Almost exactly six years after he entered the United States, Ramon Paredes Calderon asked an Aurora immigration judge to send him back to Mexico.

Paredes, a middle-aged man with spiky salt-and-pepper hair, was sitting alone in an Aurora courtroom earlier this month. Like most others held in the state’s only immigrant detention center , he wore a polo shirt and appeared without a lawyer. Through a Spanish translator, he told Judge Nina Carbone that he’d entered the United States in mid-September 2019, in Laredo, Texas. He said he didn’t have a wife or children here.

“Just friends,” he said.

He told Carbone that he wanted a voluntary departure — an increasingly common form of deportation that provides a swift exit from detention and from the country, at the cost of giving up on any othe

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