Last month, my mom sent me a video of a little girl named Galilea from Dallas.
She’s sitting on her gray couch, clutching a brown plush dog, remembering her mom’s voice, her clothes, and the way she would say goodnight.
“My mom is supposed to be with us,” she says. “ICE took her away.”
On May 29, Galilea’s mother, Carmen Herrera, showed up to her immigration court hearing in San Antonio, only to be arrested by plainclothes ICE officers, and taken into custody. In a video, Carmen, who was detained in front of her husband and children, can be heard saying, “I can’t breathe, I’m having an anxiety attack,” as she’s shoved into the back of a van.
Carmen’s arrest was part of a new ICE directive targeting courthouses all over the country — where immigrants have reported for hearings on active asylum cases, only to be deported. The same day Carmen was arrested, a 6-year-old Honduran boy with leukemia was arrested in Los Angeles when he arrived at his hearing. The boy was crying in fear — and wet himself — when a plainclothes officer displayed his weapon.
For months on end, outrage has mounted over ICE operations across the country that have targeted people at construction sites, farms, hotels, outside immigration court, at church, and at school.
Each time I open my phone, I’m greeted with new snapshots outlining the scope and scale of this national tragedy: A family of five was deported to Mexico after a traffic stop in Austin, despite the fact that two of their children are U.S. citizens. There was a viral video of a woman in Los Angeles, vlogging the process of her mom’s self-deportation after living in this country and raising a family here for 36 years. Earlier this year, an 11-year-old in North Texas took her own life after classmates bullied her and other Hispanic students by threatening to report their families to ICE.
This neverending carousel of cruelty used to masquerade as “law and order.” But the mask has been slipping, and the racism behind these immigration initiatives has become clearer by the day: Far-right political activist, Trump lackey, and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer claimed on X this week that there are 65 million “illegal aliens” in the U.S. That’s the number of the total Latino population.
When discussing the new detention center in Florida, for which the Florida GOP is now selling branded “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise, she wrote: “Alligator lives matter. The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.” To Loomer, it seems that simply being Latino is a crime.
So with July Fourth looming on the horizon — as ICE operations continue across the country, tearing apart families and terrorizing immigrant communities — I’ve been thinking a lot about my own family history, and what it means to belong to a place whose leaders do not want you here. How do you celebrate a holiday that’s about liberty and freedom when you’re watching innocent people get shoved into unmarked vans?
In May, a Texas sheriff told Newsweek he would support ICE operations in schools, saying “If someone is here illegally, they need to be deported regardless of age or location.” An 11-year-old girl (and U.S. citizen) made headlines when she and her family were deported on the way to an emergency medical appointment in Houston to treat her brain tumor. And in the most “uplifting” of these stories, a little boy named Diego was released from a Texas detention center just in time to celebrate his fourth birthday this week.
This is our new normal — the result of Trump’s promise to execute the “single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”
Texas is home to 12.1 million Latinos who make up 40 percent of the population. There are an estimated 1.7 million undocumented immigrants with families, jobs, and lives here. We share 1,254 miles of our border and a long, rich history with Mexico.
These aren’t just cold, hard statistics, they’re the context behind the living, breathing people who work with you, who pave the roads you drive on, harvest the food you put on the table, who went to college with you, who have backyard barbecues in the same neighborhood as you, whose children are in the same kindergarten class as yours.
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The year my grandfather died, I went back home to interview him about his life.
He told me stories about his escapades growing up on a ranch, helping take care of his family’s livestock. He recounted the story of meeting my grandmother at a local dance — how they’d gotten married and eventually left their small towns behind for the big city of San Antonio, where they raised my aunts, uncles, and my mom. It’s the kind of origin story that’ll feel familiar to so many Texans.
But my grandfather wasn’t from Texas. He was born and raised in Lampazos de Naranjo, Nuevo León, México.
My family arrived in San Antonio in the era of segregated pools, “separate but equal” schools, and “Whites Only” signs posted outside various businesses. Future congressman Henry B. González was just beginning his tenure as the first Mexican-American elected to the Texas Senate in over a century while my grandparents and the other families in their West Side neighborhood were packing up their trucks to begin the summer season as migrant farmers.
This state helped shape them, there’s no denying that. It introduced them to another culture, a new language, new music and food.
But along with countless other immigrants and Mexicans who have always called this state home, they helped shape Texas, too.
