EDINBURG -- Francisco Erwin Galicia settles into the light brown wrap-around couch that takes up a corner of his family's modest trailer home. A portable fluorescent light shines on his face.
“Where were you born?” the TV reporter asks.
“In Dallas,” the 18-year-old U.S. citizen replies in Spanish with a slight chuckle and a grin.
Since July 22, when The Dallas Morning News first reported that Galicia was detained for 23 days in a U.S. Border Patrol holding facility, he's told this story over and over, recounting conditions that he says were so poor he almost agreed to be deported by his own government.
But things have started to slow down. Fewer reporters are coming by for interviews.
As the headlines fade, Galicia, his mother and brothers are left with the reality that, as a mixed-status family, their right to be together is not guaranteed.
Although Galicia is a U.S. citizen, his mother is undocumented and vulnerable to deportation. His younger brother Marlon, who is not a U.S. citizen but had hopes of a soccer scholarship, was deported shortly after the two were detained together on June 27 and now lives in a dangerous Mexican border city.
Like many other mixed-status families in the Rio Grande Valley, the Galicias have always lived knowing that their lives could be disrupted by a Border Patrol checkpoint. One 2017 study estimated that 16.7 million people in the U.S. had at least one unauthorized immigrant family member in the home.
In this small slice of the Valley alone -- McAllen, Edinburg and Mission -- there are an estimated 85,000 unauthorized immigrants living in mixed-status families.
The Galicias’ story serves as a reminder that if those families want to stay together, they’ll stay here in The Valley, trapped between the checkpoints and the Mexican border.
The rest of the U.S. is closed to them.
A mixed-status family
A small black and white spotted dog named Coco roams this Edinburg colonia made up of dirt lots and trailer homes. He survives off the scraps residents give him.
Coco is especially fond of the Galicia home, where he can often be found under Sanjuana Galicia’s violet-red Chevy Malibu getting a break from the unforgiving sun. He knows she’ll give him chicken bones to gnaw.
But bones were scarce the past month. Sanjuana struggled to find the time for her job of selling Veracruz-style tamales around town. Here she’s known as “la señora de los tamales,” or the tamale lady.
The single mother was instead focused on getting her son Francisco out of Border Patrol custody and making sure that her middle son Marlon, 17, was safe in her hometown of Reynosa, Mexico.
“I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I sat here reading the Bible and begging God to help me find out about my son. I didn’t know anything about him for so long,” she says.
Francisco and Marlon, both soon-to-be seniors at Johnny G. Economedes High School, were hoping to secure scholarships to continue their education when they and their three friends set out for Ranger College, west of Fort Worth, for a soccer scouting event.
But when Border Patrol agents pulled the group aside at the Falfurrias checkpoint -- almost 60 miles north of Edinburg -- Marlon and one of the other passengers were found to have no state-issued ID and were suspected of being in the U.S. without authorization.
Francisco says he told agents he was a citizen and presented his Texas ID, a copy of his wallet-sized birth certificate and a Social Security card, but agents doubted their validity. Then, after he was fingerprinted, agents discovered he had a tourist visa to visit the U.S. That caused agents to further doubt that he was born in North Texas and they detained him.
While in custody, Francisco says, he lost 26 pounds and wasn’t allowed to shower. Border Patrol agents taunted him and the other suspected unauthorized immigrants held there, he says, and told them they didn’t have rights.
Almost two decades ago, when Sanjuana lived in Dallas, she used a fake ID to work. When she gave birth to Francisco at Parkland Memorial Hospital, staff used the name on the ID rather than her real name.
Yes, Sanjuana says, she had fake papers then, but there’s more to the story.
When Sanjuana’s contractions started on Christmas Eve 2000, Francisco’s birthday, her then-partner drove her to Parkland, opened the passenger door, told her to go inside and drove away.
Sanjuana says the man, whom she declined to identify, was married to another woman and was in the middle of obtaining legal permanent residency.
Sanjuana says he told her not to tell hospital staff that he was the father because it might affect his status adjustment process. Sanjuana didn’t say anything because she feared she’d be thrown in jail or worse -- that Francisco would be taken away from her.
“I had no one. I was alone. I didn’t have family in Dallas, and the person who was supposed to be my support system abandoned me,” Sanjuana says.
Sanjuana moved back to Mexico to be with family when Francisco was about a year old. She left Dallas pregnant with Marlon, who was born in Reynosa. They lived there for about 14 years.
But fights between cartels to control the smuggling routes fueled by Americans’ consumption of drugs chased her away. When the boys were about to start high school, she decided to move back to the U.S. She entered on a visitor’s visa and overstayed it.
