ICE, Border Patrol actions leave folks angry, fearful and, most of all, confused

The Feb. 5 letter to parents from Alice Independent School District Superintendent Anysia Trevino about school trips for extracurricular activities such as sports and band will surely rank as one of the defining documents of the Age of Trump.

Acknowledging the possibility of U.S. Border Patrol agents stopping school buses at checkpoints through the Rio Grande Valley to inquire of students’ citizenship status, the superintendent of a school district where 92 percent of the 4,500 or so students are Hispanic warned parents to be wary of “the potential implications of these encounters.”

“If a student is found to be without proper documentation, they may be removed from the bus, detained and possibly deported under current immigration policies,” said Trevino, who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley. “Additionally, if a student provides false information regarding their citizenship and it is later discovered, this could result in a permanent bar to future U.S. citizenship.”

The letter went on to reassure parents in the South Texas school district that a chaperone would follow the bus on trips and stay with any student detained “while the rest of the group continues their journey.”

True, U.S. Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks – the state of Texas’ former border czar – the next day on “Fox & Friends” described the idea that Border Patrol agents would “target school buses and children” as “absurd," prompting Alice ISD to walk back its letter. Yet a follow-up Border Patrol memo acknowledges that while school buses are not “targeted,” they might be boarded at checkpoints “to confirm the legal rights of all passengers to include adult chaperones and students to be in or remain in the United States with proper documentation and to verify the purpose and destination of their travel.”

Clear as mud?

Consider, too, beleaguered Smith County Sheriff Larry Smith, who ran afoul of Make America Great Again sensibilities in using a Feb. 6 community forum in Tyler to attempt to calm and reassure his constituents, including angry, fearful immigrants who cited U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids as reason to (quoting the sheriff) “stop sending their children to school, going to church, going to work and most importantly preventing those individuals from reporting major crimes to law enforcement.” The sheriff in a Feb. 12 letter acknowledged only confusing matters more and apologized to “citizens of Smith County, Gov. Abbott and his office, [U.S.] Border Czar Tom Homan and President Trump.”

Not exactly explained in his letter: What red line did he cross? The fact he shared the stage with several other sheriffs from conservative East Texas, including Franklin County Sheriff Ricky Jones, president of the Association of Texas Sheriffs, and the association’s executive director, former Nacogdoches County Sheriff Thomas Kerss – and that none disagreed with Smith – suggests Sheriff Smith understands he has been caught in the dizzying cultural and political turmoil dividing America that goes beyond conflicting views on the Constitution, immigration law and Christian decency. Indeed, several Make America Great Again-inclined citizens subsequently took legal steps to remove the sheriff from office for “gross ignorance of official duties.”

Presumably, this political sacrilege includes Smith’s reassuring constituents – immigrants among them – that neither he nor his deputies in the everyday business of traffic stops and such plan to routinely check on immigration status.

This is where we are in Trump’s America: Half the nation begrudgingly accepts the by-a-whisker public mandate of fellow citizens returning Donald Trump to power, yet hopes to prevent the societal and economic ruin that could result from the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants promised during Trump’s rancorous 2024 campaign. Greatest fear: U.S. citizens of color and immigrants here on visas becoming swept up in scenes conjuring images of daily life in Nazi Germany.

Looming over all, especially in Texas: Confusion by everyone from school officials to church leaders to county sheriffs to immigrants legal and otherwise over just what ICE and Border Patrol officials are prioritizing and planning.

During a Feb. 8 Saturday morning gathering organized by Baylor University world religions scholar and Baptist minister Blake Burleson and organic chemist and researcher Mark Brickhouse at Seventh & James Baptist Church, just off the Baylor campus in Waco – more than 400 miles from the anxious heart of the Rio Grande Valley – some 80 mostly white residents raised concerns about possible ICE raids of homes, schools, churches and businesses to corral undocumented immigrants. Anger edged out fear in the room, though confusion prevailed over all. Yet from all this the Heart of Texas Coalition for Immigrant and Migrant Rights was formed. It now has more than 100 volunteers and counting.

