The New Alamo

The Fight Over Immigration Is About to Get Ugly, and Texas Is Where the Bodies Will Start Falling.

- Josh Saul

IT WAS A moment of great joy, and then fear. Ammi Arevalo found out she was pregnant in early February, not long after President Donald Trump signed two executive orders ramping up enforcement of immigration law and deportations. Her first reaction was happiness, mixed with some low-level financial anxiety, but almost immediately a dark foreboding took over her thoughts. As an undocumented immigrant, Arevalo already dreads an early-morning knock on her door from immigration agents. That’s why she’s now researching midwives and plans to give birth in her apartment, just like a friend who recently had her baby boy at home for the same reason. “I’m just trying to hide from ICE, because the moment I go to the hospital they are going to ask for my name,” Arevalo says, crying softly into her green tea on the patio of a Starbucks in West Houston. “With the new laws that Trump signed, I’m afraid I’m going to get arrested.”

Arevalo left El Salvador 14 years ago, fleeing an abusive family member and one of the highest murder rates in the world, and floated across the Rio Grande with a coyote when she was 16. She was picked up by the U.S. Border Patrol just after she crossed into America near the small town of Roma, Texas, and released with instructions to report to immigration court. Then she joined her mother and little brother in Houston. She never went to court. Now the 30-year-old runs a small café, waking at 4 a.m. each morning to make sandwiches and tost adas alongside her three employees (one has documents, two do not). Arevalo married a U.S. citizen and carefully pays her taxes. She cherishes Lone Star institutions like Whataburger and her local NFL team, the Houston Texans. She smiles brightly when she reveals she has a small crush on their star defensive end J.J. Watt.