LOS ANGELES _ The girl clutched the goodbye card her friend Emily handed her that morning.
"All thou we'll be a few miles apart you allways be my best firend."
Luz Madrigal, 6, sat in the back seat of the car with her little brother Alejandro, heading south to the U.S.-Mexico border and a new home more than a thousand miles away.
Faced with diminishing job prospects and a president who promised to make life harder for them, Luz's mother and father _ immigrants in the country illegally _ decided to go back to Mexico.
They joined more than 100 people voluntarily returning since January to Mexico with the help of consulates in Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago.
An hour into the drive, Luz watched the urban blur pass by the car window under a gray sky. She pointed out tall buildings a little ways off in the distance.
"Is that Guatarajara?" she asked.
Her mother did not correct her pronunciation of Guadalajara.
"No," she said. "We still have a long way to go."
Five months before, Luz's parents walked into the Mexican Consulate on the edge of MacArthur Park to make her and her 3-year-old brother _ who are American _ Mexican citizens as well. Trump's victory felt like a bad omen. They wanted to be ready to leave.
Thousands of others across the country also went to Latin American consulates seeking dual citizenship for their U.S.-born children.
"The increase _ the boom _ started immediately after the inauguration of President Trump," said Carlos Garcia de Alba, Mexico's consul general in L.A. "We can suppose that there are strong reasons to do this. One of those is just to be prepared in case either of you could be deported. It's better to return to Mexico with children being nationals."
In the end, Luz and Alejandro's parents, Maria Barrancas and Ricardo Madrigal, decided to get out before it even got to that point.
"They're sending a message that, 'You're not welcome here, we don't want you here ... We're going to find you,'" Maria said. "You don't know if it's going to be tomorrow, the next month, the next year. You don't know when they're going to come knock on your door."
They told Luz about an idyllic place they planned to move to in Jalisco, about the goats, cows, sheep and beaches in Mexico.
She would meet aunts, uncles and cousins for the first time and ride her grandfather's horses.
The children would learn that Mexico was a vast country, and there were tranquil places, and there were places racked by terrible carnage from the drug trade. For this, Maria and Ricardo were not returning to their home state of Sinaloa, the violent heart of that trade and the land of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.
Maria and Ricardo settled on the city of Tlaquepaque in Jalisco. Ricardo's sister lives there and reported that it was safe to walk around, even at night, and that there were private schools that offer bilingual education.
"I worry for them, for their education more than anything," Ricardo said. "I'm going with the goal that my daughter doesn't lose her language. The idea is that they'll come back."
Eight days before they left, in their two-bedroom apartment in Gardena, Luz copied her multiplication tables into a notebook she would use for homework in Mexico.
For her age, Luz is already a worrier _ about her first day of school, about what they will be able to afford and what lies ahead for her family in Mexico.
Sitting among packed boxes in the living room, she practiced with a Spanish children's book her mother would read to her when she was a year old.
"Donde estara el osito Peluchin," Luz read aloud, haltingly pronouncing each unfamiliar word. "Where, oh where is Huggle Buggle Bear."
"Lo llamo y lo llamo, pero no," she trailed off, staring down at the word "quiere." Want.
"Sound it out," Maria told her. When she was 3, Luz could switch from English to Spanish without hesitation.
"How am I supposed to sound that out?" she responded, casting the book aside for one in English. Luz, who is on a second-grade reading level, finished it within a minute.
There are nearly half a million children who are U.S. citizens enrolled in Mexican schools, the Mexican government said last year. Researchers have found some students struggling to integrate because they cannot read or write in Spanish.
Mexico has not had the long history of immigration like the U.S. and so has not had to grapple with how to accommodate non-Spanish-speaking students in their schools.
"They haven't thought about creating classes of Spanish as a second language," said Patricia Gandara, a UCLA professor who heads up education for the University of California-Mexico Initiative.
"Without programs to help integrate these kids into the schools and without even the acknowledgment on the part of many teachers that these kids have special needs, they're not likely to fare really well in the Mexican school system," Gandara said. "We think it's a real crisis."
If large numbers of English-speaking U.S.-born children began heading south, they could swamp the Mexican school system.
There were an estimated 4.5 million U.S.-born children under the age of 18 living with undocumented parents, according to a 2012 Pew Research Center study. A University of Southern California analysis found that about 13 percent of children in Los Angeles County were U.S. citizens with at least one parent without legal status.
An American citizen with a parent who is a Mexican national can become a dual citizen through "registro de nacimiento," or birth registration.
In 2016, from January through August, the Mexican Consulate in L.A. registered 991 births. This year, over the same months, more than 2,000 were registered.
There have also been increases in birth registrations at the consulates of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, credited in part to the new administration.
"I think in part because of the insecurity that's come with President Trump and the possible changes to immigration," said Pablo Ordonez, Honduras' consul general in L.A. "I think people are preparing for any possibility."
