Fear overrides risks
In face of deportation threat, flood victims rule out seeking help
The water surged into the modest low-lying apartments with the full force of nearby overflowing Greens Bayou, slamming toys and tiny buckled shoes onto countertops and overturning chairs.
Byron Soto waded through knee-high water, carrying his toddlers to a second floor. But as the menacing tide edged closer, he used a friend’s inflatable boat to get to a vacant apartment on higher ground at the complex where he and his family are still camped out.
He, and others like him in the flooded apartments near Interstate 10 and Federal Road, didn’t think about calling 911. Instead, they did what they often have had to do while living illegally in the United States: They improvised.
After all, who would come to their rescue? The president wants them deported. The governor and state Legislature enacted a law allowing police officers to report them, though a federal judge blocked it late last week. Their labor will be needed for the massive reconstruction ahead, yet they are fearful of stepping forward to
help their community recover.
“I’m afraid,” said Soto, a 31-year-old construction worker from Guatemala who has been here for a decade. “They’re going to deport me, and then what would happen to my kids?”
With Hurricane Harvey hurtling into Texas, unease was already spreading among many of the 600,000 immigrants illegally in Houston. Since President Donald Trump took office, federal agents have arrested more than 6,200 here, the most in the country after Dallas and Atlanta, according to federal statistics. In this, one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the United States, who would come to their aid? And if someone did, could they be trusted?
The apprehension in this complex reached a fever pitch. Oscar Ortiz, a 36-year-old from Honduras, is caring for his 8-year-old niece whose mother is being deported this week.
“People didn’t call 911 because they were afraid Immigration would come,” Ortiz said.
Immigrant advocates knocked on doors and visited shelters to assuage such fears. “It’s a real crisis,” said Cesar Espinosa, executive director of FIEL Houston.
Mayor Sylvester Turner urged immigrants to seek help, vowing to represent them himself if they were threatened with deportation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials reiterated several times that they had suspended deportation efforts in the area while rescues were ongoing. The assurances, from Washington, D.C., Austin and Houston, weren’t enough.
“People were scared that boats from U.S. immigration services were out there,” said Jesus Contreras, a paramedic in Montgomery County who has a temporary work permit for young immigrants that is now at risk. “People weren’t sure if they were trying to round up people from the water and take them straight to the immigration center.”
At shelters across the region, officials tried desperately to dispel such fears. They added Spanish translators. They blasted messages on social media, saying they were not asking about immigration status or requiring identifying documents.
“It’s definitely been more of an issue in this disaster,” said Grace Meinhofer Torres, a spokeswoman with the American Red Cross.
As the hours turned into days, immigrants in this waterlogged complex near Greens Bayou watched rescue workers speed past the moat encircling their homes. On Facebook, they saw photographs of Border Patrol agents, the same officers who had arrested many they know, helping rescue efforts. So they stayed put. But as conditions worsened, and the river of rainfall turned into a fetid pool with an unbearable stench, as children took to nearby dumpsters searching for something to eat because no stores nearby were open and too many cars flooded, some residents turned to the only source of authority they trust.
“Why are we being abandoned,” one wrote in a Facebook message to the Spanish television network Telemundo. “There are lot’s of people trapped here without food.”
Across the region, the flooding left some immigrants with little choice but to have faith in the very authorities they feared.
At first, 48-year-old Ofelia Perez and her two adult daughters tried to mop away the water in her Channelview house. They barricaded the doors. They climbed on the beds. Finally they sat on tables. But the water kept rising. They worried they would be electrocuted as the power remained on.
And so they stuffed 11 people, including four children and an infant, into a truck, praying for safety in Perez’s daughter’s trailer. But the water was too high. The family, who came here illegally from Mexico two decades ago, took shelter in a church. Eventually, they were evacuated to NRG Center, along with thousands of others from the Houston region.
“We did it more for the children, they’re all citizens,” said Perez’s daughter, Ofelia Ibarra, 28. “We couldn’t risk their lives.”
As they squatted on makeshift beds in the vast convention center this week, they surveyed their uncertain future. Both of Perez’s two daughters work at a restaurant in Channelview that flooded even worse than her own home. She doesn’t have flood insurance.
As an immigrant here illegally, she doesn’t qualify for cash assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, though she could receive some benefits through her American children. The mayor said last week that the city likely will channel some of its relief fund to local nonprofits to distribute to immigrants who don’t qualify for federal aid.
But Perez wondered what would happen once attention turned elsewhere. Immigration actions have been suspended during recovery, but what happens after that?
“We just hope we have no problems with them,” the mother said. “That would just be the breaking point.”
At the George R. Brown Convention Center, the same anxiety gnawed at 23-year-old Ricxy Sanchez, who came here illegally from Honduras last year. She was rescued from her groundfloor Edgebrook apartment with her three children after the water rose nearly to their chests. Adding to the worries is that she recently missed an immigration court hearing, so she likely will be deported soon.
“The hurricane has added another weight on everyone’s shoulders,” said Elizabeth, 51, who is from Mexico but declined to give her last name out of fear for her status. “Everyone was already anxious about their situation in this country. And now this storm? It’s too much.”
At the Toyota Center, Olivia Rosales said she jolts awake at night, seeing images of dark water gushing forth just as it did when she and her family trudged through knee-high water to escape their home near Greens Bayou. She and her husband pulled their two toddlers in a plastic tub and tied everyone together so they wouldn’t float away in the torrent.
But there is an underlying dread to her nightmares.
“The truth is, I am afraid of immigration (agents),” said Rosales, who is here illegally although all of her six children are American citizens.
Some felt comforted by the mayor’s assurances. As she wrung floodwater out of her clothes at a laundromat in Pasadena this week, Julissa, a 44-yearold from Mexico who declined to give her last name, said she would have sought help had she needed it.
“The most important thing is life, and after that, whatever will happen will happen,” she said.
At a nearby shelter run by Golden Acres Baptist Church, Delga Barrera, a naturalized American citizen from Honduras, said she saw the flooding as punishment for the harsh rhetoric politicians have employed against migrants this year.
“God is talking to us and we need to listen,” she said. Many of her family members who are here illegally didn’t seek aid through official channels, she said, relying instead on the ad-hoc support system they have built up over the years.
“People are afraid to ask for help because of all this hostility,” she said. “(Immigration) says they won’t do anything right now, but as soon as you close your eyes they come and get you.”
Some took advantage of such fears. Federal officials advised people to verify law enforcement credentials after reports that looters impersonating Homeland Security agents were telling residents to evacuate their homes, then robbing them.
As rescue efforts turned to recovery, prominent Hispanic Republicans and construction executives urged the Trump administration on Friday not to repeal a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which provides temporary work authorization to young immigrants.
More than 26,000 in the Houston area have such permits and many live in the neighborhoods hardest-hit by Harvey, said Artemio “Temo” Muniz, a Republican strategist in Houston who is chairman of the Federation of Hispanic Republicans.
“This would be a devastating double-whammy not only for them, but for our region,” Muniz said. “We are going to need local talent to reconstruct Houston.”
He pointed to immigrants like Contreras, the 23-year-old paramedic from Montgomery County who worked throughout the disaster performing emergency aid. Without the permit, he would lose his job. Lucia Guerrero, a young immigrant from Mexico who lives south of Pearland, is a certified dialysis technician who wouldn’t be able to provide such critical care without the permit.
Ending the program would create a “new humanitarian disaster on top of the existing humanitarian disaster,” warned America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy group in Washington.
Groups pushing for reduced migration said terminating the program is necessary because it was an overreach by President Barack Obama and should be a policy decided by Congress. They say it encourages illegal immigration by assuring parents their children will be protected.
Ending the program would not hamper recovery efforts because the administration likely will not repeal current permits, but refrain from issuing new ones, said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that has advised Trump on immigration.
He said many Americans could also benefit from recovery jobs in Houston.
“Given the devastation in the area, there will be many people who will need gainful employment in the coming weeks, months and years,” Mehlman said in an email.
But as the region faces some $23 billion in property damage, thought to be the most ever suffered in a natural disaster, some of Houston’s top construction leaders said they already have a critical shortage of workers.
“Even before Harvey the need was bad,” said Stan Marek, chief executive of Marek Bros., a large construction company. “We are not going to get this town rebuilt if we don’t find a way to make more workers legal. I need a thousand workers tomorrow that I can’t find.”
About one-third of construction workers in Texas are here illegally, according to the Pew Research Center, a think tank in Washington. Jeff Nielsen, executive vice president of the Houston Contractors Association, said there aren’t enough contractors — with or without legal status — in the region to fix what needs to be repaired.
“There’s going to be a ton of emergency work just to get roadways back in shape. That’s not even looking at the housing,” he said. “It’s going to be a massive undertaking.”
In the flooded apartment complex near Federal Road, Soto, the Guatemalan construction worker, sifted through soaked documents to find his 5-year-old son’s birth certificate. Before the rains came, Soto was completing a construction project at an elementary school.
“The people that are going to be making all of the repairs, it’s us Hispanics,” he said.
Soto doesn’t know what he’s going to do. His car is flooded, so he won’t be able to get to work. The manager of the complex gave him just a few days to move out of the vacant apartment in which he, his wife, and two young children have taken shelter. She said she is terminating his one-year lease, that he would have to find another place.
“How are we just supposed to get up and go right now?”