Though Francisco had been born in Dallas, Sanjuana got him a visitor’s visa when she moved back into the U.S. She says she knew it was wrong, but saw it as the only way to legally travel across the border with him because her name isn’t on his birth certificate. She feared that would make it impossible for him to get a U.S. passport.
Sanjuana has been attacked by online commenters since the Galicia family’s story went viral. She’s been called a bad mother and criminal. Francisco says he wishes people would listen.
“People always talk without knowing the whole story,” Francisco says. “She’s our pillar and I know everything she’s gone through and everything she’s ever done has been for us because she loves us.”
Stuck in a bubble
The News made repeated requests for interviews with Border Patrol officials but none was granted. The agency made the following statement in response to The News' inquiry about the fear mixed-status families have of checkpoints:
“When Border Patrol encounters an illegal alien, whether or not at a checkpoint and regardless if that individual resides in the United States, the individual will be arrested for the immigration violation, processed, and referred to the appropriate agency for final disposition.”
An estimated 75,000 U.S. citizen children live in mixed-status families in the Valley, according to a 2018 study commissioned by local immigrants rights nonprofit La Union Del Pueblo Entero, or LUPE.
Conventional wisdom for mixed-status families is that you can’t go too far north or you’ll run into the checkpoints in Falfurrias or Sarita, and you can’t go too far west because you’ll hit a checkpoint before you reach Laredo, says Anselmo Suarez, a 28-year-old Mission resident.
There’s a string of checkpoints across America at varying distances from Mexico. The Falfurrias checkpoint, for example, is more than 70 miles from the border by McAllen. The Sarita checkpoint is about a hundred miles from the border by Brownsville. And the Border Patrol can set up impromptu checkpoints on highways within 100 miles of the border.
“You know your bounds. We’re stuck in this bubble. Eventually you do get used to it,” says Suarez, who is a beneficiary of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that grants unauthorized immigrants brought to the U.S. as children renewable two-year work permits and reprieve from deportation.
Suarez, whose family moved to Mission from Mexico when he was nine, says that growing up, the only way through the checkpoints for him was on school field trips. Border Patrol agents wouldn’t bother to check students’ papers.
DACA allows him to travel, both by air and through checkpoints. He can get a Texas ID every two years that he can show at Border Patrol checkpoints, but he still gets nervous driving through. Two of his brothers also have DACA and one was born in the U.S.
But his parents have no legal status.
There’s a guilt that comes with traveling freely, Suarez says, because he can have experiences that his parents may never have. He’s traveled to Los Angeles and other major Texas cities.
His father has always dreamed of seeing the Grand Canyon, but without status, it’s out of the question.
“My parents don’t know what’s past the checkpoint, they can only imagine. I don’t know what’s worse: to know that you can’t go past the checkpoint or being able to go and knowing that you can’t take family with you,” Suarez says.
Brenda Sanchez, a 25-year-old lifelong Valley resident, knows that guilt all too well.
She says her parents lack legal status, but they never told her that she couldn’t participate in school activities that took her past checkpoints to compete against other students in Texas when she was growing up.
Still, family trips had to take into account the fact that her parents simply couldn’t travel past the checkpoints.
“I knew the situation, so I wasn’t going to ask for something that we couldn’t do,” Sanchez says. “Everything has to be done here in the Valley. Nothing can be done across the checkpoint.”
Now Sanchez also faces the inability to travel with her husband, Luis Segundo, who’s lived in the U.S. without authorization since he was 14.
Segundo and Sanchez grew up together. They were high school and college sweethearts and have been married for about two years. They’re expecting a baby in December.
Both have college degrees from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where they pushed each other to graduate.
Though the couple is in the process of adjusting Segundo’s status through a family petition, he’s unable to work legally while that process unfolds.
Sanchez has traveled to Chicago, Washington, D.C. and California, places Segundo knows only through the photos she takes and video phone calls when the spotty cell phone reception in the Valley will allow it.
“I feel like there’s a rock in the middle of the road that I have to jump. Once I jump it, I know I’ll be able to move faster in life,” Segundo says.
In the detention center
That rock in the road was different for both Francisco and Marlon.
After the boys had been in Border Patrol custody for two days, Marlon self deported, deciding he needed to tell their mother where they’d been and about Francisco’s situation -- he knew she’d be worried sick. He phoned Sanjuana as soon as he got to his grandmother’s house in Reynosa.
But without a proper ID, Sanjuana didn’t dare get close to the Falfurrias checkpoint, the last place where her oldest son had been seen. For about two weeks, she waited and worried, at a loss about what to do.
