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 posted school district letter went on to reassure parents 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.” Later, the sheriff in a Feb. 12 letter acknowledged only confusing matters more and apologized to “the citizens of Smith County, Gov. Abbott and his office, 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 (when invited on stage to do so) – suggests Sheriff Smith understands he has been caught in the dizzying cultural and political turmoil dividing our country that goes beyond conflicting views on the Constitution, immigration law and Christian decency. Indeed, several MAGA-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: 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.

All this echoes the philosophical incoherence long displayed by many Texans over immigration which, whatever else, provides cheap labor for jobs many of us won’t condescend to take. Many fellow Texans cherish Confederate ancestry, embrace the destructive Lost Cause narrative and in unguarded moments roil at the idea of General Robert E. Lee ending through surrender “servitude of the African to the White race” (to quote Texas secessionists of 1861) – yet these same individuals allow their dander to be raised over immigrant labor, documented or not, often working for off-the-books, slave-labor wages, constructing our highways, slaughtering our beef, manicuring our yards, picking our crops and reroofing our homes.

A friend of mine, progressive-minded Baylor University religion scholar and preacher Blake Burleson – whose family tree includes Baylor President Rufus Burleson, who in 1861 encouraged students to fight for the Confederacy – was struck by this continuing cultural irony the day after Trump's election to the presidency in 2016, a victory fueled partially by the business tycoon’s vilification of many undocumented immigrants as murderers, rapists and drug dealers. Driving to work, Burleson waved to a familiar face – José, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico carefully raking leaves in the neatly manicured yard of Burleson's neighbors around two imposing "Make America Great Again" signs posted in front of a flagpole flying Old Glory.

"He almost seems like 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," Burleson said. "I couldn't help noticing the incongruity of this scene.”  

During a Feb. 8 Saturday morning gathering organized by 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.

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.”

But who knows how long this will endure in the chaotic administration of a mercurial president?

Not helping: The Trump administration has been erratic from the start about how its mass deportation of “illegals” is unfolding, possibly because it falls so short of what Trump promised during the campaign. As a Feb. 13 Axios report notes, the effort to deport a million undocumented immigrants has been hindered by a “lack of funds, detention space, officers and infrastructure to handle arrested immigrants.” 

Not helping: Passage of state laws about state and local powers impacting an obligation long regarded as the exclusive domain of the federal government. One thinks of Texas Senate Bill 4, signed into law in December 2023 by Gov. Greg Abbott to “stop the tidal wave of illegal entry into Texas.” During a press conference in the Rio Grande Valley, Abbott said in a burst of hyperbole the law would cut the number of undocumented immigrants by up to 75 percent.

Not helping: On-again, off-again rulings from state and federal courts over legitimate constitutional issues arising from differing perspectives and interpretations of everything from laws to executive orders. One thinks again of embattled SB 4 which, at one point in March 2024, saw the Supreme Court of the United States clear it for enforcement the same day an appellate panel of the ultra-conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals then put the same bill’s enforcement on hold.

Not helping: A failure by Congress to fulfill its constitutional duties and hammer out a workable solution. Just a year ago several Republicans in the U.S. Senate finally ignored extremists in their ranks and worked to fix what wasn't exactly an "open border" but was sufficiently porous to raise concerns. The deal would have sharply limited border crossings, beefed up security personnel, purchased fentanyl-detection devices, tightened standards for asylum appeals and deported thousands of undocumented immigrants.

Not helping: Because President Biden indicated he would sign this bipartisan bill, Trump – by then in full campaign mode – condemned the bill and Republicans who defied him by working toward its passage. All this exposed the carnival barkers and snake-oil salesmen infesting the Republican Party for what they are. Was this continued "invasion" (Abbott's word) worth allowing Trump to have a provocative issue to run on through 2024 when a smart deal to remedy matters was on the table?

If one said yes, that Republicans should defer to Trump, then by 2024 logic one had to discount all the alarm expressed over immigrants running amok. And so the Republican-engineered border deal was off, snuffed out by Republican lawmakers. The Make America Great Again juggernaut then campaigned on outrage over “open borders.” And now we find that mass deportation of the scope Trump promised will add billions of dollars to the federal debt as Congress hungers for tax cuts for everybody and his dog.

Since implosion of the bipartisan border security bill in early 2024, Americans have been treated to such bizarre spectacles as the "Take Our Border Back" convoy rallies to Texas that, rather than being about border security, showcased unrelated conspiracy theories, January 6 testimonials, evangelism, music, self-indulgent patriotism and anti-Biden rants. Ted Nugent headlined the poorly attended Dripping Springs event. The rocker who famously did not fight for his country during the Vietnam War apologized to its war dead "for allowing this piece of shit [Biden] to get in the White House."

