Manny Fernandez

Ruth Ortiz will get none of it. She and her lawyers say the Harvey recovery has discriminated against flood victims like her: renters.

Ortiz, 36, was renting a two-story home in Victoria when Harvey made landfall 65 miles to the south. High winds blew out the windows as rainwater poured in, ruining her furniture. She lost just about everything, and two years later, she is still struggling, moving from place to place, paying off her credit-card debt and caring for her 14-year-old son, who has a brain tumor, all on her dental assistant’s salary.

She received some immediate federal assistance in the weeks following Harvey — nearly $2,400 total to regain her footing after surviving the worst rainstorm in U.S. history. It was all the recovery money she received.

“I just felt left behind,” Ortiz said. “Knowing that there’s help out there, it’s just sad.”

After floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters, government resources, public attention and news media coverage often focus on homeowners. The tally of a disaster’s destruction is measured largely in terms of the number of deaths and the number of homes lost.

The aftermath of Harvey has been no different. Tenants who were forced out of the damaged apartments and homes they had been renting are still struggling with the financial, emotional, physical and logistical chaos unleashed by Harvey.

Many of these tenants are low-income Texans who are black or Hispanic, and who were living in some of the most vulnerable locations at the time, in low-lying areas prone to flooding and in poorly maintained buildings. They were often at the mercy of their landlords, lacked renter’s insurance and had difficulty tapping into and navigating their way through local, state and federal agencies and resources.

Allegations that the government favors homeowners and discriminates against low-income renters of color were the subject of a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in Corpus Christi, Texas. The suit accuses officials with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the state General Land Office of ignoring the needs of renters in the Harvey recovery, and of steering the $5 billion in recovery programs to homeowners, developers and landlords.

The actions by state and federal officials also have a discriminatory effect, the suit claims. The vast majority of tenants in the counties hit by Harvey are black and Hispanic, while the majority of homeowners are white. The discriminatory policies have made it harder for black and Hispanic renters to rebuild their lives post-Harvey, while making it easier for white homeowners, the suit claims.

Renters who survived Harvey across the state lost their jobs, moved into new apartments with higher rents or lived in hotels, their cars or with relatives. Some found cheaper, more far-flung residences, and at least one woman was only able to afford her apartment by keeping it virtually empty, with little to no furniture and a mattress on the floor.

Brenda Jones, whose rental home in the bay front town of Aransas Pass was damaged during Harvey and who lived in her car for a time, had to move so far from her church that she stopped attending services there. Vanessa Wharton, a Harvey-affected renter in Corpus Christi who hears from debt collectors after she broke a lease to leave an unsafe apartment, has overdue bills and expenses, in part because she pays $100 more in rent than she did before Harvey.

Wharton’s payments on her rent-to-own refrigerator illustrate the disparities between renters and homeowners in disaster recovery, advocates for low-income tenants said. The multitude of post-Harvey assistance includes an appliance reimbursement program administered by the state and financed by the federal government — but it is only available to homeowners, not to renters.

Ortiz, Jones and Wharton are plaintiffs in the suit filed Friday.

“We do see jurisdictions where it looks very clear that homeowners are getting preferential treatment,” said Marion Mollegen McFadden, who ran a disaster-recovery grant program at HUD during the Obama administration and who is now senior vice president for public policy at the nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners.

“In some ways, it is a blind spot that the government has, except that it’s a blind spot that civil-rights advocates and others have brought a bright light to over the years in multiple recoveries.”

Rachel Zummo, a lawyer for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, a nonprofit group that filed the lawsuit and is representing the tenants along with the law firm of Daniel &amp; Beshara, said: “Renters just don’t have the same access to recovery resources that homeowners do. They are still struggling to recover from the setbacks the disaster caused.”

The case is similar to one in New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Civil rights groups filed a complaint with HUD in 2013, accusing New Jersey officials of discriminating against low-income and minority Sandy victims, including renters, in its state plan for distributing federal recovery dollars. The groups, including the Fair Share Housing Center, reached a settlement in 2014 that required New Jersey to increase the resources available to low-income renters, including establishing a $15 million pool for immediate help to displaced tenants. The difference with the Texas case is that it is not an administrative complaint filed with HUD but a federal lawsuit against the agency.

The $5 billion in Harvey-related recovery programs at the heart of the Texas lawsuit are federally financed but state administered.

The programs were proposed and are being overseen by the Texas General Land Office, and were approved by HUD. Federal disaster aid happens in stages, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency handling much of the immediate, temporary assistance and HUD supplying much of the long-term rebuilding money through its disaster recovery Community Development Block Grants.

HUD and the General Land Office did not respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit does not focus on federal aid from FEMA or on the HUD recovery money that was earmarked for Houston or Houston’s Harris County. The tenants in the lawsuit live outside Houston in the smaller cities and towns of Rockport, where Harvey made landfall; Corpus Christi; Victoria; and Aransas Pass.

The state action plan, which details how the $5 billion will be spent, bars nonhomeowners from receiving direct financial assistance while allowing direct aid to homeowners, the lawyers for renters said. The state plan includes programs that allow local governments to offer buyouts to homeowners and that provide reimbursements to homeowners for out-of-pocket repair expenses. The so-called Affordable Rental Housing program in the state plan helps developers and local governments repair or build new housing stock or infrastructure.

