no longer his own boss, but his new salon, Dos Flamingos, in the tourist-rich Roma district has given him a purchase into his new life.

He knows how relatively lucky he is to have found work so easily. One night, as he was walking home from the salon feeling particularly low and missing his old LA life, a man stopped him on the street.

The man asked for directions to a place, using a Spanish word that Ortiz didn’t recognize. It took a while to work out he was referring to a “refugio” – a temporary shelter for homeless US deportees.

“I don’t take it for granted,” Ortiz tells me. “I know that could so easily have been me.”

The salon is flamboyantly bilingual, and most of his clients are English-speaking American women. “Bienvenidos! Welcome!” a sign says at the entrance. “Walk-ins & Reservaciones”.

His neighbourhood is luxuriously tree-lined and full of birdsong, and the jacarandas are in stunning purple bloom. There are great tacos in a street stall outside his apartment.

All told, Ortiz is reveling in newfound independence of the sort that many young Americans get to experience in their mid-20s. It’s just that for him the launch into adult life was delayed for more than a decade by his immigration status.

“It sounds silly, but it feels like I’ve grown up,” he says. “I’ve been given a second chance to live my own life, to have my own voice. This is my country.”

If the story of Abel Ortiz ended here, it would have a pleasing simplicity. It’s so much more complicated than that.

At the heart of the concept of “self-deportation” is a contradiction: that you can be coerced into doing something voluntarily. Ortiz left of his own volition, but only after he had been made so fearful that he felt he had no alternative.

“I couldn’t breathe in LA,” he says.

For Trump and his top adviser Stephen Miller there’s a lot riding on instilling such terror. It’s a way to bump up the numbers of those departing, allowing Trump to boast that he has fulfilled his campaign pledge to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history”.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, responding to Guardian questions, claimed that since Trump’s second inauguration, 2.2 million “illegal aliens have voluntarily self-deported”. More than 100,000 had used the “visionary” CBP Home App, a portal that offers undocumented people a one-way plane ticket home and an “exit bonus” of $2,600.

Ortiz had never heard of the app, and says he wouldn’t have touched it if he had. “I don’t trust the American government, or American anything, really.”

Immigration experts are skeptical of the DHS statistics. That 2.2 million figure appears to have been extrapolated from an earlier estimate floated by anti-immigration group, the Center for Immigration Studies. The calculation was based on monthly population data from the Census Bureau that the agency itself warns should be handled with utmost caution.

“I don’t trust that number, it looks inflated,” said Julia Gelatt, an immigration policy expert with the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute.

Though Trump’s data should be taken with a big pinch of salt, it is true that an unknown number of undocumented immigrants have headed for the exit. Ortiz was among them.

Since leaving, he has watched ICE spread its net from LA to other cities. It has fortified his conviction that he made the right decision.

When news broke of the killing by federal agents of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis he felt vindicated. “If they could kill a white woman, and then a white man, if they could kill these white people, what would they have done to me?”

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There’s a pattern experts have observed among undocumented US immigrants who return to their native countries: the initial euphoria often fades quickly. The relief of escaping fear and reclaiming basic freedoms can give way to something more complicated, allowing darker emotions to swoop in.

Claudia Masferrer, a sociologist at the Colegio de Mexico who co-wrote The Returned that explores the lives of US migrants coming back to Mexico City, has a word for the discombobulation that follows. “Norteado”.

“It’s the experience of being disoriented, physically and socially. It’s a reference to the US, ‘el norte’ [the north], but also the sense that you can no longer determine the points of the compass, the disorientation of returning.”

Ortiz has never heard of “norteado”. But he can relate to what it describes.

We are walking from his apartment to the Dos Flamingos salon to begin his day’s work. We stop at a coffee shop where he orders the traditional Mexican spiced drink, café de olla, and a sweet doughy churro.

“I’ve been kind of antisocial lately, just processing everything,” he says as we sit.

There’s the loss of loved ones back in the US. Though he’s not especially close to family and says he hasn’t suffered homesickness, he did have a twinge recently when he was absent from his father’s 57th birthday celebration.

He misses his best friend, Regina, co-manager of LuXcy. She hasn’t returned his calls since October, mad at him for abandoning her.

“I’m angry right back at her,” he says. “She cut me off, just when I need her most.”

At the Mexican end, he’s wrestling with mounting irritations. English is his first language, and his Spanish is scratchy. As a result he gets labelled an “extranjero” – foreigner – and asked where he comes from.

“It happens every day,” he says. “I don’t blame anyone, but it’s definitely annoying. It’s a reminder that I’m not really from here.”

Back in LA he had a teeming community of friends, long-term salon clients, fellow gym junkies at the local gym where he worked out daily. In Mexico City he has cordial relations with his Dos Flamingos co-workers, but his clients are new, and everywhere else he goes he is a stranger.

“The things that bring me joy and give me comfort – going to the gym, being healthy, walking the city – those things aren’t working any more.”

He hasn’t been to the gym for four months.

I dare to suggest that he sounds depressed.

“Yeah, I think there is a level of depression,” he concedes, adding that he’s come to see his predicament as a form of grief. “I’m grieving the life I had. Not crying-on-the-bathroom-floor type of grief, but still grief.”

After three hours of talking, I ask him if he is tired of so many prying questions. “No,” he says. “I’m just tired of being me.”

There’s another side to his creeping malaise. The longer he has been away from the US, the more his blood boils over the country that was his home for 38 years.

He fumes about Trump and his ongoing immigration crackdown. “It’s vile, it’s horrible. It’s amazing what he’s gotten away with, and it shows how racist America is.”

He feels rising resentment about how he was treated over all those years. He can see more clearly now, with the benefit of distance, how condescending many Americans were towards him.

He witnesses the same dismissive treatment being doled out by US clients towards his Mexican co-workers in Dos Flamingos. He doesn’t like it.

He also now recognizes that as a person of color and undocumented immigrant, he tended to keep his head down in LA and avoid answering back. He’s trying to break free of that lifelong habit.

The other day, a young American woman who was in Mexico City for a wedding behaved haughtily towards him as she sat in his salon chair, going so far as to question his judgment about styling techniques. For once he didn’t remain silent.

He calmly, but firmly, refused to serve her.

He sees that as maybe a way out of his non-bathroom-floor grief. Keep moving, keep asserting, avoid bitterness.

“I’ve made a decision that I don’t want to hold on to my resentment towards white America. I don’t want to become an angry old man.”

Yes, there are doubts aplenty about what he has done. But he insists they are not regrets.

He does not regret turning his back on the place he thought was home until Trump showed him it wasn’t. But he does have questions.

“The Abel that I was, I left that person behind in LA,” he says. “So who is the Abel I want to become?”

He hopes to find the answer when he goes off traveling. First stop, Barcelona in May where he plans to attend a concert by Bad Bunny, whose half-time Super Bowl show he loved so much.

After that, who knows?

Watch the full Guardian documentary following Abel’s last week in the United States below.