Milwaukee Teacher’s Aide Yessenia Ruano Self-Deports to El Salvador

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.