The fair-housing lawsuit was filed against HUD and its secretary, Ben Carson, as well as the General Land Office and the Texas land commissioner, George P. Bush. It seeks a judgment declaring that the plaintiffs’ federal civil rights were violated and a permanent injunction requiring officials to submit an action plan that includes direct assistance to renters.

The case follows criticism last year that Carson and HUD officials were weakening the agency’s fair housing division and attempting to scale back efforts to enforce fair-housing laws, a policy shift confirmed by current and former HUD officials but denied by Carson.

John Henneberger, an expert in disaster-recovery housing and co-director of the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service, said his group and others had warned the state and HUD for months that the plan for the $5 billion excluded direct aid to renters, and would finance new apartment buildings with so-called affordable rents that many low-income Texans could not afford.

“We jumped up and down and hollered, both to the state and to HUD, and nobody did anything about it,” Henneberger said. “Government discounts and does not treat people of color equitably, and it doesn’t treat poor people the way it treats people with more means, and that’s just a universal truth that I’ve seen in over 40 years of housing programs in this state.”

This article originally appeared in

Two Years After Hurricane Harvey, One Group Says It Has Been Overlooked: Renters

VICTORIA, Texas — The state of Texas has been disbursing $5 billion in federal dollars to help repair homes, businesses and infrastructure damaged in Hurricane Harvey in August 2017.

De Alba was shot in the back nearly four weeks ago in the massacre inside an El Paso Walmart. While a gunman stalked the aisles, de Alba shielded his wife and 9-year-old daughter in a bank at the front of the store. Other shoppers crowded into the same corner. A man near de Alba softly prayed aloud, trembling with fear.

The gunman saw them — between eight and 10 men, women and children — and opened fire. De Alba, 48, drew his wife and daughter close to protect them, but they were also shot. One bullet struck his wife’s thumb and breast. Another hit his daughter’s leg.

Several of those around them, including the man de Alba saw praying, were killed that morning. His wife and daughter have since been released from the hospital. But he remains at the University Medical Center of El Paso, undergoing operations — three so far — and fighting to regain his strength.

On that August morning, de Alba’s life — like the lives of other survivors and the relatives of the 22 people who were killed — quietly and painfully paused. Most of the dozens who were wounded were treated at area hospitals and released, but a handful remain hospitalized, including two at University Medical Center, de Alba and Luis Calvillo, 35, a military veteran and youth soccer coach who was shot five times.

For the de Alba family, the slow recovery has been marked by dislocation. De Alba lives in Chihuahua City, the capital of the Mexican state of Chihuahua, with his wife and daughter. But since Aug. 3, the family has effectively lived in El Paso: De Alba in his hospital room, and his wife and daughter at a nearby hotel, where his mother and his sister have also relocated from Mexico.

Erika, his 9-year-old daughter, should be in school. Oliva, his wife, is the principal at the school Erika attends, but she, too, has not wanted to leave. In Chihuahua City, Mario de Alba runs a shop that repairs and sells washing machines and dryers, but now the business is closed.

This is what the recovery from a mass shooting looks like: Not only are there physical, emotional, financial and logistical tolls, but in a border city like El Paso, binational ones, too.

“I can’t move forward,” de Alba said. “I can’t take my daughter to school. I’m not able to work. I have bills to pay. But my world has now stopped.”

Federal immigration officials have assisted the de Alba family — Mexican citizens who are among the thousands who legally cross the border daily to work, shop or study in El Paso, using tourist and other visas that allow them to be in the United States temporarily — and given them permission to stay in El Paso during de Alba’s recovery.

Still, de Alba worries about the future. He will most likely remain hospitalized for several weeks, and so he worries that his family will run out of money and will have to return to Mexico. He worries about his daughter not being in school and his wife not working.

“If they’re not here,” he said of his family as he lay on his hospital bed, “who’s going to take care of me?”

His sister Cristina heard him, and she leaned over and touched his head. “No, you won’t be alone,” she whispered.

On Thursday morning, de Alba steeled himself for another operation, scheduled for that afternoon. His cousin, Lucero de Alba, was visiting from Ciudad Juárez, El Paso’s next-door sister city in Mexico. She had waited three hours in a long line to cross the border at one of the international bridges.

But now, with her there, as well as his sister and his 79-year-old mother, Maria Montes, the mood shifted. It quickly became the de Alba Show. Soon, laughter filled his room, a sterile space with few touches of home.

Smiling, de Alba said he had something on his mind. When the gunman stormed into the Walmart and opened fire, de Alba had just paid a lot of money for a cart full of groceries, clothes, a pair of shoes for himself and back-to-school supplies for his daughter. He had tucked the receipt into his shirt pocket. Maybe Walmart would give him a refund, he joked.

“How much was it?” his cousin asked.

“How much?” she asked him again.

“$850,” she exclaimed, as laughter and whistles filled the room. “$850? Are you serious? You’re a big spender, my friend.”

Confined to a hospital room and tethered to intravenous tubes and beeping machines, de Alba has had several weeks to think about the massacre and the man charged with orchestrating it. The suspect, Patrick Crusius, 21, lived with his grandparents in the Dallas suburb of Allen, and law enforcement authorities said he had posted an anti-Latino manifesto minutes before the attack, writing that he was acting “in response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

De Alba says that he does not understand the gunman but that he does not hate him. “He’s a person who doesn’t even love himself,” he said. “A life with no purpose.”

Later, he cracked a smile. “The only people I hate in my life,” he said, “are the customers who don’t pay when I fix their washer or dryer.”

