Immigrant Families on Edge Amid Uncertainty Over New Texas Law

By Carlos Nogueras Ramos / The Texas Tribune

ODESSA — Maria del Carmen’s body went stiff in her living room Tuesday night when the television news broadcast announced yet another update on the new Texas immigration law. Her eyes were glued to the screen as she tried to make sense of the bold letters.

The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that Senate Bill 4, a new law authorizing police to arrest people who officers suspected of having crossed into Texas from Mexico anywhere other than a legal port of entry, could take effect. The 37-year-old grabbed her phone and texted her husband, who reassured her, saying everything would be okay.

Hours later, a new headline appeared on her phone: Another court had stopped the law from going into effect.

“Truthfully, I don’t understand it,” said del Carmen, who left her home in Durango, Mexico nine years ago and crossed the border into Texas. “They pass it and stop it, and I don’t know what to think.”

It’s a familiar sentiment among many families in Odessa, a predominantly Hispanic West Texas city, as they try to keep up with the legal chaos that has ensued since the Legislature passed the law last fall.

Under Senate Bill 4, crossing the border could result in a Class B misdemeanor, which carries a punishment of up to six months in jail. Repeat offenders could be charged with a second-degree felony, which carries a sentence of two to 20 years. The law says that state judges must order migrants returned to Mexico if they are convicted, with local law enforcement officials responsible for that trip. Should a migrant return voluntarily, the judge could drop the charges.

In response, the U.S. Department of Justice and immigrant rights groups sued Texas, arguing the law was unconstitutional because it interfered with existing federal immigration laws. Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United American Citizens, or LULAC for short, said the organization would “fight [SB 4] in the courthouse until they render it unconstitutional.”

“Immigration is solely a federal matter, not to be taken on by the state,” Garcia said.

In the meantime, the organization is advising people to ignore the noise until the fate of SB 4 becomes definitive, Garcia said. “The average immigrant who’s undocumented, they’re going to continue to work and feed their families,” Garcia said.

The law’s authors said it is not meant to target immigrants already living in Texas, only those who have recently crossed. Its supporters have portrayed it as an effort to put more border security power in the state’s hands, given what they see as the Biden administration’s failure to address record levels of illegal immigration. But locals both undocumented and naturalized said they feel anxious and defeated.

Rosie Luján, a lifelong Odessan whose parents immigrated from Ojinaga, Mexico 43 years ago to give their kids a chance at a better life, gathered with her family in Luján’s childhood home in Odessa’s south side, a Mexican enclave, on the night the nation’s highest court allowed the law to take effect.

Luján, who was born in Ojinaga and was three years old when she arrived in the U.S., says the law makes them feel that it won’t matter how hard they worked to achieve legal status. Luján said she fears that her family members could be racially profiled if a police officer pulls them over.

Luján, who became a U.S. citizen in 2016, said she’s confident of how she would navigate an interaction between her and a police officer, she said, but she worries about her mom, Francisca, who is older and doesn’t speak much English. Her mom five years ago earned her U.S. citizenship, a milestone the family celebrated over a big dinner.

“It’s a humiliation for us Hispanics,” Luján said. “Just because of how we look.”

Immigration advocates said disorder is the point.

“Unfortunately, the chaos and confusion are almost the goal,” said Priscilla Lugo, an immigration advocacy strategist at the Texas Law Immigration Council, a statewide nonprofit providing legal services. “It’s making people who are already here scared, confused, nervous, and apprehensive about what it’s like to live in Texas.”

Anne Chandler, the organization’s president, added: “​​The law is on and off, and people are terrified. How do they protect their loved ones? Even as a lawyer, I’m confused. Everyone is on pins and needles.”

Federal Mexican officials filed an amicus brief Thursday in the lawsuit over SB 4 that said the law has instilled “fear, panic, and uncertainty” among the Mexicans residing in the U.S.

“The possibility that thousands of Mexican nationals authorized to study, work, and reside in Texas are now under threat of detention, removal, and criminalization — and the related separation from their families — upon any interaction with a Texas law enforcement official has engendered unprecedented levels of anxiety in the Mexican community,” the brief said.

In the days since the state of SB 4 unraveled, del Carmen has unplugged from the news cycle, turning off her television and leaving her phone vibrating in the room. Crouched on her porch, she plucks roses from her modest garden.

She has no relatives in the U.S. other than her partner, a Cuban man she met eight years ago in El Paso; he has legal status. They moved to Odessa five years ago to start a trucking business. Every month, she sends money to her family and pays for her daughter’s education, something she had not been able to afford back in Mexico, she said.

Because she’s still undocumented, she drives under the speed limit, always worried about being pulled over by the police.

Over the next few months, she plans to lay low. She has a follow-up appointment in July to change her immigration status — she has applied for permanent residency, also known as a green card.

“I really don’t know what to think,” del Carmen said. “Maybe there are too many of us, I don’t know. But I understand why they come here, looking for a better life. I know because I’m one of them.”

By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss

As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin. 

Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.

Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes. 

Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.

Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.

On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.

There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.

The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.

Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.

They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel

The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.

We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.

The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.

After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago. 

What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.

“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”

“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality. 

Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.

“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.” 

Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed. 

“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”

When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.

He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.” 

I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows. 

We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.

/sp

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