When Laymone Khambounleung was deported to Laos last August, his mother’s relatives met him at a holding facility. He did not know what they looked like.
It was one of many unknowns Mr. Khambounleung faced when he was removed from the United States, the only country he had really known, over convictions including burglary and threatening a family member.
Now, he is learning to navigate daily life in a country he left four decades ago as a baby. Mr. Khambounleung, who grew up in Louisiana, can speak Lao, but he cannot read or write in the language. He has befriended other men who, like him, left the country as children and assimilated in the United States.
And like deportees across Latin America, Africa and elsewhere in Asia, he is sharing glimpses of his life on social media, hoping to raise awareness about the challenges and opportunities people face when they are removed to unfamiliar home countries, or third countries to which they have no ties. For some, their online posts also provide an income.
In Mr. Khambounleung’s videos, his reactions to sights in Laos, narrated in his Louisiana accent, have attracted millions of views.
“It’s all new to me too,” Mr. Khambounleung, 41, said in an interview. “I wanted to let the whole world see the Lao culture also, experience it with me while I’m experiencing it.”
Between President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 and the end of July, about 980,000 people were deported by the Department of Homeland Security, according to an analysis by Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. While most were intercepted at the border, a substantial number were immigrants residing in the country.
Through their videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, the lives of people who dwelled in the United States for a long time are told in new post-American chapters. Viewers on social media are offered a unique window into what comes after deportation upends a life.
‘You Don’t Really Fit Into Anywhere’
Being deported for some people means returning to a country of which they have little memory.
Mr. Khambounleung was 3 when his family, refugees from Laos, arrived in New Iberia, La., he said. After a burglary conviction, a judge in 2007 ordered his removal from the United States.
With Laos then accepting few deportees, Mr. Khambounleung stayed on supervised release, and was convicted of additional crimes, including robbery and threatening a family member. He was working as a pipe welder in Texas when Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him last year, he said.
“Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, noting Mr. Khambounleung’s criminal record.
He moved in with an aunt and uncle outside Vientiane, the capital of Laos.
“If it wasn’t for them, man, I don’t know what I’d do out here,” he said. “I’d be lost.”
With work difficult to find, he filmed his new surroundings: sunsets along the Mekong River, a scooter trip gone awry in a rice field, a building that reminded him of Toad from “Super Mario Brothers.”
“I always want to catch a funny moment,” he said. He hopes his posts will help him make a living.
But there are challenges that do not make it to social media. Mr. Khambounleung has left family behind in the United States, including a young daughter.
“Everybody in the video — they all smile and laugh and everything,” he said. “But deep down we’re all sad.”
Bryan Vasquez, 30, is also adjusting to life in an unfamiliar home country. He was deported to El Salvador in 2020.
Mr. Vasquez, too, had been brought to the United States by relatives. A judge ordered his removal as a child in 2007. But Mr. Vasquez said he was unaware of the deportation order, and it was not enforced until 2020, after he was convicted of conspiring to transport an undocumented migrant.
“I remember just looking at the streets and just crying,” Mr. Vasquez said. “I literally messed up my life for quick money.”
Mr. Vasquez first stayed with family in the city of San Miguel before moving two years ago to San Salvador, the capital.
“That’s when I was finally able to feel like, ‘OK. I like it here,’” he said.
Last year, inspired by similar videos, Mr. Vasquez began posting about El Salvador on TikTok, also hoping to earn an income. He documented the cost of living, from iPhones to pupusas, and sights he thought would interest Americans.
“It’s a weird feeling, like you don’t really fit into anywhere,” he said. In the United States, he said, he had felt Salvadoran. But in El Salvador, people see him as Americanized.
Mr. Vasquez said he missed his family and his job as a medical assistant, and comforts like Chick-fil-A.
But, he said, he finds life in El Salvador less stressful. “As of right now, I feel good over here,” he said.
Streaming Life in Mexico
Other deportees, like Raúl Hernández, use social media to process a situation they never imagined: being deported to a third country.
“I earned my deportation,” said Mr. Hernández, a Cuban citizen who was convicted of several drugs charges as well as burglary. He was deported to Mexico last August, in line with a Trump administration policy that has also sent people to African countries not their own, like Eswatini, South Sudan and Rwanda. “What I didn’t earn was getting sent to a third country without due process,” he added.
The D.H.S., in a statement, said he did receive due process. It defended its use of third-country removals as an “essential public safety tool,” arguing that there are safeguards in place.
Mr. Hernández, 29, was 7 when he was brought to the United States. His convictions led to revocation of his residency and a 2020 removal order. In May of 2025 he was detained by ICE.
He said he and other detainees were bused from a detention center in Arizona to Tabasco, Mexico. Mr. Hernández now lives in Cancún, where his father retired. He cannot work because he lacks legal status in Mexico. And he cannot be returned to Cuba, which has often refused repatriations.
“You’re here in a worse limbo than you were in before you came,” he said.
He began posting, he said, to educate other Cubans about third-country deportations. Now, he streams on TikTok most days and shares interviews with other deported Cubans.
The money he has made from social media, he said, including donations from sympathetic viewers, has helped him make ends meet.
His social media work has also given him purpose, he added.
“Honestly, it’s been the most fulfilling thing I’ve done in my entire life,” he said.
‘I still consider that home over there’
Social media is also documenting the toll of deportation on families.
Catherine Coe, 33, an American, began sharing on TikTok after her husband, Santiago Benitez, was deported last September.
“I had to let people know what was happening,” she said, including to people not convicted of serious crimes.
Mr. Benitez, 37, arrived from Mexico in 2013 as an undocumented immigrant. The couple lived in Alabama, married and had been seeking residency for Mr. Benitez when he was detained by immigration authorities. He had no criminal record aside from charges related to illegal entry, Ms. Coe and a lawyer said. (The Times found traffic-related offenses but no other criminal record for Mr. Benitez.)
Faced with the prospect of her children being separated from their father, Ms. Coe decided to move with the family to Tijuana.
Now, as they await the outcome of Mr. Benitez’s visa application, Ms. Coe is commuting from Mexico to Southern California to her job as a nurse.
On TikTok, she documented what she called “the hardest year of her life”: packed up boxes at their family home; her son’s last day of school in the United States; new routines in their home in Tijuana.
For all the disruptions, sharing their lives on social media is helping deportees maintain their ties to the United States, even if they now live in distant countries.
“I still consider that home over there,” Mr. Khambounleung said. “I’m forced to be here.”
Jennifer Jenkins contributed research.
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