Editor’s note: The migrants in this story asked to be identified only by their first names or initials because they are undocumented and fear arrest and deportation.
SAN ANTONIO — Jossman had told himself many times that the day a copeventually pulled him over, he wouldn’t run.
Before wading the Rio Grande and surrendering to the Border Patrol in Eagle Pass, Jossman had been a clown, a knife thrower, a magician, a lion tamer, a tiger tamer, a motorcyclist inside a globe. He grew up in a Romani family of traveling circus jugglers, roaming around South America and his home country, Venezuela.
The 39-year-old funded his journey to the U.S. performing in circuses along the way, then settled in San Antonio and worked construction to finally rest, he said, from all his ramblings.
When Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election and unleashed his mass deportation crusade, Jossman found himself changing habits — rationing his trips to the grocery store, avoiding his walks and exercise in the park, looking over his shoulder at traffic lights. He gave up his weekend barbecues with his boss, hanging out at the lake, cruising the beaches down in Corpus Christi.
And he steeled himself for a potential arrest. In April, when state troopers checked his license after pulling him over on his way to send money to his son in Venezuela, he said his nerves got the best of him.
He tried to run. The officers caught him.
In San Antonio, where more than 60% of the population has Latino roots, President Trump’s mass deportation push sent many residents into hiding and made them change their daily habits to avoid a potential encounter with ICE.
Through mostly traffic stop detentions and workplace raids, the agency arrested an average of 71 immigrants per day in San Antonio between December 2025 and March, according to a New York Times analysis. That ranks fourth among U.S. cities — Dallas is second.
ICE released Jossman in June. He’s awaiting a hearing before an immigration judge who will rule on his asylum application in January.
He’s still trying to stay invisible, leaving his rented room only to work and attend Pastor Dianne García’s church.
Many other undocumented immigrants have done the same, becoming guarded and anxious: the sight of a police car pushes them to the edge. Some lost access to much needed financial aid, and now depend on a volunteer network for routine activities like running errands or going to the hospital.
Lisa Diana, a 57-year-old volunteer, said she buys groceries for a family so afraid of ICE that they don’t even let her in the house. For months she’s been leaving the bags at their door, sending them a translated WhatsApp message and walking away. She’s never seen their faces.
“Everyone here in the community is terrified. Everyone,” said J., a 39-year-old Venezuelan woman who also attends García’s church. “Try to do things right, although doing things right doesn’t guarantee you anything … don’t run a red light, don’t go running around in the street, don’t be out late at night. Go to work and then go straight home.”
At a news conference in San Antonio on Tuesday, U.S. Democratic Reps. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio and Greg Casar of Austin and state Rep. Trey Martinez Fisher urged the Bexar County sheriff’s office and other law enforcement agencies to end their partnerships with ICE to help enforce immigration laws because it’s causing fear among residents.
“Some students in San Antonio stop showing up at school. Folks are afraid to show up to their places of worship or even go to work,” Castro said. “Businesses have lost employees. Some businesses have told me that either they’ve shut down or they’re on the verge of shutting down and going broke.”
The July 7 fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican who had been in the country for over three decades, by ICE agents only intensified the fear.
“It hit me deep in my soul,” Jossman said, thinking of his own arrest. “If they had wanted to shoot me, they could have. And then all they would have had to say was, ‘He tried to pull out a gun,’ or something like that, and that would have been the end of it. It’s our word against theirs. We’re immigrants and they’re the law here.”
He said he misses the Texas he used to know, where neighbors helped him and he befriended people from all over the world.
Persistent fear “can become a habit, shaping our daily choices, relationships, rituals and behaviors,” said Venus Ginés, a former teacher of health literacy at Baylor College of Medicine and founder and CEO of Dia de la Mujer Latina, a company that promotes health in the Latino community. “The mind may begin to anticipate danger, influencing how people make decisions, whom they trust, and whether they seek care.”
Yailyn, a 32-year-old Venezuelan whose husband spent eight months in a detention center, had to support their three daughters and pay for lawyers with her job at a restaurant.
“I developed an abscess on my head. It kept getting bigger and bigger, and then another one came up, so I went to the doctor,” who explained it was from stress, she said. “It would get itchy every time I get stressed, when the rent is due, when the bills come in, when everything comes in…”
For García, the 46-year-old pastor, managing her anger is the hardest thing. She runs what she calls an “immigrant church” — a shelter where neighbors go when they need a helping hand, and for most their only social lifeline, which she said has helped more than 150 ICE detainees so far.
“Mostly I feel angry at people who don’t care and who don’t even know that this is going on,” García said. “My biggest worry is that we’ll be having a service and ICE will come here and take everyone away.”
Like being in a horror film
Even before ICE hit San Antonio, Jennifer’s life was never easy.
At 25 she had left her home in Honduras, fled the gangs, watched her daughters faint under the desert sun during the journey north and crossed the Rio Grande straight into the Border Patrol — which quickly returned them to Mexico nine times before they made it to San Antonio in 2022.
