IT’S EASY TO FORGET THAT back in 2012, Mitt Romney was an advocate for self-deportation. The Republican challenger ran on a platform that explicitly called for the lives of immigrants to be made so difficult that they would leave on their own.

So while self-deportation may have seemed like a draconian concept introduced during Donald Trump’s second term in office, in reality, many in the immigrant-rights community knew Republicans had a longstanding interest in the idea and only needed an opportunity to implement it. Those advocates understood that while such a policy would push some immigrants to recede further into the shadows, others would choose to leave everything behind to start anew in a foreign country. We may never truly know how many families have made that wrenching choice, or what finally pushed them to do so.

This is the story of one such couple.

Mateusz, 30, is from Poland. A former DACA recipient, he saw the writing on the wall before the 2024 election and brought up the prospect of moving abroad with his wife, Madeline, a U.S. citizen, also 30.

“She pushed it away because it’s terrifying,” Mateusz told The Bulwark, asking to use only their first names to avoid reprisals at work.

The two had built their entire lives in the United States. Madeline works for an education nonprofit, and Mateusz is a veterinarian technician. They were married in Boulder, Colorado and grew to love hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park. It became tradition to go to Lollapalooza every year to hear artists like Metallica and Chappell Roan. Mateusz would take road trips like the one he did for his thirtieth birthday, where he zigzagged from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to Zion National Park in Utah, hitting Death Valley twice on the way and stopping to do laps at a racetrack. Those sorts of moments are easy to take for granted when you’re living your life normally. It’s when you’re forced to imagine never being able to enjoy them again that they become precious.

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Mateusz and Madeline were being forced to confront that prospect. And so, as the 2024 election neared, Madeline began to reconsider uprooting. Both she and Mateusz were hopeful that Kamala Harris would pull out a victory, but they feared a redux of Hillary Clinton in 2016. The leadup to Election Day was agonizing. Mateusz felt there was collective denial over Trump’s chances of winning—and when the votes came in, the couple felt as if they were watching a slow-motion trainwreck. The election clinched it for them: Madeline agreed that they should leave.

They just couldn’t figure out where to go.

They looked at Ireland, but realized the visa and work-permit situation would be arduous. They considered France because Madeline speaks the language, but France presented similar challenges. They initially ruled out Poland because Madeline doesn’t speak Polish, which is notoriously difficult to learn. But then they realized Mateusz’s Polish citizenship would make it easier for Madeline to secure a permit for residency. It didn’t hurt matters that Mateusz had some inheritance there to help them get on their feet.

When Mateusz began chronicling his self-deportation plan on Reddit, he felt what he called “white guilt.” He was aware that there are many nonwhite undocumented immigrants who are having a much more difficult time under the Trump administration—unable to pick up and move, yet ever more fearful of what life increasingly looks like at home.

While most people were supportive, some, assuming Mateusz had simply overstayed a visa, told him he didn’t know what the “real” undocumented story was. He quickly shut them down. He hadn’t flown to the United States on a visa. A Polish coyote had brought him and his mother across the southern border two months before the September 11th attacks. Taking a flight from Amsterdam to Mexico City that summer, they headed north to Matamoros, and from there made their way into Texas near Brownsville.

“I walked [through] Matamoros on foot, crossing the Rio Grande into Texas,” he said. “We had to throw away any article of clothing with Polish wording, toys, and videotapes.” When he made that trek, he was 6 years old.

By 2018, Mateusz was living in the United States legally as a DACA recipient, but a tough financial stretch left him temporarily homeless and unable to pay for a DACA renewal.

As things improved, he met Madeline, a girl from Michigan, on the dating app OkCupid. They went out for beer, grabbed food, and felt a connection. They were both nerdy and discussed risky, sensitive topics people often avoid on first dates, like politics and immigration policy.

But that wasn’t what drew Mateusz to Madeline. “She was hot as shit, for starters,” he explained. “But she was also a challenging person to be around—she made you think, she asked hard questions and didn’t shy away from having difficult conversations.”

Since the beginning of their relationship, the couple has had a continuous conversation about the burden that comes with Mateusz being undocumented. When they met, Madeline didn’t fully understand what she was signing up for, Mateusz says. He told her: “If this is too much for you and you feel you need to leave, do that.” She didn’t take him up on his offer—not then, not now.

“There were a lot of conversations, research, and crying,” he said. “She’s absolutely scared shitless about having to leave her Midwestern family behind, leave her parents behind—she never thought she would leave the Midwest in general. But it helped when we thought about what kind of life we would like to live.”

Now, as he gets everything ready to head to Poland, saves money, and prepares to self-deport by November, Mateusz says he will “have to shed” part of his American identity. He told me it’s about fitting in: He’s incredibly self-conscious about being seen as a foreigner back home in Poland.

“I’ve never not embraced my Polish side, but since we’ve decided to move, I’ve put a lot of energy into getting to know my culture again, and I feel like in order to do that as comprehensively as I can, I have to put the American side of myself in a box and pack it away for a little while,” he said. “I also just want to leave this part of my life, me living in the States, behind because it carries a ton of personal trauma with it, and I don’t want it affecting the start of my new life. It inevitably will, but if I can minimize the effects, I will.”

He understands that because he spent over a year in the country illegally, he would be barred from returning for ten years. He views this as practically a lifetime ban from the country he has called home since he was a small child, which is why he doesn’t plan on returning, even if he eventually could.

“We also want to just start our life already, without this giant cloud hanging over us and we can’t hide anywhere from it,” he said.

Mateusz said he is also ready for the next chapter of his life—one that will happen far from the country where he arrived as a scared-shitless kid nearly a quarter century ago. But he’s angry, too. It’s not just that his world got turned upside-down so quickly, but that so many people supported the policies compelling him and others to self deport.

“This is what you voted for. You voted for the guy who claimed he was going to be on your side. Meanwhile he’s cutting Medicaid and Medicare while he’s going after the people who pick your food and paying El Salvador to put people in cages,” he said. “So go fuck yourself.”

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The Trump administration has joined forces with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to do away with in-state tuition for young undocumented students brought to the country as children, ending a policy passed by former Republican Governor Rick Perry that for decades has helped so-called Dreamers pursue their education goals in the state. Some Texas Republicans have had their eye on getting rid of this law for years, and Paxton decided not to fight the lawsuit brought by the Justice Department.

An estimated 57,000 current undocumented students would be affected, and many may need to leave their schools. The AP reported that the University of Texas’s in-state tuition price tag of $11,000 would be marked up to $41,000 for undocumented students under their new “out of state” classification.

The formerly undocumented author Julissa Arce, who has written about working at Goldman Sachs despite the secret of her immigration status, texted me out of the blue last night because the policy changed her life.

“I’m devastated,” she wrote. “This is the law that allowed me to go to college 24 years ago.”

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