She grew up believing America was home. Brought from a Thai refugee camp as a baby, Ma Yang went to school in Milwaukee, worked as a nail tech, raised five children, and built a life with her disabled U.S.‑citizen partner. Then a pandemic-era move into the wrong house pulled her into a marijuana trafficking case. She admitted she helped count and package cash, served two and a half years in prison, and thought that meant she had paid what she owed. Instead, when the cell door opened, immigration officers were waiting.

Transferred from Minnesota to Indiana to Chicago, she signed deportation papers she never truly believed would be enforced against someone who’d never set foot in Laos. On March 6, she was flown to Vientiane and left in a guarded rooming house, without documents, family, or fluent language. Her eldest daughter and partner now struggle to hold the family together while she fights panic and dwindling medication. From thousands of miles away, she asks the country she called home: how does a single bad choice erase a lifetime of belonging?