“If God has sustained me this far, it’s because He still has a purpose for my life.”
Elaine speaks these words with a calmness that stands in stark contrast to everything she has endured. Just a year ago, she was deported from Phoenix, Arizona. Today, she is once again making the journey north—not because she wants to start over, but because returning to Honduras did not mean returning to safety.
Originally from Honduras, Elaine traveled to the United States with her two children in search of protection. She applied for asylum at the port of entry in Reynosa and, after spending two days in detention, was reunited with family members in Phoenix. There, she began rebuilding her life. Her children were growing up, attending school, and she imagined a different future for them.
That future changed one morning when immigration agents arrived at her home to arrest her.
“My lawyer never told me about my court date. I didn’t know there was a deportation order against me,” she recalls.
She was taken to the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. Soon afterward, she was deported directly to Honduras and barred from reentering the United States for twenty years.
“The hardest part wasn’t going back. The hardest part was going back without my children.”
Her children remained in the United States with their father. Today, they are nine and thirteen years old. Since then, motherhood has been lived through phone calls, text messages, and the hope of one day holding them in her arms again.
“I asked for us to be deported together, but they only deported me.”
Back in Honduras, violence found her once again. Together with her current husband, she became the victim of robberies, assaults, extortion, and other acts of violence that made it painfully clear they could not live there in peace. It reminded Elaine why she had left her homeland in the first place. Once again, they made the difficult decision to leave.
The journey through northern Mexico was no safer. As they traveled, members of Mexico’s National Guard extorted them, tore up the temporary transit permit issued by the National Migration Institute that allowed them to travel through Mexico, and stole the money they were carrying. Even traveling in a migrant caravan and completing part of the journey aboard freight trains, they could not escape the constant insecurity.
And yet, when Elaine tells her story, she rarely begins with what she has lost.
She begins with God.
She speaks about the faith that sustains her when she cannot make sense of what she is living through. She speaks with certainty that even when borders close and families are separated, her dignity remains untouched.
“There are very difficult days, but God has never left me alone.”
Elaine and her husband stayed at our shelter for several days.
“Being here has given us a chance to breathe,” she told us.
Her words invited us to reflect on our own hearts.
At Kino, we often meet people whose strength springs from that very conviction. A faith that does not erase suffering or answer every question, but enables them to keep walking when every option seems exhausted.
Elaine’s story reminds us that hope, too, can be a calling.
Not a naïve hope that ignores reality, but a profound decision to keep believing that every person deserves the opportunity to live in safety alongside the people they love.
As she waits for the day she can be reunited with her children, Elaine continues walking. And with every step, she carries something that no deportation, no border, and no injustice has been able to take from her:
Her faith.
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