After an hour or so of expressions of concern by friends and neighbors amid suggestions of organizing to support local immigration advocacy groups, lobby politicians and ferry immigrants to doctors, schools and attorneys, longtime local attorney Kent McKeever, whose practice includes immigration as an area of expertise, stressed the extreme fluidity of the moment.

“This could change tomorrow, OK?” he said. “Literally. But right now the local ICE office is telling us that they do not have the capacity to conduct raids in our community, so that’s good, right? But that could change. They are prioritizing individual enforcement against undocumented people who have criminal records, more recent [immigrants] within the last two years of illegal entrance, and then people with prior deportations and other immigration violations.”

With Trump’s issuance of pronouncements, declarations and executive orders, some in conflict with others, authorities in Waco seem intent on reassuring the public about continuance of daily life. They discourage visions of federal agents storming school classrooms, playgrounds and extracurricular events to scrutinize and possibly detain brown-skinned individuals. Amid anxiety in Waco Independent School District where 60 percent of its 14,000 students are Hispanic, McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara – strapping inspiration for Taylor Sheridan’s Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton in the 2016 film “Hell or High Water” – assures trusting Central Texas constituents that ICE is only targeting individuals who have committed crimes and known gang members. The ICE raid of Feb. 24 in the Houston coastal area that resulted in 118 arrests would seem to confirm this; arrests reportedly involved individuals accused of criminal sexual conduct, homicide, theft, child sexual abuse, weapons offenses and drug charges. The raid presumably included at least some of those who chose to associate with such individuals.

For the moment, these are distinctions with a difference, so far as law enforcement is concerned. Rusk County Sheriff Johnwayne Valdez, in trying to bolster’s Sheriff Smith’s reassurances during the latter’s off-the-rails Feb. 6 immigration forum in Tyler, stressed that if immigrant constituents, documented or not, hesitate out of fear to contact the sheriff when serious problems arise, it defeats the first obligation of a sheriff and his deputies to deter serious criminal activity and protect the entire county population.  

“I’ve been doing this for 40 years,” said Valdez, whose background includes service on the Deep East Texas Narcotics Task Force. “I don’t answer a call for service and ask everybody there what their immigration status is. I ask how I can help them because they called us for a reason. They called 9-1-1 for a reason. They called for an ambulance for a reason and we’re the first ones to respond. What I don’t want for the citizens of Rusk County is for them not to call us when they need help, because I could give a rip what their immigration status is at that moment.”

To which Hopkins County Sheriff Lewis Tatum, based in Sulphur Springs, added to Hispanics in the Tyler audience: “You need to go to school, go to work, go to church, conduct your lives like you have been, just like the sheriff is saying here. Don’t break the law and you don’t have nothing to worry about. Just continue on with your lives.”

Franklin County Sheriff Jones, who heard Trump border czar Homan speak during the February National Sheriffs Association Winter Conference, said concerns similar to those voiced in Tyler are being aired in other counties. “My understanding after we came back from Washington, D.C.,” he said, “we’re looking for the rapists, we’re looking for the murderers.” He added: “I don’t think I’ve ever asked anybody since I been sheriff since 2013 if they had papers and I’m not going to start today and neither are my officers.”

Notwithstanding such reassurances (and by unquestionably conservative sheriffs), confusion among Texans has only accelerated. In 2017, former Waco Tribune-Herald assistant opinion editor Sandra Sanchez wrote of state legislation requiring local governmental entities and law enforcement officials to comply with federal immigration laws and detainer requests, inviting the prospect of racial profiling on city streets, including the targeting of her then-teenage daughter.

“Clearly, they were targeting immigrants, but there will be others affected who now live in a state where at any time they might feel forced to prove their birthplace,” Sanchez wrote in a compelling McAllen Monitor column. “Does this mean she'll need to carry her passport to school? And if she ever is approached, will it change how she views law enforcement? We have, after all, long taught her to respect and trust them. As her 16th birthday approaches, all along I thought the most I had to fret about was whether she'd remember to put both hands on the wheel, keep the music low, don't follow too closely and pay attention to other motorists. But now we both have so much more to fear.”