Lucero laughed. “He’s a de Alba,” she said. “He’s in a good mood every day. It runs in the family.”

The day before the shooting, de Alba drove four hours from Chihuahua City to El Paso to pick up his wife and daughter, who had arrived at the city’s airport from a trip to Denver. They booked a hotel room in El Paso for the night and planned to shop at Walmart the next morning before making the long drive back home.

It was not yet 11 a.m. when de Alba, his wife and his daughter finished paying for their items. They were preparing to walk out when the gunman, wearing earmuffs and carrying an AK-47-style rifle, walked in. De Alba said he did not hear the gunman say anything.

“Serio,” de Alba said in Spanish of the gunman’s expression. “Serious.”

De Alba said he rushed Oliva and Erika into First Convenience Bank, across from the registers. They were the first to hide in a corner. Other shoppers soon followed as gunshots echoed across the store. He covered his wife and daughter, and soon there was blood. He remembered seeing a nose and an ear on the floor.

A few moments later, de Alba and his family rushed outside. In his panic, he tried to drive them to a hospital. They got to their car, and his wife handed him the keys. But he had no strength to put it into gear, he said. Ambulances and paramedics arrived as his pain increased. He told a paramedic to take his wife and daughter but to leave him there to die.

“I thought I was going to die,” he said. The paramedic refused his request and helped him into an ambulance.

“When he arrived at the hospital, he was unconscious,” Lucero said. “His father died two years ago. He said that he saw him in the emergency room waiting for him. For seven seconds, he was diagnosed dead.”

De Alba had serious internal injuries, and his recuperation has been slow. Doctors recently found pus inside of him from intestinal leakage. With tubes in his nostrils, and unable to eat or drink, he and his relatives have more questions than answers about how long his recovery will take. He was not paralyzed and is able to walk, but they wonder how independently mobile he will be when he is released.

A few days ago, he saw therapy dogs in the hospital. On Thursday he asked a hospital executive whether he could spend time with one. The St. Bernard or the Great Dane, he was asked. He thought for a moment. The Great Dane.

On Thursday, his daughter and wife stopped by his room before his surgery. Later, everyone gathered in the lobby to say goodbye to Lucero. Four weeks after the massacre, Erika walks with a slight limp and Oliva still has a cast on her wrist and thumb. Erika smiled and giggled outside the gift shop. Lucero bought her a candy bar.

De Alba said he believed that their fate could have been different. They could have been killed as they hid, just like the man who had been praying beside them. Erika, he said, is his inspiration to recover.

“I’ve been focusing on being grateful,” he said. “My daughter visits almost every day. What else can I ask of life?”

Life Stalled, a Family Strives to Recover From a Mass Shooting

EL PASO, Texas — They stand beside him, smoothing his black hair, holding his hands, massaging his feet and making him laugh. Mario de Alba’s loved ones have kept this bedside vigil inside an El Paso hospital room, 28 days and counting, for the washer-and-dryer repairman now called the Hero of Chihuahua.

Galicia showed the agents the proof of his birth in the United States when he was stopped at the checkpoint one night in June, when he was on his way to a college soccer tryout. But the agents, his lawyer said, told him they believed it was fake.

They took him into custody, taking him first to a Border Patrol facility in the border city of McAllen and then to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Pearsall, Texas, southwest of San Antonio, where he remained Tuesday.

“He is desperate,” said Galicia’s lawyer, Claudia Ivett Galan, who along with Galicia’s relatives has tried unsuccessfully to win his release. “He wants to get out as soon as possible. I’m trying to stop my client’s deportation and intervene before it’s too late.”

Galicia’s case, first reported by The Dallas Morning News, appears to be part of stepped-up enforcement efforts at Border Patrol traffic checkpoints as the Trump administration cracks down on illegal entry at the southern border. In cases such as these, the administration’s zero-tolerance approach sometimes collides with the messy, unorthodox lives of mixed-status families, whose paperwork is often legitimate but incomplete or faulty.

Officials with the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, and with Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Tuesday that they had no immediate comment but were looking into the case.

Galicia was traveling north on the evening of June 27 with his younger brother and a group of friends. They were headed to a soccer tryout at a college in Texas. Galicia will be a senior in the fall at Johnny Economedes High School in his hometown of Edinburg, a border city in the Rio Grande Valley. He was hoping that his soccer skills would capture the attention of the coaches and scouts, and earn him a scholarship.

To drive north from Edinburg, the group knew they had to pass a Border Patrol checkpoint about 60 miles north of the border near the town of Falfurrias, Texas. The checkpoints form a secondary layer of border security: All cars must stop, and agents typically ask the occupants of each vehicle if they are U.S. citizens. The more than 30 permanent checkpoints across Arizona, California, Texas and New Mexico have instilled a quiet, widespread fear among many Hispanic citizens and legal residents in border cities that they will be mistaken for someone who is without papers.

Galicia had traveled through the Falfurrias checkpoint in the past and was not expecting any trouble, Galan said. Nevertheless, as many Hispanics do, he had brought with him numerous documents, including a birth certificate that showed he was born at a hospital in Dallas on Dec. 24, 2000; his state ID, issued in January by the Texas Department of Public Safety; and his Social Security card. Galan supplied The New York Times with copies of these documents; the birth certificate features stamps from both the state of Texas and the Dallas Bureau of Vital Statistics.