In 1968, my aunt was one of 400 Edgewood High School students who walked out in protest of inadequate funding and unequal conditions. That demonstration was the beginning of a decades-long fight against Texas’ discriminatory school financing system. Three of my uncles enlisted in the military, and while they finished out their service, their neighborhood was rocked by the deaths of 55 Edgewood students in Vietnam — the second-highest number of casualties from a single U.S. school district.
These are the people who helped raise me, who taught me how to ride a bike and tie a lasso knot, who put me on horseback before I could write my own name, and introduced me to Vicente Fernández, Johnny Cash, Selena, and George Strait.
I could list out all of the things that make them worthy of being called “Texans,” write out all of their best qualities and contributions, but I want to be clear: my grandparents didn’t deserve to be here just because they did things “the right way,” or because, once they were here, they became model citizens who seamlessly adapted to their new home.
They weren’t perfect, they were just lucky: Lucky that they were born at the right time, lucky that their journey here didn’t have to involve a dangerous trek through the desert or across the river, lucky that my grandfather already had a sister who immigrated here before him, and who helped him understand the process. They were lucky enough to come here “the right way,” put down roots, and not have to worry about their lack of knowledge or their mistakes making them targets for deportation.
And thanks to that trick of fate, I don’t have to spend every waking moment worried that my family will be ripped apart by undercover ICE agents. I don’t have to think about how to afford costly legal fees, how to get them to and from their court appointments, or how to make sure they know their rights. For so many others, these fears are an everyday reality — an all-American nightmare they cannot wake up from.
And while they navigate this turmoil, the official White House account has turned their suffering into cruel and disgusting memes, posting an “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” and an AI-generated illustration of a woman crying while being handcuffed. In an Op-Ed for The New York Times published this week, author Chandran Kukathas writes that Trump and his administration believe they have a democratic mandate to deport as many people as possible.
“Their ultimate fear is that outsiders pose a danger to American values — the threat of not just taking our jobs or becoming welfare scroungers but also transforming our society into something different,” he says. “‘America First’ means not so much putting Americans first as putting a distinct idea of America and American values first.”
We’ve been down this road before. In 1954, Border Patrol claimed to have been responsible for the deportation of roughly 1.2 million Mexicans under President Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback.” It’s a policy that Trump himself has cited as inspiration, though historians have argued that the actual amount of deportations was much lower, and study after study has shown the short-term efficacy of mass deportations and their detrimental effects on the economy.
But, as Alexander Aviña, an associate professor of history at Arizona State University, told the Texas Tribune, these types of crackdowns do show long-term success in one area: creating a culture of fear and xenophobia.
“There is this element of spectacle that both administrations use,” Aviña said. “They try to induce fear and terror in immigrant populations to get them to self-deport, and that’s something they tried to do with Operation Wetback, and it’s something that is continuing with the Trump administration.”
Of course, that xenophobia and fear isn’t specific to undocumented immigrants. Though proponents of these policies at first claimed that federal agents would only be targeting violent criminals, then only the undocumented, that soon grew to any immigrants “creating a ruckus.”
Throughout his campaigns, Trump and his supporters have repeatedly framed the arrival of immigrants to the U.S. border as “invasions.” It’s the same language used by the mass shooter who drove 650 miles to El Paso in his 2019 manifesto. And it’s the same language that Stephen Miller — White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Homeland Security Advisor, and the architect behind Trump’s immigration policies — has used repeatedly, most recently in discussions about Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
The sprawling legislation would authorize an unprecedented $170 billion for immigration and border-related operations, making ICE the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the country, and when a handful of Republican holdouts briefly held up the bill, Miller addressed them on Twitter, saying “BBB will liberate America from invasion. Occupied towns will be freed. Whole towns saved.”
The bill also seriously guts child protection standards made possible by the Flores Settlement, opening the door to prolonged, inhumane detention of children and families. “Armed with this funding, this administration will be able to multiply its violent raids and detain over 750,000 children, parents, and longtime residents in remote detention camps where, even now, people are dying,” said Sarah Mehta, Deputy Director of Government Affairs for the American Civil Liberties Union.
I’m the granddaughter of an immigrant, and Texas is the only place I’ve ever called home. For most of my adult life, I have watched as this state’s leaders have pushed for the erasure of Mexican history in schools, have fought to put our authors on banned books lists, and have helped ICE and the federal government carry out mass deportations that have upended our communities.
Some people might wonder why we fight so hard to “belong” to a place that has such a fraught relationship to our community, but those people are asking the wrong question. This isn’t about belonging, because we are here. We’ve been here. And as hard as it will be to make it through this current moment, the simple fact of the matter is this: There is no Texas without us.