And that was only a few months into Trump’s first presidency.

To confound matters, it’s evident each of us walking around in America has a different idea of what our country should be doing on immigration, even among those who support deportation in one form or another. A poll by The New York Times and Ipsos of 2,128 U.S. adults conducted in early January found 87 percent surveyed supported deporting undocumented immigrants in the United States who have criminal records; 63 percent favored deportation of those who arrived in America over the last four years. However, 62 percent oppose ending protection from deportation for immigrants who were children when they illegally entered the United States, while 55 percent oppose ending birthright citizenship for children born to immigrants here illegally. Incidentally, birthright protection is part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which Trump apparently thought he could invalidate by executive order.

To confound matters further, Trump "co-president" and MAGA-come-lately tech billionaire Elon Musk has fiercely championed immigration exemptions allowing better-educated immigrants to assume or retain reasonably well-paid high-tech jobs in America through H-1B visas, drawing equally fierce condemnation from MAGA firebrands such as Steve Bannon – the latter arguably the heart and soul of the MAGA movement – as effectively cheating well-educated, native-born Americans of good-paying, high-tech jobs. Musk drew a line in the sand on the matter. “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” the 53-year-old South African-born founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla Motors replied to a critic on “X,” the sprawling social-media platform Musk controls. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

Bannon meanwhile has responded by reminding MAGA diehards that Musk and fellow Trump-supporting billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy's pronounced support for H-1B visas justify MAGA doubts, given the fact that, notwithstanding the $290 million Musk invested in Trump's 2024 reelection and Musk's work in "deconstruction of the administrative state," Musk remains, first and foremost, "an oligarch" pressing certain priorities way out of step with "America First" principles. Bannon in February has only doubled down on such rhetoric, blasting Musk and other tech CEOs as "techno-feudalists" and Musk in specific as a "parasitic illegal immigrant."

To confound matters even further, on Feb. 26 Trump presumably raised at least some "America First" eyebrows by announcing a "gold card" for wealthy immigrants. "We're gonna put a price on that card of about $5 million and that's going to give you green card privileges, plus," Trump declared. "It's gonna be a route to citizenship and wealthy people will be coming into our country." When asked by a reporter whether a Russian oligarch would be eligible for such a card, Trump replied: "Yeah, possibly. Hey, I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people."

For those who angrily branded President Obama a tyrant for using executive action in 2012 to provide a measure of legal protection for young immigrants brought illegally into the United States as children, Trump's gold card scheme raises obvious questions about philosophical coherence, assuming consistency in MAGA principles exists. It also raises questions about a two-tiered approach to legal status in America, one for elite, wealthy immigrants, another for those of more desperate circumstances. The Trump initiative appears to be a significant revision of the EB-5 program, established by Congress in 1990 as a way to draw foreign investment through granting legal status to individuals who invest approximately $1 million in a business that creates at least 10 jobs. 

If Trump 2.0 can be believed (and that’s asking a lot given its trafficking in falsehoods, conspiracy theories and half-baked policy proposals), the so-called "invasion" at the southern border has largely ended, whether because of seasonal cold, Trump's ascension or both. The administration in a Feb. 21 statement cites legitimate news media reporting that, among other things, Catholic Charities is seeing only “zero to three families” at its famous McAllen migrant shelter (courtesy of reporting by Sandra Sanchez, now of Border Report). It cites a report (again by Sanchez) that a Brownsville shelter shut its doors due to a “sudden decrease in asylum seekers” over the past month. And a migrant shelter network in El Paso says only one or two of its 20 shelters will remain open.

"Two years ago, U.S. Border Patrol agents encountered 1,500 illegal immigrants every day in the El Paso sector alone – now, they’re seeing roughly 80 per day amid President Donald J. Trump’s unprecedented effort to secure the homeland," the White House Office of Communications stated. "Now, organizations that once facilitated the invasion of illegal immigrants are finding out that sheltering them is no longer necessary."