Galicia does not have a driver’s license, Galan said.

“Border Patrol agents were telling Francisco that his birth certificate was fake, that he was Mexican,” she said.

One of the issues that may have aroused the agents’ suspicions was the presence of Galicia’s younger brother, Marlon Galicia, 17, who was born in Mexico and has been living in the United States illegally. He had only a school ID, Galan said. The driver of the vehicle, one of Galicia’s classmates, is a U.S. citizen, Galan said.

Another issue that could have confused the agents and has complicated his case involved one of Galicia’s documents. He brought with him a tourist visa issued by Mexico that stated that he had been born in that country, his lawyer said.

Galicia’s mother is a Mexican immigrant who lives illegally in Edinburg. When Galicia was born, she did not put her real name on his birth certificate because of her immigration status, and she never corrected it. Because of that, she never went through the process of getting her son a United States passport. She believed the best way for him to travel back and forth from Texas to Mexico was to get him the Mexican tourist visa, Galan said.

“She never fixed that name on his birth certificate, so she never got him a passport and thought it was just easier to get him a tourist visa to get him in and out of the country,” Galan said.

Galicia was taken to a Border Patrol facility in McAllen. His brother was also briefly detained but later signed documents agreeing to effectively self-deport, and is now living with relatives in Reynosa, Mexico, across the border from McAllen.

Galicia’s mother tried on her own to get her son released. After about two weeks with no success, she turned to Galan for help.

Galan said she planned to meet with her client and with the ICE officials handling the case Tuesday in an attempt to secure his release.

Galicia fears he will be deported, she said. On Monday, she said, an ICE officer approached him, seeking to interview him under oath about his situation. The officer was carrying documents that appeared to acknowledge that he was indeed an American citizen, Galicia told his lawyer. But he declined to meet with the officer.

“Francisco was so scared he didn’t want to sign anything without me present,” Galan said. “He’s actually scared they’re going to trick him into signing an order of removal.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/texas-citizen-detained-immigration.html" id="297e9a07-d6c8-3437-a2dc-6ec80cea4818">The New York Times</a>.

SAN ANTONIO — Francisco Erwin Galicia, 18, was born in Dallas and, according to his birth certificate, is an American citizen. But he has been in federal custody for nearly four weeks after being detained at a Border Patrol traffic checkpoint in South Texas.

He Was an American Citizen on His Way to a Soccer Tryout. He's Been in Immigration Custody for a Month

They took him into custody, taking him first to a Border Patrol facility in the border city of McAllen and then to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Pearsall, Texas, southwest of San Antonio.

Late Tuesday afternoon, 26 days after he was first detained, Galicia was released after the news media, Democratic lawmakers and migrant advocacy groups put his case in the national spotlight.

“He’s really happy to be out,” Galicia’s lawyer, Claudia Ivett Galan, said in a telephone interview from a restaurant near the detention center where she and her client had gone for tacos.

Galicia declined to comment. “He’s feeling a little bit overwhelmed,” Galan said.

Galicia was traveling north on the evening of June 27 with his younger brother and a group of friends. They were headed to a soccer tryout at a college in Texas. Galicia will be a senior in the fall at Johnny Economedes High School in his hometown, Edinburg, a border city in the Rio Grande Valley. He was hoping that his soccer skills would capture the attention of the coaches and scouts, and earn him a scholarship.

One of the issues that may have aroused the agents’ suspicions was the presence of Galicia’s younger brother, Marlon Galicia, 17, who was born in Mexico and has been living in the United States illegally. He had only a school ID, Galan said. The driver of the vehicle, one of Galicia’s classmates, is a United States citizen, Galan said.

Galicia’s mother, Sanjuana Galicia Chapa, is a Mexican immigrant living illegally in Edinburg. When Galicia was born, she did not put her real name on his birth certificate because of her immigration status, and she never corrected it. Because of that, she never went through the process of getting her son a United States passport. She believed the best way for him to travel back and forth from Texas to Mexico was to get him the Mexican tourist visa, Galan said.

Marlon Galicia was also briefly detained but later signed documents agreeing to effectively self-deport, and is now living with relatives in Reynosa, Mexico, across the border from McAllen.

Galicia’s mother tried on her own to get her son released. After about two weeks with no success, she turned to Galan for help. Galicia said in an interview that after her son was detained, the authorities prevented him from communicating with any relatives for weeks. She spoke to him for the first time since his detention only on Saturday.

“Almost a month of not knowing anything about my son,” she said, adding: “I also feel mad because he did not commit any crime. He spends all his time studying and playing sports.”

At about 4 p.m. Tuesday, Galicia was waiting in the lobby at the ICE detention center when Galan arrived for a meeting to discuss her client’s case with officials. She said none of the ICE officials gave her any explanation about his detainment after he was released.

“I did talk to his officer, and he did not apologize,” Galan said. “All he said was just, ‘Thank you for your patience.’”

An American Citizen Is Released From Immigration Custody After Nearly a Month

SAN ANTONIO — Francisco Erwin Galicia, 18, was born in Dallas and, according to his birth certificate, is a U.S. citizen. But he was held in federal immigration custody for nearly four weeks after he was detained at a Border Patrol traffic checkpoint in South Texas.

The smugglers were sending him across the Rio Grande to reunite with his mother, who had left him back in Honduras two years earlier and moved to Texas. He boarded the raft with his sole possession: a piece of laminated paper bearing her phone number and address.

