by Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica, and Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This video is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez has served four terms as the top law enforcement officer in Val Verde County, Texas, a sprawling rural territory that shares 110 miles of border with Mexico. It is a position his father dreamed of holding before he died at the age of 51. Martinez says his father, a staunch Democrat, raised him and his nine siblings to serve their community.

Martinez describes himself as “Catholic and pro-life and pro-gun.” He’s also committed to his father’s party. His relationships in Val Verde County have repeatedly propelled him into office, thanks to support from both Democrats and Republicans. But this year, Martinez’s victory is less certain because some in Val Verde County don’t think he’s tough enough on immigration — even though securing the border is not a local sheriff’s responsibility.

This short documentary follows Joe Frank, along with his brothers David and Leo Martinez, as they wrestle with the tensions around immigration in Del Rio, nearly three hours south of San Antonio. Martinez’s run for office provides a glimpse at how new patterns of immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border have coincided with, if not driven, changing attitudes among voters who live there. Some communities once considered Democratic strongholds have begun to turn red, a trend bolstered by Republican efforts to court Latino voters.

Those efforts are changing politics in Val Verde County. A political action committee called Project Red TX has backed a candidate named Rogelio “Roger” Hernandez to run against Martinez. Since 2018, the PAC has been recruiting and financially supporting Republican candidates in local races across majority Latino border counties. This year, it has backed 50 local candidates, including three in Val Verde County. Hernandez’s signs have appeared all over town, with his slogan of “bringing order to the border.”

As border towns become the backdrop of a national immigration debate, how will it shape Del Rio? Watch this pressing short film presented by ProPublica, in partnership with The Texas Tribune, and go deeper by reading this story.

Lisa Riordan Seville, Mauricio Rodriguez Pons, Liz Moughon and Katie Campbell contributed to the production.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, photography by Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

DEL RIO, Texas — In 2008, Joe Frank Martinez beat a Republican incumbent to become the first Latino elected sheriff along this 110-mile stretch of border. Nearly 16 years later, in mid-September, Martinez stood in front of several dozen voters at the San Felipe Lions Club, having to campaign harder than ever before, and on an issue that wasn’t a factor in his previous elections: immigration.

The 68-year-old Democrat had been in law enforcement for nearly five decades, and save for a little more than a year when he was stationed elsewhere as a state trooper, Martinez told the audience, he’d spent them ensuring the safety of residents in Val Verde County. He had mastered politics in this place nearly three hours south of San Antonio, where residents prided themselves on voting for the person they liked best instead of a party. He’d handily won each of his elections and ran unopposed four years ago when the county tipped for Donald Trump.

Since then, it had been a tumultuous time, Martinez acknowledged to those assembled in the cafeteria-like space. They’d gone through a pandemic. They’d contended with a winter storm that had left hundreds of Texans dead. And then, he said, “We faced the Haitians.”

He didn’t explain what he meant, and he didn’t have to. The memory of nearly 20,000 primarily Haitian immigrants — the equivalent of more than half of the population in Del Rio — arriving at the border almost all at once and held under the international bridge for two weeks in September 2021 has been seared into the minds of residents here. Many feared it could happen again and questioned whether Martinez was tough enough on immigration.

Immigration is not part of Martinez’s job. But in Del Rio, like in other majority Latino border communities across the country, the issue is high on voters’ minds and is disrupting long-standing political allegiances. The barrel-chested lawman with a booming voice has experienced those disruptions firsthand. In a community where about 80% of residents are Latino, some had begun painting the Democratic sheriff as soft on immigration and falsely accused him of aiding unauthorized crossings.

Sometimes the attacks happened openly. When he pulled immigrants who had arrived at the banks of the river out of the water to keep them from drowning, Republicans accused him of helping people enter the country illegally. Some residents, including supporters, criticized Martinez on social media when they learned he would be endorsed by the Bexar County sheriff based in San Antonio who, during a speech at the Democratic National Convention, called Trump self-serving and accused the former president of making border sheriffs’ jobs harder when he killed a bipartisan border security deal earlier this year.

Other times, some of those who turned against Martinez did so without saying a word. A sign he placed at a longtime friend’s house had been replaced by one with his opponent’s slogan about “bringing order to the border.”

Standing in front of the crowd gathered at the Lions Club, Martinez shared a dizzying array of charts he’d brought along to respond to his critics. Things were in order at the border. Val Verde was seeing some of the lowest numbers of immigrants crossing in years, even lower than in neighboring counties where sheriffs had gone as far as to allow militias to operate.

As for whether the Haitian migrant episode could happen again — the question he knew was looming in people’s minds — he reminded them that it was federal authorities, not his office, who controlled border crossings.