Another statement on Feb. 26 suggested ICE raids were indeed targeting dangerous immigrants. Examples cited included a Haitian national charged with three murders and apprehended in North Carolina; a Salvadoran national and MS-13 gang member convicted of aggravated assault with bodily injury and DWI, apprehended in Houston; a Guatemalan national charged with multiple counts of child rape, apprehended in Massachusetts; a Brazilian national and confirmed gang member convicted of assault and battery, apprehended in Boston; and a Honduran national convicted of sexual conduct with a minor, apprehended in Minnesota. The statement added: "The Trump administration will remain focused on putting our own citizens first by mass-deporting illegal migrant rapists, murders [sic] and other criminals out of American communities.”

Yet anxiety continues. Waco attorney Susan Nelson told veteran Waco Tribune-Herald reporter Carl Hoover that many of her clients applying for a green card or addressing other immigration issues are worried, particularly families where some members are citizens and others are undocumented. While she believed it unlikely that ICE would enter schools to make arrests, experience suggested they might arrest undocumented parents as they arrived at a school to pick up their children. And Waco ISD Trustee Jose Vidaña told Hoover that he senses a general concern among students and parents about the prospect of immigration arrests and possible deportation. "Even people who have been here legally fear being picked up," Vidaña said. "I want to assure them that we're here to support them."

During the Seventh & James Baptist Church gathering, realization quickly set in that most participants were in the dark about all this – not just about how the Trump deportation dragnet is unfolding but what immigration laws and protocols actually are. A German-born woman with whom I spoke stressed that Americans who talk of undocumented immigrants simply “getting in line” for legal status – as if renewing a driver’s license – display ignorance about how difficult it can be to get citizenship: She has five degrees – a testament to her intelligence, discipline and doggedness – yet, she said, it took her 23 years to become a U.S. citizen.

Meanwhile, others in the Seventh & James group seek to battle racist stereotypes.

"I know from personal experience not all of our illegal immigrants are bad hombres,” said Guatemala-born immigration and personal injury attorney Luis Vasquez, who years ago overstayed his visa while growing up in Waco. “Yet that's the message we hear and it seems the news, the media, they want to focus on, you know, the bad apples, and there are. I think there was an interview asking, 'How do you feel about immigrants coming in?' And, sure, for security reasons, there has to be some balance. We can't have open borders. But there's also a lot of good people here.”

Vasquez's comments conjure Burleson's thought-stirring 2017 column for the Waco Tribune-Herald in which he marveled at a neighborhood spectacle just after Trump's 2016 victory, partially sealed through Trump’s characterization of immigrants as murderers, rapists and drug dealers. On his way to work, Burleson waved at José, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, carefully raking leaves in the front yard of neighbors around two imposing "Make America Great Again" signs near a flagpole flying Old Glory. Burleson pondered the fate of an individual who seemed "one of William and Cindy's family members since he takes faithful care of the beautiful gardens and lawns of the elderly couple nearly every day of the year – fall, winter, spring and summer. I couldn't help noticing the incongruity of this scene."

An Old Testament verse sprang to Burleson’s mind – Amos 5:12, which condemned the prevalence of injustice in 8th-century Israel and the failure to uphold the law: "There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes and deprive the poor of justice in the courts."

Thus the spectacle of Trump’s America churns on, whether in Alice or Waco or Tyler or Washington, D.C., whether in the rugged Texas borderland or the history-lined corridors of the U.S. Capitol. A few days after freeing and/or absolving some 1,500 supporters who four years earlier violently stormed the Capitol, brutalized police officers and threatened the lives of lawmakers, Trump was in Las Vegas, reveling in his return to power and justifying his immigrant deportation scheme by repeating groundless claims about foreign leaders opening up faraway prisons and mental institutions and liberating murderers and rapists to flow into America. The J6 liberator then asked unquestioning rallygoers: “Can you imagine somebody doing that to our country?”

Described by one of his editors as “an equal-opportunity skeptic” and one of his readers as a "modern-day Don Quixote" (for better or worse), Bill Whitaker in November 2020 retired from Texas journalism after a career of nearly 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist. He served as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor during his final dozen years in the profession.