His mother had borrowed $3,500 from a cousin and a friend to pay the coyotes. Her brother handed José over to the men, who tried to scare the boy into staying quiet as the raft pushed off from the Mexican shore. “They were telling me that they were going to report me to my country,” José said. “But I didn’t believe him.”

What the boy didn’t know was that reaching his mother would be much harder than finding a Border Patrol agent, spending a few days in custody and then looking for his mother’s house, as he had been told to do. He found the Border Patrol, all right, but instead of being handed over to his mother, José was sent to a foster care facility in New York, where he was held for nearly eight months as his mother tried to win permission for his release. She didn’t succeed until April.

José was what the federal government calls an “unaccompanied minor” — an abstract clinical description for a dangerously specific human drama that has been playing out in ever-larger numbers along the southwest border.

Although the Trump administration has officially ended its policy of taking children away from their parents if families are caught crossing the border illegally, young children like José continue to be held in U.S. immigration detention facilities, sometimes for months at a time, because of regulations requiring complicated screening procedures that officials say are intended to ensure the children’s safety.

Much of the time, young people take the dangerous journey from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador on their own or with a smuggler to rejoin parents in the United States. In many cases, their parents came to the United States illegally, settled somewhere and then, possibly years later, sent for the children they left behind. It is a phenomenon that has been going on for decades, but as the number of Central American migrants arriving at the border continues to grow, there has also been a sharp increase in young people traveling alone.

While there were 38,189 apprehensions on the southwestern border of Central American children traveling alone in the 2018 fiscal year, there have been 37,669 in the current fiscal year as of April.

José’s mother, Patricia, 23, did not want to disclose her or her son’s last name, because of fears of reprisals from the government because of their immigration status. Patricia is in the country illegally, and an immigration court judge has ordered her to be deported.

Their story began in 2016, when Patricia left Honduras, leaving her son, whose father had died before he was born, with relatives. She settled in Bryan, Texas, started a new life as a house painter and gave birth to another child, a daughter, now 2. Finally, she said, she told relatives she was ready for them to send José to her.

She had assumed he would spend some time in Border Patrol custody, she said, but had no idea he would be sent to a foster-care program in New York while the government decided whom he should be released to.

Weeks went by. Then months. Finally, the paperwork settled, José was put on a plane bound for Houston on April 11 and joined his mother. Nearly eight months had elapsed since he left Honduras.

To discourage the large migration flows, the Trump administration has repeatedly called attention to the dangers that parents are subjecting their children to on the journey from Central America. Children have been abandoned by coyotes, like the 3-year-old boy that Border Patrol agents discovered alone and crying in April in a cornfield; they have survived near-drownings, sexual and physical abuse, and grueling hikes.

The uncertainty and hardships often continue once the children are in government hands, say many of those who work with newly arrived migrants, even though the government no longer has a policy of separating families.

In the case of José’s family, Patricia said she had difficulty communicating with her son after he arrived in the United States, or even finding out what was happening to him.

“I would send messages, and sometimes I wouldn’t get a response, and sometimes I would,” she said. “I had never seen an extreme case that would take this long.”

After he was apprehended at the Texas border, José was placed with the Cayuga Centers, a New York nonprofit group that runs a foster-care program that receives federal money to assist migrant children. He remained in Cayuga’s custody from early September until he was released in April.

The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement oversees the care and housing of unaccompanied minors, whom the government calls unaccompanied alien children, or UACs. A spokeswoman declined to comment about José, noting in a statement that to protect the privacy and security of children in the country illegally, “their locations are kept confidential and we do not identify or discuss specific UAC cases.”

The average length of care in the federal unaccompanied minor program is 66 days, or about two months. Jose’s case was an unusually complex one involving an investigation of a possible child-safety issue, according to some of those working on the case. Patricia said she knew of no circumstance that would have justified keeping her son away from her for so long.

A Cayuga Centers spokesman said the center could not comment on specific cases. But the spokesman, Richard Crompton, said in a statement that the group’s average length of stay was 29 days and that any decisions delaying the release of children were never made lightly.

“Sometimes delays in discharge are due to an ongoing criminal or child-welfare matter in the home, and we must await the resolution of such matter before discharge is considered safe and appropriate,” Crompton said in the statement. He said the center’s records indicated that considerable contact had been made with the family in José’s case, adding: “We regret that the mother feels otherwise.”

José now lives with his mother, his sister and his mother’s partner in an apartment in Bryan, near the Texas A&amp;M; campus in College Station. The cramped apartment is still decorated with balloons, stuffed animals and a handwritten welcome banner. Jose turned 8 six days after his release — his mother threw him a party and gave him a blue-and-yellow Batman cake.

José has had a rough transition after spending two years apart from his mother in Honduras, then enduring the crossing, the months in custody and his enrollment in first grade at a new school in a new city. He has acted out, his mother said, as he tries to find his footing.

Another mother in the country illegally who lives in Bryan knows how hard that transition can be. Jesus, an acquaintance of Patricia’s, came to the United States several years ago after leaving her own son behind in El Salvador, then sent for him.

The boy, Ernesto, was 12 years old when he made the crossing with an older teenage cousin a few years ago.

Now 15 and a sophomore at a Bryan high school, Ernesto, whose family also asked that their last names not be used, said many students at his school had made the frightening river crossing over the Rio Grande to join their parents in the United States. It is a bond among them that often goes unspoken. “I don’t really talk about it,” he said.