“How was I supposed to approach immigration and tell them that they had my son and that I wanted to know how he was? They would take me and deport me, too,” Sanjuana says. “I would’ve kept fighting for my son wherever they sent me if that happened, but it was too big a risk to take.”
She also had to take care of her youngest son, Cesar, and scrape by to make sure bills were paid.
Sanjuana finally hired attorney Claudia Galan, who went to Border Patrol authorities and presented Francisco’s original birth certificate and other school and hospital paperwork. But they still didn’t release him.
Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have said that, “Generally, situations including conflicting reports from the individual and multiple birth certificates can, and should, take more time to verify.”
Meanwhile, Francisco and 60 men took turns sleeping on a grimy concrete floor, some in the restroom area, of a Falfurrias Border Patrol detention center.
They were fed dry bologna sandwiches for breakfast and junior cheeseburgers for dinner. Francisco says the men were bitten by ticks and some were very sick.
Federal authorities have not responded to questions about conditions at the center.
The powers that be
Father Roy Snipes, the “cowboy priest” as he’s known in Mission, says from his rustic office behind the historic Our Lady of Guadalupe chapel that for decades, his parishioners have been wary that they could be picked up by immigration.
But lately the fear has been worse. Even some U.S. citizens who long attended La Lomita have stopped going to the small chapel that sits on the U.S.-Mexico border to avoid the hassle of impromptu Border Patrol checkpoints.
“The talk from the powers that be is much more belligerent and hostile. Much more cruel and unforgiving. Much more rigid and frigid and ferocious,” Snipes says.
Sometimes immigrant families are in situations where their kids may need medical treatment in Houston or San Antonio, says Abraham Diaz, who works with the immigrant rights nonprofit LUPE.
Diaz says immigrants have approached LUPE and asked for help in getting their children across checkpoints. The group tries to find sponsors who can help, or uses other methods like powers of attorney to temporarily grant custody of a child to someone who can travel beyond the checkpoints. But it doesn’t always work.
“You’re giving a parent a choice of either risking their lives in the U.S. by trying to cross the checkpoint or risking the life of their child by not crossing. Sometimes these are matters of life and death,” Diaz says. “It’s a dilemma and some parents don’t know what to do.”
Diaz says he wishes there would be exceptions to cross checkpoints for medical reasons or if an undocumented youth has a college acceptance letter to a university outside the Valley.
Back to normal
At night Francisco says he thinks about the men he met during his 23 days in Border Patrol custody. Some told him they’d been there for longer than a month. They were from all over, he says -- Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela.
They weren’t bad people, he says, and were searching for a better life.
On the morning of June 20, Francisco heard his name called. He was told he’d be transferred from the Border Patrol station to ICE custody. The men around him formed a prayer circle.
“We prayed and thanked God that some of us were leaving. We prayed to God that he would give the people staying strength to be there for the rest of the time they would be held there,” Francisco says.
The men who were staying rushed to find whatever scraps of paper they could: torn paper cups and old Whataburger receipts from agents’ meals. One of the men had managed to keep a pen after not being searched thoroughly.
They wrote relatives’ phone numbers on the scraps and asked Francisco to call them. He collected about 15. He’s since been able to connect with five families.
But Francisco thinks mostly of his brother, Marlon. They talk every day on the phone and text constantly through WhatsApp. This is the longest the two have ever been apart.
“I feel like I’m missing a piece of myself. He belongs here with us. I know he’s not alone, but I wish he was here with us,” Francisco says. “Apart from being my brother he’s my best friend. We’ve lived our best experiences together, and now even our worst experience happened to us together.”
Francisco’s documents, some clothes, a gold necklace and the car in which the boys were riding when detained have not yet been returned.
Sanjuana says the focus now is getting her family back together. But Marlon returning without papers, she says, isn’t an option. His chance of playing college soccer is now slim or altogether gone.
“I just want to know if someone can help me with Marlon, but we don’t know how to do it or have the means to do it. He was deported. How are we supposed to do it?” Sanjuana says, tears streaming down her face.
When the interview ends, and the reporter leaves, a door near the back of the Galicia home that leads to the bedroom area swings open. It’s her youngest son Cesar, hungry for a snack.
Sanjuana worries ICE will come knocking at their door to take her away from Francisco and Cesar, who is also a U.S. citizen. She has done her best to keep him from the spotlight and hasn’t allowed for him to be photographed or interviewed.
As is the case with Francisco, Cesar’s future is stuck between two borders and two languages. He has every right to be in the U.S. but his mother doesn’t.
“He speaks more English than Spanish,” Francisco says. “But we speak to him in Spanish so he doesn’t forget.”