She said the father of her children became addicted to methamphetamines during the difficult one-year journey trying to enter the U.S., and would beat her. One night in San Antonio he got high and knocked their daughter unconscious. Jennifer called the police. He was arrested and deported.
Jennifer kept going, renting apartments when she was able to get cleaning jobs, living in shelters when they didn’t.
After Trump’s return to the White House, Jennifer said she felt like a character in a horror movie.
“There was a time when there was nobody at all in the streets. There was so much fear. Most of the people I knew didn’t have jobs or anything to eat,” she said. “Imagine: we couldn’t go out because they were hunting us.”
She said it hurts to see new empty seats at García’s church during Sunday services.
When ICE arrested her friend Yailyn’s husband on his way to work during a traffic stop outside Austin, “She was traumatized. She couldn’t even see a police car without crying and shaking,” Jennifer said. “She would say to me, ‘Jennifer, why do you go out? Aren’t you scared?’
“It scares me — of course it scares me. But I know that, first of all, there is a God. And second, I have to work.”
But other than working, she doesn’t go out much. And since ICE began raiding the streets, jobs became harder to find. Jennifer’s only able to work a couple days a week — enough to pay rent, not enough to afford anything else. So the family stays in.
Jennifer’s 3-year-old son, born in Texas, is the only one in the family with a U.S. passport. Her 5- and 7-year-old daughters were born in Honduras like herself.
The lack of legal status had already left them without food stamps until Jennifer asked García for help. The pastor was able to intervene and fix the problem.
Once all three children caught a bad fever and a nasty cough. At the hospital, she said doctors didn’t want to treat her daughters because they didn’t have papers. She had to call in the pastor again.
It took some convincing, she said, but eventually the doctors agreed to treat the children.
During her children’s summer vacation, the four of them spent most time at home, watching TV or playing on their phones, with the blinds down.
She said sometimes when she’s driving with her kids in the car, her oldest daughter tells her: “Mommy, drive carefully or the police will catch us.”
Summer dresses and ankle monitors
It’s been a while since J. has worn her summer dresses.
She’s been camouflaging her ankle monitor with jeans since she was released along with her 3-year-old son from the Dilley detention center for families in January.
She cannot take it off even to sleep, so she tosses and turns in bed, trying to find a position where she feels it as little as possible. During the day, she monitors the battery to make sure it never runs out — which would trigger an alert that could put her behind bars again.
“When they released me it put me into a depression for a week. I felt like a criminal, like ‘We’re putting this on you so you behave,’ ” said the 39-year-old Venezuelan, who arrived with her baby at the U.S. border and surrendered to the Border Patrol in Eagle Pass in 2023. They released her but required her to attend ICE check-ins while authorities reviewed her case.
She said she attended all her check-ins, worked hard cleaning houses and, in less than a year, had rented an apartment, bought herself a car, and established a good credit score.
ICE arrested her and her son in November during her annual check in. Until then, she didn’t think the mass deportation campaign would target her — she felt she had done everything right under the law.
“In fact, when I was detained, everyone at church was saying, ‘If they detained J., they’re going to take all of us,’ ” she said. “Put yourself in God’s hands, because ICE is out on the streets and you never know when it might be your turn.”
The first week at Dilley she just cried. She couldn’t sleep because the light was always on, and her son didn’t eat for two days, she said.
“Those two months felt to me like everything I had worked for over almost three years had come crashing down,” she said. “I kept thinking, ‘My baby is so little, and he’s already being detained.’ I thank God he was still little because there were some older children there crying because they wanted to leave. That broke my heart.”
ICE released her in January with a parole that allowed her to apply for a marriage-based green card without leaving the country. In February, she married her partner of two years, who is a U.S. citizen.
She said she didn’t lose her home “because, thank God, I had always paid (rent) ahead.”
She went back to her job at a Tex-Mex restaurant, and never left home without her parole documents.
In August, a judge ordered her deportation despite her pending green card application. She’s trying to save money to appeal.
She said she’s used to her ankle monitor but she still misses summer dresses.
Staying in Texas
After his release from detention, Jossman went back to the $700 bedroom with a kitchen and bathroom that he rents with his partner in a manufactured home that’s been divided to house four other families, in a San Antonio working class suburb.
Jossman said they’d like to move — the ceiling is low, and the cheap materials don’t insulate against the Texas heat.
He went right back to work because he needed the money, but his body struggles with the physical toll of construction work after two months of living in a cell. He said he drives home after his shift and spends the rest of his day calling his 16 children, scattered between Venezuela and Colombia. One of them is sick and the medical bills are mounting.
Jossman has a document showing his scheduled court appearance in January, so he’s the one running errands since his partner is also undocumented. He drives her to work at a sandwich factory every day at 5:30 a.m., and picks her up again after her shift.
He said she only leaves their home to cash her paycheck, and talks about returning to Venezuela.
Jossman wants to stay in Texas and open his own business. He’s picturing a trailer packed with his clown props, and performing for laughing kids.
Maybe one day, he says — when people like him are no longer a target.
Uriel J. Garcia contributed to this story.
Disclosure: The New York Times has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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