Mothers crossing the Mexico-U.S. border risk everything to reunite with their children

Maria says the smugglers formed a human ladder and told her to climb up by grabbing their shoulders and the steel bars of the border wall between Mexico and California.

The human smugglers picked a spot along the border wall near Tecate, a municipality about 50 kilometres east of Tijuana. It was June, and Maria was trying to return to the U.S. to be reunited with her twin sons and husband in California. She was with a group of about five others also trying to cross. 

Maria says a young man was the first to scale up the human ladder and over the border wall. She was told to go up next and started to climb.

"Then I heard and saw that [U.S. Border Patrol] trucks started to arrive," said Maria, in an interview earlier this month with CBC News at the Instituto Madre Asunta shelter for women and children in Tijuana. 

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Maria says she fell back on the Mexican side and landed among shrubs with thorns and the group started running. She says she doesn't know what happened to the young man who made it over the wall. 

CBC News is not using Maria’s full name because she fears repercussions for her attempts to enter the U.S. twice in the past 10 months.  

While migrant caravans from Tijuana have disappeared and this Mexican border city of about 2.3 million is no longer the waiting room for entry into the U.S., there are still people seeking to cross. 

Many who risk the journey have been separated from their families by deportation, including mothers who are trying to get back to their children, advocates say. And they're choosing more dangerous, clandestine routes that cost tens of thousands of dollars with narrow margins of success.

She says she fell back on the Mexican side and landed among shrubs with thorns and the group started running. She doesn’t know what happened to the young man who had made it over the wall. 

Maria says her husband, who is still in California, arranged for her failed attempt to cross the border in June, but she doesn't know how much he paid. "The only thing I know is that we owe money."

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Vitalina Pietrobiassi, the director of the shelter run by the Catholic order of Scalabrinian Missionaries, says the Mexico-U.S. border is a place of "pain" and "separation" for many.

"The women who are deported come here to find a way out of their desperation," said Pietrobiassi.

Smugglers charge up to $25,000 US

Next door, Raul Ochoa is the executive director at House of the Migrant, a shelter for men also run by the Scalabrinians. He says that based on conversations he's had, human smugglers in the area are now charging between $15,000 to $25,000 US to move people across the border. 

The low end of the smuggling price spectrum may mean following a guide to a remote spot where surveillance is weak, Ochoa says, adding that paying top dollar could get you guaranteed passage through a port of entry under an arrangement with a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent.

Crossing into the U.S. right now has a low probability of success, he says, even if one has the money to pay human smugglers known as coyotes.

"The border is basically sealed, there is a lot of security, and the price to pay a coyote is extremely high."

Dina Ramos is also staying at the Instituto Madre Asunta. Ramos, a mother of six children who were all born in the U.S. where she lived undocumented for more than 20 years, says she was caught by U.S. authorities on Sept. 13, while trying to slip across the border. 

Ramos would not share details of her crossing attempt, but says she was trying to get back to her family in the U.S. after she returned to Mexico in July to see her ailing parents. 

"My children are over there, on the other side, and that's what hurts," she said. 

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Ramos says she's desperate to be with her children and plans to find another way across the border. 

"One does many things for love," she said.

"I am going to ask for direction from God. I have faith in Him and He is the only one that can help me." 

Applying to come to Canada

Ramos was one of more than 10,000 people intercepted since last October by U.S. border authorities in the San Diego Sector. The sector covers roughly 96 km of land border from the Pacific Ocean west of Tijuana to the Tecate region.  

This figure is a sharp drop from the approximately 320,000 apprehensions recorded in that area between October 2023 and September 2024, according to U.S. border data. 

U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a statement on Sept. 16 saying that apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border had dropped by more than 90 per cent since December 2023.

Tijuana immigration lawyer Soraya Vazquez, deputy director of Al Otro Lado, an organization that provides legal and humanitarian support to migrants and refugees, says many of the people still willing to risk crossing the border are deportees trying to get back to their families. 

"It's something that is still happening, most of all, yes, with deported mothers who left their families, their children," said Vazquez. "They will always have a yearning to return."

For Maria, staying in Tijuana is not an option. She says she wants to get back to her twin sons — one is set to join the U.S. Marines — and her husband. 

Maria, originally from the state of Mexico, has lived undocumented in the U.S. for years. She says she has managed to cross irregularly between the two countries twice. In December 2024 she received word that her oldest son had suffered a massive heart attack at age 29, and she rushed back to Mexico. He died before she arrived and she stayed for a year after. 

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She says the family considered moving to Canada because her U.S.-born twins would have no issues entering the country. 

Maria hired an immigration lawyer in Mexico City who she says got her an appointment with the Canadian embassy in the fall of 2025. At that appointment, she says, a Canadian official took her photo, fingerprints and interviewed her. 

"The person who interviewed me told me, 'Good luck,' and that he believed I was a good person," Maria said. 

But she says Canadian officials rejected her application and she was never told why. So, in December 2025, she decided to put her life in the hands of human smugglers and cross into the U.S. through the Mexican border state of Sonora, which borders Arizona.

'The dream ends here'

Maria says she was with a group of about half a dozen people who walked for three days through the desert and mountainous borderlands. On the third day, at about 2 or 3 a.m., they believed they had successfully managed to make it across.  

"And then all these flashlights turned on," she said. 

"It was immigration and they told us, 'Stop walking, don't advance, stand there.' They had dogs." 

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Maria says she'd been travelling with another mother and her 14-year-old son. She says the mother told her she was trying to save the boy who no longer wanted to go school and was getting involved with people linked to crime. 

"She cried. All that effort, all those bruises, all those falls, it stays here, the dream ends here," said Maria. 

They were all handcuffed and made to walk what Maria says felt like a long distance to a bus that took them to the Central Arizona Florence Correctional Center about 100 km southeast of Phoenix, Ariz.

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Maria was assigned a lawyer who recommended she plead guilty at her court hearing before a judge in Tucson, Ariz. After her plea, Maria was deported back to Mexico about a week before Christmas. She'd spent about two weeks incarcerated. 

Despite her two failed attempts, Maria says she plans to try again to get to her sons.  

"It's tough. At first, it's a nightmare, but that nightmare can turn into a dream," she said. 

"A dream I want to reach in the future … to be with my family, to be united."