MEXICO CITY — Lois Muñoz, originally from Brooklyn, New York, has been living in her husband Alfredo's family compound in Puebla, Mexico, for the past three months. Because she has no car and speaks very little Spanish, her world has shrunk dramatically from the busy life she led as a waitress at a diner in Middletown, New York.
Muñoz is one of a growing number of Americans who've made the move south, choosing to accompany their undocumented spouses who are voluntarily leaving in light of President Donald Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration.
A report released in December by American Families United, a nonprofit organization advocating for U.S. citizens and their immigrant spouses, estimated that 1.5 million U.S. citizens are separated or live in fear of separation from the person or country they love because they are in relationships with mixed immigration statuses. The report details the impact for children born of mixed-status marriages, who remain in limbo because of their parents' immigration statuses.
NBC News spoke with three families facing wrenching choices: stay in the U.S. and risk a loved one's ending up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, restart their lives together in Mexico or decide to live apart.
For Muñoz, making the move to Mexico was an easier legal path than risking her husband being detained. Americans married to or in common-law relationships with Mexican nationals can apply fortemporary, then permanent, Mexican residency under "Family Unit" rulesand then obtain work permits. However, the move came with significant sacrifices, as well as a language barrier.
"I lost everything; everything's gone. All my Christmas stuff gone that I saved for years, all my Halloween decorations," Muñoz said in a video call. "But it's OK. My husband's going to be safe."
She admitted that it has been lonely. "Your husband's there, but it's not like you've got a friend. I thank God I have my two cats, because they are company," she said.
The couple got together almost 18 years ago when Alfredo asked Lois to dance at a bar.
As their relationship progressed, he told her that he had originally gone to the U.S. illegally to earn money to help his ailing parents, she said. Alfredo said he walked across the border illegally in 2003, was able to fly home and back, and then last entered in September 2010. Because Alfredo had more than one illegal entry, he was permanently barred from legal pathways to stay.
"After we got married, we inquired with a couple of lawyers and never got anywhere. And, you know, we were OK," she said.
The couple plowed themselves into work and weren't fearful — until Trump took office.
"I worried about him every time he left the house. He worked all over the New York area and New Jersey and Pennsylvania," Muñoz said about his construction work. "We were always hearing stories about 'Oh, they took so and so, they took so and so.' I was always worried, worried, worried."
It's a stark change for Muñoz, who is in her 50s and a mother of four adult children still in the U.S.
"I was around people constantly. I had regular clientele where I worked. So I was always socializing. On my days off, I was constantly going," she said. "Now I feel like I have no sense of purpose."
Alfredo is hopeful about their new life in Mexico. "It was like a month that I felt a little strange, a little different," he said in Spanish. "But now, it seems that we're both going to fit in here."
The Muñozes aren't alone in their move.
North of Puebla, in Mexico City, Haley Pulver, 34, is navigating a similar journey.
She moved here from Connecticut in August with her partner of three years, Oscar Enríquez.
The pair met on the dating app Tinder and started out as friends. Enríquez said he remembers being lonely, with no friends outside of his welding work, and how he felt he could be fully himself when he was with her.
It was a while before she knew he was living in the U.S. undocumented. He told her that he had unknowingly overstayed a visa in 2019, she said. Then, two months later, he was detained for about a week before he was released. He had never been in jail before, "so it was shocking," he said of being taken away in chains.
Pulver said a judge issued an order for his removal last year.
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"I don't remember the specific conversation that we had, but he brought it up. And then, of course, I had to get the info. So I asked 500 questions," she said.
Pulver, like many of the loved ones of undocumented migrants, was using apps and Facebook to track the whereabouts of federal agents.
"It got to the point where the ICE situation just seemed so out of control. We had plans in case he got pulled over. It got to a point where it was very stressful," she said.
That stress, in addition to the order for his removal, led Pulver to sell her car and furniture, quit her job as a rights and clearances coordinator for ITV America, pack her entire life into a "giant" box and two suitcases and move to Mexico.
"It was very difficult at first, because I had never left the United States. I'd never even left the East Coast," she said. They moved into a home in the capital that Enríquez had purchased using money he'd saved from work in the U.S.
"My Spanish was very limited, and his parents don't really speak English. I've slowly been getting out of the house by myself," she said.
Meanwhile, Enríquez said, they are getting used to their new life. "I'm rediscovering Mexico City, because it was a long time ago I left," he said. "So I'm trying to rediscover everything with her."
For now, Melissa Byrd is living apart from her partner of almost two decades, Jesus Jimenez Meza. She is in South Carolina, and he is in Veracruz.
Byrd and Jimenez got together in the unlikeliest of circumstances — she was grieving her husband, who died in 2007 after having been unwell for many years, when her 9-year-old son set her up with his friends' uncle.
"My daughter was actually dating one of his nephews at the time," Byrd, who has worked for a school district in various capacities for decades, said. "He basically took my son under his wing and was kind of like a father figure to him. And even to this day, they're just like this. They're so close."
Jimenez, who had overstayed after he entered the U.S. on a work visa in the late 1990s, was helping raise both of Byrd's grandchildren. Then, in February 2025, he was sued for breach of contract by a construction client, Byrd said. Though a judge threw the case out, ICE agents arrived the next day, and he was taken to a detention center in Georgia before he was sent to Mexico on a government-chartered flight, she said.
The pair reunited in Veracruz and spent a few days on a beach to decompress.
In the year since Jimenez returned to Mexico, Byrd has visited him four times. She hopes to move there in a year when her granddaughter is a little older and has adjusted to going to day care.
"Everybody relied on Jesus. He was the backbone of our family, and that's not here anymore," she said.
The Department of Homeland Security said 2.2 million people who were in the country illegally have self-deported since January 2025. "With over 700,000 deportations during President Trump's first year in office, those still in this country illegally should realize that this administration will enforce the laws of this nation," a spokesperson said in a statement.
The realities for couples like Byrd and Jimenez are both challenging and complex. Long-standing immigration law bars people who have overstayed their visas by more than a year from returning to the U.S. for a decade, even if they're married to American citizens.
It's something the proposed American Families United Act, a bipartisan bill introduced last March, is looking to challenge.
Under the act, immigration judges and officials would be able to weigh the impact of family separation and grant families relief case by case.
While the bill seems currently stalled, if it passed, it would make a huge difference to Lois Muñoz, who, despite having been married to Alfredo since 2016, has no way of fast-tracking his return to the U.S.
In the meantime, her life in Puebla has narrowed to taking the bus into town for pedicures and her extended family's daily 2 p.m. lunch together. That has brought along a new challenge: On Fridays, it's her turn to prepare lunch, she said.
"Do you know how intimidating it is cooking Mexican meals for a Mexican family in the middle of Mexico?"
MEXICO CITY — Lois Muñoz, originally from Brooklyn, New York, has been living in her husband Alfredo's family compoun...