He was as upset as they were with President Joe Biden’s response, and he’d been very public about saying as much. He hoped that when it came to the race for sheriff, they would judge him on how he’d handled the responsibilities assigned to him. How he’d served Val Verde, like his father before him, as a lawman, neighbor, husband and father; that who he was outweighed his affiliation with any party.

This time, however, he wasn’t sure the pitch would work.

“I want to try to keep my campaign at the local level,” Martinez said in an interview.

“I might be blind to the fact that it can’t be done.”

It’s long been understood that the Latino vote is neither monolithic nor reliably Democratic. Places such as Del Rio, a deeply Catholic border city whose economy depends heavily on law enforcement jobs, have always held conservative views. Republicans like former President George W. Bush won here by appealing to those views while arguing for a compassionate approach to immigration.

Until recently, the party’s far-right shift on immigration hadn’t managed to make significant inroads in border communities. Conservative assertions about the issue, particularly those that painted immigration as an “invasion,” had failed to resonate with people on the border precisely because they knew better from living there. To them, the border was a fundamental feature of their day-to-day lives and an engine of their economies, not something to be afraid of. A decade ago, the overwhelming majority of immigrants who crossed the border were from Mexico. And the majority of the Latinos living on the United States side of the border had roots in Mexico as well.

That’s changed, as have other immigration patterns at the border, and so have the attitudes of those who live here. Democratic politics have been slow to keep up — at least rhetorically — with those shifts. But Republicans have seized on them to move more voters into their camp. The state’s Republican Party no longer attempts to strike a balance on immigration. In fact, during this presidential cycle, it has gone even further by using the issue as a litmus test for whether it can turn border communities red, not just in their choices for state and federal candidates but for local ones too.

Beginning in 2014, the numbers of Central American families and unaccompanied minors arriving at the border started to increase. The sight of juveniles held in makeshift camps on area military bases stirred political tensions in border communities and beyond. Later, the border became ground zero for Trump’s anti-immigration efforts, which involved separating children from their parents and forcing Central American asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico until they were given a date to appear in U.S. immigration court. Neither of those efforts had a lasting impact on the number of people arriving at the border, but they forced more immigrants to be stuck on the Mexican side for longer periods of time — and disruptions on the Mexican side of the border almost always ripple into the U.S. side.

In an unprecedented effort to help the United States keep immigrants from arriving at the border, Mexico began detaining them and transporting them farther south. It also allowed the United States to turn back Mexican nationals and some Central Americans, but not most other immigrants. When word got out among would-be immigrants in South America, West Africa, China and Haiti, they began arriving in such large numbers that they overwhelmed the border, along with several of the U.S. towns and cities where they ultimately landed.

The thousands of Haitians who arrived in Del Rio three years ago shook the city because it was like nothing people there had experienced in recent history. And like Martinez, a lot of residents here have histories that go back a long way.

His grandparents migrated from Italy and Mexico more than 100 years ago, attracted by the area’s fertile land and ranches. One grandmother fled instability and violence leading up to the Mexican Revolution. Growing up, Martinez recalls immigrants knocking on the door of his family’s home, asking for a meal and temporary work. Sometimes that meant a little less food on the table or that the shed in the backyard got yet another fresh coat of paint it didn’t really need.

Martinez and his nine siblings learned to move easily in two cultures.

“My dad always emphasized to us: We’re in this country, we’re Americans first,” said his brother Leonel Martinez Jr., 67, who runs a binational company that makes leather horse saddles in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, and sells them in the United States. “He also stressed that we should never forget our roots.”

A staunch Catholic and Democrat, the family patriarch looms large in the choices the siblings make. He was active in fighting for equal rights at a time when Mexican Americans were excluded from many activities and did not have a voice in government. He co-founded a civic group to help bring sewer lines, paved roads and mailboxes to his predominantly Mexican American neighborhood; helped elect the city’s first Mexican American mayor; and dreamed of becoming the first elected Hispanic sheriff for Del Rio — a dream he held on to until his death at the age of 51.

Because of him, the brothers are Democrats too, but in varying ways.

Leonel, who wears a goatee and goes by Leo, voted for Barack Obama and then voted twice for Trump, saying he aligns more closely with the latter on the economy and immigration. He believes U.S. policy has become such that it is easier for people from far-off countries to come and stay than it is for Mexicans.

“Why would you do that?” he said. “I mean, if I see my neighbor having a problem, he’s the first one I think I want to help. If I see somebody on the other side of the world that needs help, I don’t know.”

Another brother, David, was elected four years ago as Val Verde county attorney. The 60-year-old with graying hair is among the more progressive of his siblings. He opposed efforts to prosecute some people seeking asylum and said that as far as he’s concerned, what’s been going on at the border is not an immigration crisis. It’s “a human crisis.” And in responding to it, he said while choking back tears, “We can’t be inhuman. We can’t put our compassion aside.”