Flash forward a year and we witness more spectacle, including Trump border czar Tom Homan getting into a verbal sparring match with the pope over deportation operations. And as Trump’s Department of Justice scuttled bribery charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Adams’ appearance with Homan on “Fox and Friends” appeared to suggest, true or not, that the federal charges were dropped in return for Adams’ greasing the skids for immigration crackdowns in the Big Apple.

“If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sitting on the couch,” Homan declared as he, Mayor Adams and “Fox and Friends” hosts sat on the couch whooping it up at this apparent quid pro quo deal. “I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”

Everyone laughed.

And as Trump’s riding-the-range Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem presses for 87,000 IRS agents to leave their jobs hounding scofflaws and cheats to pay their taxes to fund government operations and instead help nab immigrants, some in Congress mull a long-term government deportation operation that could cost $1 trillion, canceling out Trump co-president Elon Musk’s crusade to cut a trillion dollars from the federal budget (a goal halved from his 2024 vow to cut $2 trillion), all of which makes sweeping Trump tax cuts appear even more financially irresponsible.

With Trump’s ascension, authorities in Waco 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 constituents that ICE is only targeting criminals who have committed crimes and known gang members.

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, legal 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.”

If the Trump administration can be believed (and that’s asking a lot given its preference for falsehoods and conspiracy theories), the so-called "invasion" at the southern border has largely ended, whether because of seasonal cold, fear of Trumpian border vigor or both. Briefly shelving its familiar disdain for "fake news," 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 McAllen, Texas, shelter (courtesy of reporting by former Waco Tribune-Herald opinion colleague and McAllen-based Sandra Sanchez, now of Border Report). It cites reports (again, by Sanchez) that a Brownsville facility shut its doors due to the “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.

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.

During the Seventh & James Baptist Church gathering, realization quickly set in that most participants were simply 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 rabbi with whom I spoke stressed that Americans who talk of undocumented immigrants simply “getting in line” for legal status – as if just 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 says, it took her 23 years to become a U.S. citizen.

Another woman – a graying, native-born former Republican – lamented how deeply rooted America’s immigration problem likely is amid the “burn-it-all-down” MAGA mentality that has so infected the Republican Party. She recalled her days as a precinct chairwoman for the party and how, as far back as the 1980s during the Age of Reagan, she noticed a growing segment at state conventions that exhibited an outlook she described as “more punitive, that is to say mean.” She finally cut her Republican ties after such mean-spiritedness became more prevalent, initially in the desire to punish women attempting to secure abortions, then encompassing a wider range of cultural and political targets including immigrants.

"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.”

One point of ire raised during the Waco meeting: Former Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn's Feb. 1 post on tech billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk's increasingly toxic social-media platform alleging "money-laundering" of federal money by Lutheran Family Services, which provides immigration services. This prompted Musk, then meddling with government agency expenses, to respond (online, of course) by declaring he would be "rapidly shutting down these illegal payments."

Musk, who campaigned for Trump by spreading unfounded rumors of immigrants being imported to America to vote for Democrats in the 2024 election, represents an increasingly polarizing presence in Waco and Central Texas, courtesy of the thundering rocket-engine tests conducted at his nearby SpaceX facility which some homeowners blame for foundational problems, even as MAGA neighbors revel in the earthshaking presence of Trump's partner amid visions of sending U.S. citizens as emigrants to Mars.

Thus the spectacle churns on, whether in Alice or Waco or Tyler or Washington, D.C. A few days after freeing and/or absolving some 1,500 supporters who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, attacked police officers and threatened the lives of lawmakers four years earlier, Trump was in Las Vegas, reveling in his return to power and justifying his deportation scheme by echoing claims of foreign leadership opening up faraway prisons and mental institutions and liberating murderers and rapists to flow into America. The J6er-in-chief then asked rallygoers: “Can you imagine somebody doing that to our country?”

To confound matters, it’s evident each of us walking around 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.

And this is where we are in Trump’s America, not even two months into a presidency no longer tempered by public servants knowledgeable about and respectful of the law.

Nor are only Republicans and MAGA to blame. One wonders how the nation might have fared had Biden seized the initiative early in his presidency and assembled a blue-ribbon panel of borderland sheriffs, county judges, business leaders, ranchers, farmers and leaders of charitable organizations, all without regard to party, race or religion, to debate and craft a set of recommendations for border security and immigration that Congress and the president could have then considered for passage into law.

Democratic friends admonish me for such political naiveté, reminding me that Biden was busy early in his presidency trying to return America to stable economic and societal footing after a deadly pandemic the previous administration bungled. Fair enough. But in failing to multi-task and address immigration head-on at the very outset, Biden allowed a virulent strain more deadly than COVID-19 to imperil our constitutional order, our democratic traditions and the virtue of the citizens upon which any democracy must rely if it is to survive.

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.