Ernesto said he struggled to learn English and to become a son again — he had been only 4 when his mother left El Salvador. “I didn’t have the money to bring him with me,” Jesus said.

Both Patricia and Jesus defended their decisions to make new lives in the United States before sending for their children.

The escalating gang violence in El Salvador convinced Jesus to pay a smuggler to bring Ernesto, she said. “He was more in danger there than anything, so that’s why I decided for him to come,” she said. “It’s a risk you have to take, for good or for bad. You can’t explain it, from the time you leave them to the time you see them, there’s just so much. There’s so many emotions, you can’t explain it.”

Patricia, too, said she knew the risks of the journey, but she felt more at ease because her brother would be with José most of the way. Still, she said, she had trouble sleeping as José and her brother traveled to the border. “I thank God that he crossed safely,” she said, “because I’ve seen lots of news stories where a lot of my people have suffered tragedies and have died.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/us/migrant-child-texas-shelter.html" id="20989f4d-d730-38d9-a995-c065a31d3900">The New York Times</a>.

He Crossed the Border Alone, Amid Chaos and Peril. He Was 7.

BRYAN, Texas — José was 7 years old when they put him on the raft.

Struggling to communicate using her broken Spanish, Todd told the three young people to get out of the cold and into her car. She was phoning and texting friends for help when a sheriff’s deputy drove up, followed soon by the Border Patrol. “They asked me to step behind my car, and the supervisor came and started Mirandizing me,” said Todd, referring to being read her Miranda rights. “And then he says that I could be found guilty of transporting illegal aliens, and I’m, like, ‘What are you talking about?’”

Todd spent 45 minutes in a holding cell that night. Federal agents obtained a search warrant to examine her phone, and she became the focus of an investigation that could lead to federal criminal charges.

As the Trump administration moves on multiple fronts to shut down illegal border crossings, it has also stepped up punitive measures targeting private citizens who provide compassionate help to migrants — “good Samaritan” aid that is often intended to save lives along a border that runs through hundreds of miles of remote terrain that can be brutally unforgiving.

Earlier this year, federal agents raided the home of a volunteer who provides meals, housing and other aid to migrants in the Texas border city of Brownsville. In Arizona, four volunteers with No More Deaths, a nonprofit based in Tucson, were convicted on misdemeanor criminal charges after leaving water and canned food for migrants hiking through the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Five other volunteers also faced charges, including one felony case now pending in U.S. District Court in Tucson.

“I honestly don’t feel like I ever did anything wrong: I stopped to help some kids,” said Todd, 53, who serves as both the city attorney of Marfa, Texas, and the county attorney of Jeff Davis County, an elected position. “It’s been pretty transformative for me, to be perfectly honest. To have devoted my life to public service, and then to be Mirandized, detained and investigated as if I’m a human smuggler. The whole thing was really, really, very surreal. It was like a ‘Twilight Zone.’”

Federal agents at the border in some cases work closely with nonprofit shelters and volunteers to coordinate housing and transportation logistics for migrants in border cities who have recently been released from Border Patrol custody. But often, volunteers who aid illegal border crossers before they are in custody are treated far differently.

For Todd, it started at about 10 p.m. on Feb. 27, just outside the funky desert community of Marfa. Todd was busy that night: She had attended a planning and zoning meeting at Marfa City Hall, had a late dinner at the Hotel Saint George and was driving back home to nearby Fort Davis. Suddenly, a young man in a white shirt ran out of a ditch and started waving at her.

“I have two teenage boys,” Todd said. “I have a 17-year-old and a 15-year-old, and he looks about the same size as my 15-year-old son, and so I literally think, ‘Oh my God, it’s like this kid on the side of the road.’ I turn around and go back, because I can’t leave a kid on the side of the road.”

He was a bit older than a teenager, she learned, as he and his siblings started telling her what had happened.

They were originally from El Salvador — Carlos, 22, his brother, Francisco, 20, and their sister, Esmeralda, 18. They had fled their home country years ago and were living with an aunt in Guatemala. Worsening gang violence forced them to leave — two of Carlos’ friends were murdered, and a gang leader wanted Esmeralda to be his girlfriend, according to court documents. The trio headed for the United States and crossed the border in a remote stretch of desert with a group of migrants and smugglers. But Esmeralda became sick and had trouble keeping up.

The others in the group pushed ahead, but her brothers stayed by her side. The three of them became lost as they hiked north, and they ran out of food and water, according to statements they provided to the federal public defender’s office. Esmeralda’s condition had worsened by the time they flagged down Todd.

“I can tell she needs immediate medical attention,” Todd recalled. “She’s having a really hard time walking.”

She had the siblings get in her car and started to contact friends — one who works for a refugee services nonprofit and another who is a lawyer for the Border Patrol.

Moments later, a sheriff’s deputy from neighboring Presidio County pulled up behind her, lights flashing. The deputy and Todd know one another, but he was immediately suspicious, she said, asking whether she thought the migrants’ backpacks smelled like dope. The deputy alerted Border Patrol, whose agents read Todd her rights.

Todd, who routinely puts misdemeanor lawbreakers behind bars as a county attorney, was put in a holding cell at a nearby Border Patrol station. Her purse and other personal items were confiscated.

“I walk in and a guy says, ‘Are you the driver?’ I said, ‘No, I’m the lady who stopped to help these kids,’” Todd said. “They seemed to think there was something very nefarious going on, when I literally got flagged down on the side of the road and tried to be a good Samaritan.”

She was held in a large holding cell for about 45 minutes, and then released and driven back to her car, which was still on the side of the highway. She had been detained for a total of about three hours.

Days later, back at work at Marfa City Hall, she was visited at her office by an agent with federal Homeland Security Investigations and a Texas Ranger. The federal agent handed her a search warrant for her phone, and she surrendered it. One of the friends she had texted that night told Todd that agents had also questioned her and examined her phone.

Todd has not been charged with a crime, though the three migrants from El Salvador were held for some time as material witnesses, suggesting that federal prosecutors were contemplating using them in a criminal case against her. They are now in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in El Paso and could face deportation. “All three remain in ICE custody pending disposition of their immigration cases,” an ICE spokeswoman said in a statement.

A spokesman for the Border Patrol said the incident remains “an active case,” but declined further comment, as did the U.S. attorney’s office.

The episode has both angered and perplexed Todd and her friends and co-workers in Jeff Davis County. William Kitts, the Jeff Davis sheriff and a county government colleague of Todd’s, said numerous residents have assisted migrants, providing them with water or giving them a ride to his office. None have been prosecuted, and Kitts said Todd shouldn’t be tried, either.

The sheriff said he believes that Esmeralda would have died had Todd not stopped to help her. According to court records, she was taken by Border Patrol agents to Big Bend Regional Medical Center in Alpine, Texas, and was treated for four days for starvation, dehydration, infected wounds from cactus spines and rhabdomyolysis, a serious condition that can lead to kidney failure.

“Harboring is a big jump for them to make in my book,” Kitts said of the threatened criminal charges against Todd. “There’s a human component to this. We’ll let Congress and the politicians fight it out, but if somebody’s hungry or thirsty or needs some help, we’re going to help them.”

Kenneth Magidson, who served as the top federal prosecutor in Houston and in the South Texas border region from 2011 to 2017, said the government has begun taking “a harsher approach” to prosecuting such cases since President Donald Trump took office. “Providing drinks of water or someone needs immediate medical assistance and you take them to a hospital — you’re stretching it,” he said. “You have to look at the entire context of the case. Was it at the person’s house? Were they spending the night? It’s more than just giving somebody on the side of the road some water.”

Todd said she plans to work with her congressional representatives on legislation exempting good Samaritans from federal prosecution.

“There is something bigger at stake than just me here, because this does send a message to try to chill people from helping others,” Todd said.

One day last week, she received one good surprise: The authorities returned her iPhone. “They took it at 11:30 in the morning and said I would have it back by 3 in the afternoon, 5 at the latest,” she said. “And 53 days later, I got my phone back.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/us/texas-border-good-samaritan.html" id="2041aa54-f78f-323c-afcc-baa20defe7e6">The New York Times</a>.

McALLEN, Texas — Teresa L. Todd pulled over one recent night on a dark West Texas highway to help three young Central American migrants who had flagged her down. Todd — an elected official, government lawyer and single mother in a desert border region near Big Bend National Park — said she went into “total mom mode” when she saw the three siblings, one of whom appeared to be very ill.

She Stopped to Help Migrants on a Texas Highway. Moments Later, She Was Detained.

A Navy veteran, he was known for going the extra mile: One day, while off duty, he rushed out of a barbecue at his in-laws’ house in Sierra Vista, Arizona, when he spotted a migrant man being chased by the Border Patrol. He tackled the runner and held him until the agents caught up.

Few knew De La Garza’s secret: He was in the country illegally, too.

The nation’s main border protection agency had hired an unauthorized immigrant to police the border — one of at least four cases of workers in the country illegally revealed to be working at federal immigration agencies in recent years.

De La Garza, 38, was born in Mexico, and had lied about his citizenship status and supplied his employer with a fraudulent Texas birth certificate that falsely said he was born in Brownsville, Texas.

“In retrospect, I fully understand now that I was being selfish in my desire to serve my country that I had so loved,” he wrote after he was indicted by a federal grand jury on three counts of passport fraud and making false statements on his application for a federal law enforcement background check.

De La Garza agreed to plead guilty to one count of passport fraud, and the other two counts were dropped. On Thursday he was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Tucson, Arizona to one year of probation and a $1,000 fine. Judge Raner C. Collins said his service to the country “ought to count for something.”

Before the brief hearing, De La Garza was surrounded by friends and relatives, including his two daughters, aged 2 and 4, who are U.S. citizens. He stood quietly before the judge dressed in a black suit.

The Trump administration has pushed employers to stop hiring workers in the U.S. illegally, urging the use of electronic verification tools and document checks and conducting hundreds of workplace raids to arrest and deport unauthorized immigrants. The fact that one was working in its own federal ranks shows the difficulty of ascertaining work status in a nation where the labor of immigrants is considered crucial in many industries. There are estimated to be 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country.

Federal authorities also must field a workforce that by design reflects the heavily Hispanic communities across the Southwest they are expected to police. Agents sometimes have relatives, friends and neighbors whom they know or suspect entered the country illegally. In South Texas, one of the most heavily traveled migrant corridors in the country, Border Patrol agents or their spouses have sometimes hired unauthorized housekeepers, as do many of their neighbors.

De La Garza’s deception was unusual for Customs and Border Protection, the largest law enforcement agency in the country, with nearly twice the staff of the FBI. Yet it was not unprecedented. There have been at least three other cases of unauthorized people working as Customs officers or Border Patrol agents who were prosecuted in federal court in recent years.

One of those cases involved Oscar Antonio Ortiz, a Border Patrol agent in the San Diego area, who first applied for work in the weeks after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Like De La Garza, Ortiz was a Mexican citizen who used a fraudulent birth certificate and his service in the Navy to help him land a job in federal law enforcement.

But once he was hired, Ortiz got involved, along with another agent, in human smuggling: transporting migrants for money into the United States, sometimes in their Border Patrol vehicles, according to court documents. Ortiz, who had been assigned to the Border Patrol station in El Cajon, California, was sentenced in 2006 to five years in prison.

De La Garza worked at the port of entry in Douglas, Arizona, about 120 miles southeast of Tucson. He lived with his wife and children about 40 miles west of Douglas in the town of Hereford, and appeared to relish his job, filling his home with mugs, clocks and other trinkets bearing Customs or Navy logos.

He was born in Matamoros, Mexico, and lived for most of his childhood in Mexico with his mother, moving to the South Texas city of Brownsville as a teenager. In 2003, at age 23, he enlisted in the Navy and served on the USS Greeneville, a nuclear submarine. He received an honorable discharge in 2008, and went to work for Customs and Border Protection in 2012, earning a spot as a squad leader at the agency’s basic training academy in Georgia.

The authorities appeared to first learn that De La Garza was actually a Mexican citizen around the time he applied for a U.S. passport in 2017.

De La Garza wrote in a letter he submitted to Collins that he had believed in his youth that he was American.

“Growing up, my parents told me that I was a U.S. citizen, and my whole childhood I was led to believe this was true,” he wrote. “Because of that, I grew up thinking I would do my duty one day and join the U.S. military.”

Both of his parents tried to discourage that idea, and when, as a teenager in Mexico, he asked for his birth certificate, he was told the truth. His mother, he wrote, “told me that I had been lied to my whole life and I was and had been all along, a Mexican citizen. I refused to believe that to be the truth, and still came to America with my U.S. birth certificate that she had given me.”

The birth certificate, which had been submitted to state offices in Texas, was fraudulent. Prosecutors said that it listed Brownsville as his place of birth in December 1980. In reality, he was born in Mexico in October 1980.

The midwife listed on the fraudulent Texas birth record was convicted in 1984 of conspiracy to make false statements on birth certificates, prosecutors said.

Nonetheless, De La Garza used that birth certificate to claim U.S. citizenship, including for his five-year background check for Customs and Border Protection in October 2016 and on his passport application in October 2017.

After De La Garza requested and received a copy of the fraudulent birth certificate from Texas authorities, he wrote in his letter to the court, he believed that his parents had told him he was really born in Mexico in an attempt to deceive him and keep him from joining the military, he wrote in the letter.

“I should have pushed my parents more for information instead of dismissing it,” he wrote. “I served my country in the U.S. Navy honorably and with pride,” he said, adding that he took his job as a CBP officer “seriously.”

“I hope my combined 10 years of U.S. government service without fail and with the utmost pride allow for your honor to have clemency on what can be the rest of my family’s lives and livelihood,” he wrote.

Citing his lack of any criminal history, federal probation officials recommended to the court that he serve one year of probation with no prison time, and his lawyer, Matthew H. Green, agreed.

“While clearly misplaced, Mr. De La Garza was motivated to commit this crime out of his desire to protect the United States and remain with his family,” Green said in a written filing to the judge, adding, “Mr. De La Garza and his family ask only one thing from the United States — they ask for a second chance.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/us/border-patrol-agent-undocumented-immigrant.html" id="cb96f377-3bd8-3e1c-a9c3-96e039a9c8ad">The New York Times</a>.

Marco A. De La Garza Jr. spent nearly six years as a federal officer with Customs and Border Protection, working on the front lines of America’s southern border in Arizona and doing his best to keep unauthorized immigrants out of the United States.

Border Officer's Secret in Arizona: He Was Undocumented

His house on the 1600 block of Milpa Verde is located in an odd swath of Brownsville, Texas, that runs between the border wall and the Rio Grande — a netherworld that is officially still America but which somehow got left on the Mexican side of the wall.

Visitors often get confused, including Veloz’s daughter, who was nervous the first time she visited the house, and reminded him that she hadn’t brought her passport.

“She said, ‘Dad, don’t tell me we’re in Mexico,'” he recalled. “Because she’d gone past the fence.”

One of his neighbors made a homemade billboard that she posted at the end of her driveway to make things clear: “We’re Part of America.”

On long stretches of the Southwest border, a clearly visible boundary separates the United States and Mexico. In parts of Southern California and in the Arizona desert, it takes the shape of a wall running right along the line, with one country on each side.

But in South Texas, things get fuzzy. The border there, by tradition and international treaty, is the Rio Grande, and no one has yet figured out how to build a border wall in the middle of a river. As a result, the fence that elsewhere would trace the southern edge of the United States can run, as it does in Veloz’s neighborhood, more than a mile north of the river.

That has created an oddly isolated zone of homes, ranchland, industrial sites and nature preserves that locals call a no man’s land, between the barrier and the border — a place that dozens of Texans call home.

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — Homar Veloz lives in South Texas, but on the wrong side of the border wall — separated from the rest of the United States by a long line of vertical steel bars standing up to 18 feet high.

Manny Fernandez

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