Joe Frank, whose given name is Jose Francisco, straddles his brothers’ views. He’s pro-gun, is anti-abortion and has a son who works as a Border Patrol agent. He believes that there should be a path for people to make their case for starting new lives in the United States but that the current system is too chaotic and doesn’t move fast enough to remove those who don’t qualify.

That position had always worked for him among voters because that’s where they seemed to be too — until the Haitian immigrants arrived.

On a chilly morning in January 2021, Martinez stood at the edge of the riverbank as a rescue boat brought in the body of a 33-year-old Haitian woman. She wore red tennis shoes and blue and white basketball shorts. Her shirt was pushed above her bulging belly. The woman, who drowned while trying to reach Del Rio, had carried twin babies nearly to term.

Martinez was shaken by the loss of three lives all at once. He felt people either didn’t know or didn’t care what was going on at the border.

He began capturing photos on his phone of the crisis he saw unfolding before him: parents with their babies struggling to wade through the Rio Grande and other immigrants who were not lucky enough to survive the river’s currents. There were also the images of a human smuggler who was arrested three times after she kept getting released, young girls traveling alone and a high-speed chase that left eight immigrants dead.

In the months that followed, Border Patrol encounters in the Del Rio sector, which stretches 245 miles along the Rio Grande through Val Verde and two other border counties, doubled from 11,000 that January to nearly 22,000 in April 2021. Frustrated, Martinez wrote his first-ever opinion piece, for USA Today. In it, he called on Washington politicians to visit his county rather than just pass through for a photo opportunity, and he pleaded with them to put their egos aside and pass comprehensive immigration reform.

“If they could stay a few days and see the madness and mayhem going on right now, there’d be no more wasting time trying to decide whether the border situation is a ‘crisis’ or not,” he wrote. “If they could have witnessed my deputies pull a full-term pregnant woman’s body out of the Rio Grande, maybe they could put their differences aside.”

It wasn’t just a humanitarian issue, Martinez explained in an interview on Fox News that month. It was a resource issue. “When I have four deputies working, and three of them are tied up for the majority part of the day, we can’t serve our citizens and our community the way we need to be serving them,” he told the cable news network.

No Washington decision-makers visited. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, however, seized the moment. A loyal Trump supporter and one of Biden’s fiercest critics, Abbott traveled to Del Rio that June to hold a border security summit. He praised Martinez, saying he appreciated “all that he and every man and woman involved in law enforcement are doing, especially to step up and help secure our border.”

The governor described what was happening as an invasion. He then announced that the state would build its own wall and arrest immigrants for trespassing as part of Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar state initiative he’d launched earlier that year. “We are going to do everything we can to secure the border,” Abbott said to a boisterous crowd, “and it begins immediately today right here in Val Verde County.”

But three months later, little had changed.

Immigrants started to arrive in Del Rio by the hundreds, then by the thousands. Instead of being processed and leaving the city almost as soon as they arrived, as they typically did, they waited with Border Patrol-issued color-coded raffle-like tickets for the opportunity to turn themselves over to federal authorities so they could request legal protections, including asylum.

They lay on pieces of cardboard under makeshift tents fashioned from river cane they’d cut from the banks of the Rio Grande. Parents and their children vomited and passed out from dehydration in the triple-digit heat. There were no showers, and only about one portable toilet was available for every 140 people.

Some Del Rio residents asked how they could help, while others called for the immediate deportation of all of the immigrants. One woman fired her revolver in the direction of a group of Haitians, claiming she had panicked.

The swift and sudden arrival of so many immigrants also tested the Martinez family.

When the federal government announced the temporary closure of the international bridge, Leo Martinez called the sheriff, hoping that his brother had information on how long the closure would last. Joe Frank Martinez didn’t know.

While he waited to learn more, Leo Martinez was forced to divert U.S. deliveries of saddles through another international bridge more than 50 miles away, where the driver had to wait upwards of 12 hours to cross. The closure cost the company several thousand dollars in fuel and additional staff time.

“We are pawns in this game that the federal government’s playing,” said Leo Martinez, a self-described ultra-super-conservative Democrat, later adding that much like in a game of chess, border residents are “the ones that you sacrifice up front.”

The Sunday after the bridge closed, David Martinez, the county’s top attorney, was packing for a conference when he got a call from a city official. Abbott wanted police to arrest thousands of immigrants under the bridge for trespassing, and the city official asked if he would prosecute them.

The county attorney didn’t directly say no, but his response left no doubt.

The federal government had created the circumstances that had caused the immigrants to remain there, he told the city official. It had brought in portable toilets and provided some food and water. For police to arrest them, officials needed to make it clear they were no longer allowed on city property. Besides, the county attorney said, the crushing workload on his three-person legal team would inevitably lead to a backlog that would force immigrants to stay in detention longer than is legal. