MARIO CARRERA HELD IT TOGETHER at his going-away party—right up until the moment his beloved niece handed him her parting gift.
“I already know what it is,” the 52-year-old said in Spanish, dissolving into tears in his niece’s arms. “I’m very emotional. Family, thank you for everything. Oh my God, an iPhone!”
“So you can record!” a family member off-camera yelled.
The scene plays out in a viral video posted last week by Carrera’s niece Jenny Gonzalez, 27, a Miami native. It has garnered hundreds of thousands of views, almost 2,000 comments, and over 100,000 likes.
Carrera has been a chef for decades in the Miami area, where his high-level work and his warm personality have earned him a measure of fame. He has repeatedly been invited to cook on air for Univision’s flagship morning show, Despierta America, and in just over a month after starting a TikTok account, he’s already racked up 30,000 followers.
But Donald Trump’s deportation machine doesn’t distinguish between violent criminals and hardworking immigrants who have been here for decades. Like thousands of other immigrants across the country, Carrera and his wife, who is from Argentina and also undocumented, began to consider their options. Carrera’s wife has bad anxiety; she worries that he will be taken from her, perhaps snatched by ICE during a simple ride to visit family and record content. Carrera mirrors that concern—he worries that his wife could be deported without him or vice versa.
So in late May the couple reached a wrenching decision: They would self-deport later in the summer.
And now the date they chose, August 3, is finally here.
“I’ve seen lots of videos—they break my heart—of families arriving to immigration court and they separate them, the parents from the children. Honestly, it hurts,” Carrera told me. As I found typical of him, he showed compassion for others before speaking about his own situation. “When someone gets married, they always want to be with their wife and children, so it’s very hard, what’s happening. Because of people’s color of their skin, they grab someone, and even U.S. citizens, they’re grabbing them like criminals, hitting them. There is no more respect for human rights. So me and my wife, we’re leaving. We don’t want that situation, the anguish that they could separate us.”
CARRERA FIRST CAME to the United States in 1991, but he returned to Mexico in 2000 to care for his mother, who was dying of cancer. She was given six months to live but carried on for six years. Carrera believes this is because she was energized by the support, love, and medical care he and his siblings were able to give her. He returned to the United States following her death in 2006 and has lived here since.
His niece, who serves as a school tutor during the year, is working two jobs during the summer. She saved part of each paycheck from her retail job and her role as a nanny until she had enough to get her uncle an iPhone 12 Pro Max. When the notifications, follows, and comments started to roll in from the video she posted, her phone began overheating. Meanwhile, Carrera’s new phone’s battery was quickly zapped from all the “dings,” he said.
Gonzalez said her uncle has always had a gregarious personality, bringing calm to every situation and putting a smile on the faces of his family and colleagues at restaurants.1 Even before TikTok—where he begins videos with his trademark “Hola, familia bonita!”—he used to toss garlic up in the air dramatically as he cooked, telling others in the kitchen to look at the imaginary camera a few feet away. It made them laugh—he’s a natural.
“My uncle has always had that talent of talking to the camera, or like a radio-station DJ,” Gonzalez said.
But the beautiful and somber video she posted of her uncle’s farewell party showed a side of Carrera different from what his viewers and colleagues may have seen before. Gonzalez added a caption that made clear the urgent stakes of the moment.
“My uncle will be self-deporting back to Mexico,” she wrote. “And even though I will miss him I rather him go than be locked in a cage.”
In recent months, their family’s WhatsApp thread has been abuzz with links to social media posts warning residents about places in Miami where ICE has been spotted grabbing immigrants. The already-bad situation has only gotten worse since Florida Republicans and Trump giddily celebrated the opening of a large and stupidly named detention center in the Everglades, where immigrants are enduring inhumane conditions.
“All those videos of the president interviewing and showing the camps with cages—you just look at those cages, and it’s a prison,” Gonzalez told me. “Who would want to see one of your family members there when you know they haven’t committed a crime? How my uncle treats people, how kind he is—all he has really done is cook.”
Gonzalez said her uncle’s journey has included selling fruit in the street and his food outside arenas during concerts in Miami. “Any opportunity not just to make money but to share his food and his talent, he would do it. My uncle has done nothing wrong to be locked in those cages.”
Thomas Kennedy, an activist working for the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said the family’s concerns are well founded. He cited the story of a Miami-Dade County restaurant owner who skipped a check-in with ICE because “I’m not going to be locked up in ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’”
“Now he’s pretty much on the run or under threat that they could go get him,” Kennedy told me. He emphasized that there are downstream effects when people like the restaurant owner or Carrera come to feel they are under siege. Going into hiding can fray or snap the financial ties they have to their communities, which in turn can have serious consequences for employers, workers, and vendors.
“It’s not just Krome [an ICE detention center in Miami-Dade County] and traditional ICE centers—those are scary, but when you have the governor and attorney general of Florida talking about a moat, how there’s one way in and one way out, and when people escape there are alligators waiting for them, that’s scary to people. So they think ‘Maybe I’ll just self-deport.’”
CARRERA IS A HOOT. I ask him what dishes he cooks best, and he deadpans, “I burn the water.”
(Gonzalez says that after working at Pasta Factory for years her uncle makes a fresh pasta to die for, but his ribs and Mexican food are also top tier.)
But as he gets ready to head to Mexico, where Gonzalez will be joining him initially to help him get his content going, Carrera has been thinking about how his difficult upbringing prepared him for this moment.
When his family lived in Oaxaca during Carrera’s childhood, his mother Gloria used to wake up early to make piles of tortillas. She would then go to the market and barter tortillas for tomatoes, tortillas for chiles, tortillas for anything they needed or wanted to eat later that day. When she’d arrive home carrying fresh fruit and ingredients for dinner, Carrera and his seven siblings would know they were about to have a wonderful meal, and they would race to the table with ravenous joy.
“I’m not sad or hurt because I lived that childhood—instead I’m happy, because I can see the need of other people,” he told me.
As he contemplates his imminent return to Mexico—to his beloved Oaxaca, specifically—he describes big plans to make a difference there. “I want to bring food to hospitals, because people come from different towns for procedures with little money. I want to make soup for the abuelos and bring food to the orphanage. My sister sends clothes to the orphanage, but there is a lot of need,” he tells me. It’s that compassion again.
Although he desires to help people after he gets settled, Carrera doesn’t yet have a place to live or a job lined up, which is why Gonzalez created a GoFundMe to help get him on his feet to achieve his dreams.
The uncle and niece’s bond, obvious enough in the video she posted, is even more apparent in person. You can see it in the way they speak about each other. It was Carrera who took his sister to every doctor’s appointment leading up to his niece’s birth. When Gonzalez was born, it was Carrera who suggested Jennifer as her name. (He liked Jennifer Lopez.) A cherished family photo shows a younger Carrera holding his little niece up by the back of her outfit with one hand.
Their bond might explain why the one time Carrera became emotional during our interview was when I asked him about his relationship with Gonzalez.
“When she gave me the iPhone, I started to cry because you can feel the love and affection she has for me,” he said. “And I feel the same: She’s like a daughter for me.”
Gonzalez says things are only going to get worse in this country for immigrants like her uncle.
“I don’t understand why people that voted for [Trump] are in shock. That has never made any sense to me—especially Latinos who voted for him, that makes even less sense to me,” she said. “It’s kind of ‘You get what you paid for.’”
Her message to people being affected by the administration’s brutal anti-immigrant policies is for them to leave if they must.
“They say the American Dream is over, so it’s time to create your dream somewhere else,” she said.
I ask Carrera if he’s sad to leave, and his response is heavy but clear.
“On one hand: Yes, I’m sad. I’m leaving my kids, my brothers, my good friends, and the company where I work,” he said. “But at the same time, I leave happy. I’m content. Because I know my country is waiting for me with arms wide open. I’m going to a country where I will have the liberty to get the licenses I need to cook and start a business, because I’m a Mexican citizen. So in Mexico I will do things the same way I do everything—with a full heart.”
While Carrera has become known for his cooking videos on TikTok, the one thing he didn’t want to discuss with me is the restaurant he works at currently because the shadow of immigration enforcement hangs over it. The restaurant industry has long depended on hiring workers from Latin America, workers who often lack proper documentation. Trump’s mass-deportation regime hasn’t changed that yet, and doesn’t seem likely to anytime soon.