Siblings Navigate Fear, Loss and New Responsibilities After Home Is Upended

Andrea García's father issued new rules for the household months ago, simple and non-negotiable: carry your passport at all times, especially her mother's. That directive, small in words but heavy in weight, reshaped the daily rhythms of a family of six in El Paso already navigating some of the most intense federal immigration enforcement the region has seen in decades.

García, 18, lives with her parents and three sisters in a city where eight of every 10 residents are Latino, a demographic reality that makes the Trump administration's deportation surge feel both sweeping and intimate. The Garcías are what immigration advocates call a "mixed-status" family. Three members hold green cards, including García's mother and two older sisters, whose legalization process began around 2015 before stalling when President Trump took his first term in 2016. Two were born abroad as U.S. citizens. One is a naturalized citizen. No single legal category covers the whole family, which means no single form of protection covers them all.

García's mother and older sisters received their green cards in December 2018, a milestone that came after years of bureaucratic delay. Legal status, though, has not fully insulated them. "Start carrying your passport with you, especially mom's," García recalled her father telling the family, a man she described as the protective shell around those he loves, enforcing a firm set of rules to keep everyone together.

Old habits have quietly fallen away. Cross-border visits to Ciudad Juárez, once a natural extension of daily life in a binational region, have become a risk the family no longer takes. García and at least one of her sisters, both students, began carrying their documents everywhere following visa revocations affecting students at the University of Texas at El Paso, a development that made the abstract threat concrete.

El Paso, long called the Ellis Island of the Southwest, now finds itself on the front lines of a federal enforcement campaign carried out in large part by Latino law enforcement agents targeting Latino communities. Nationally, 31 percent of the undocumented population lives with at least one U.S. citizen child under 18, a figure that illustrates how enforcement tears through families regardless of the citizenship status of individual members.

García has absorbed the fear, the clipped routines and the weight of new household responsibility with something approaching resolve. She is 18 now, old enough to vote, and she intends to use that. She says she will speak up in a way that "actually has impact." Many of the pieces of jewelry she wears daily were given to her by her mother, a quiet reminder of what she is trying to protect.