Milwaukee Teacher’s Aide Yessenia Ruano Self-Deports to El Salvador
ICE reportedly denied her request to remain in US while visa application pending.

Yessenia Ruano puts a hand to her heart before a check-in at the Milwaukee branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Feb. 14, 2025. Photo courtesy of Voces de la Frontera
A Milwaukee teacher’s aide left for El Salvador on Tuesday morning after deciding to self-deport, her attorney has confirmed.
Yessenia Ruano’s case drew support from protestors who assembled before her Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-ins earlier this year, urging federal officials to let Ruano remain in the U.S.
Ruano worked at the Academia de Lenguaje y Bellas Artes, a bilingual school within the Milwaukee district, and she’s a mother to twin girls who were born in the U.S.
Ruano took her daughters with her to El Salvador on Tuesday.
Her attorney, Marc Christopher, said Ruano chose to self-deport instead of potentially being detained by ICE.
That’s after federal officials handed down a decision on Friday, denying Ruano’s request for an emergency stay that would have halted a deportation order against her while her visa application was being considered, Christopher said.
ICE officials gave a one-sentence rationale for denying the stay. They said that Ruano “did not warrant a favorable exercise of discretion,” according to Christopher.
“Quite frankly, if she doesn’t warrant it, I don’t know who does,” Christopher said.
Ruano does not have a criminal record. She crossed the southern border into the U.S. in 2011 to escape gang violence in her native El Salvador, according to immigration advocates and her attorney. Ruano said a local gang murdered her brother, and she feared for her life.
“She’s very involved in the community,” Christopher said of Ruano’s life in Milwaukee. “She’s a teacher’s aide for kindergarten teachers. She owns her own house, pays taxes, gets no benefits back. So if you look at the positive versus negative factors, which you’re supposed to look at, there’s not a single negative factor that she has.”
During a May 30 hearing, ICE officials told Ruano to self-deport by June 3. At the time, Ruano had an application pending for a T-visa, which is a type of legal status that’s granted to victims of human trafficking.
After that hearing in late May, Ruano’s attorney filed for an emergency stay, asking that she be allowed to remain in the country while her T-visa application was being considered.
That prompted her to remain in the U.S. for several more weeks while awaiting a decision on that stay, Christopher said.
But Christopher said few of those stays are being granted under the second administration of President Donald Trump.
“From what I’ve been seeing consistently through other cases and hearing from other attorneys, they’re not granting hardly any stays for anyone really,” he said. “I am more than positive that she would have been able to remain in the U.S. while the T-visa was pending … under previous administrations.”
After coming to the U.S., Ruano previously applied for what’s known as withholding of removal, according to her attorneys. An immigration court dismissed that case in 2023 without denying or approving it while Ruano planned to pursue a T-visa, her attorneys have said.
“During the Biden era, they were doing something called prosecutorial discretion,” Christopher said. “If you withdrew your application, the government was not going to seek removal against you unless you had … been arrested for some type of serious crime, so she agreed with the Department of Homeland Security to have her case dismissed.”
But Christopher said that changed when Ruano got a notice of deportation proceedings against her during the current Trump administration.
Christopher has been Ruano’s attorney for about two months. Before he took over her case, he said she paid over $14,000 in legal fees to file a T-visa application with a different team of lawyers based out of Ohio.
“To ask a teacher’s aide who’s raising two 10-year-old girls to come up with $14,000, it’s a large ask,” Christopher said.
“I’ve been reading the comments [on articles about Ruano and people ask,] ‘Why didn’t she apply for the T-visa sooner,”‘ Christopher said. “It’s very, very tough to tell someone, ‘Hey, these processes take years and years and cost over $10,000’ and expect them to do everything immediately. And then once you file, decisions take years. And so what this is is a very broken immigration system that needs to be reformed.”
Earlier this month, members of the Milwaukee Common Council released a statement opposing Ruano’s impending deportation. The Council marked 14 minutes of silence to honor Ruano’s 14 years in U.S.
Milwaukee teacher’s aide Yessenia Ruano self-deports to El Salvador was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
If you think stories like this are important, become a member of Urban Milwaukee and help support real, independent journalism. Plus you get some cool added benefits.
This is an outrage. The Trump/ ICE fascists deport honest, hard-working folk- without whom there would be no modern Milwaukee. I imagine militarized goons invading my GGGrandpa Phil’s Kenosha Co. farm and marching him off. I think of these stormtroopers dragging my GGGrandma Bridget out of her house on 7th & Pierce…immigrants are us.
Making America safe for criminals and white supremacist.
The one glimmer of hope in all this is the number of people in this community that refuse to put up with the fascist ICE. So different from when the Gestapo rounded up Jews in the dead of night. We must keep the light on ICE’s behavior in order to get these heartless deportations stopped. Must continue the good fight for Ruano and her daughters.
If she worked in a slaughter house or cleaned toilets at a hotel, Trump would consider her a valued employee and she could have stayed. Committed educators aren’t important to him and MAGA.
If she worked moving boxes of classified documents from room to room at Mar-a-LOCO, you can bet your butt she would still be in this country.
But working as a teacher’s aide at a school automatically disqualifies her for the T-visa for which she applied. Racist Frump sure doesn’t want any non-whites to be educated, and believes that whites should only learn what he and his Nazi-like regime want them to know.
This is sad. There needs to be a solution.
What if every US Representative and Senator had 1000 citizenship awards?
–These are elected officials that we vote for and should have good judgment.
–The Representative or Senator can review the situation and, if they believe this individual should be a citizen, the box is checked. A Green Card is issued, and once the checks and citizenship test are complete, the person becomes a US citizen.
I don’t know all of the facts. However, if Representative Moore said she believed this person deserved citizenship, I trust the judgment of Representative Moore, who would have access to all of the facts.
Just complaining doesn’t help. We need to look at someone changing the law. Congress can passes laws quickly and this should be possible.
Robert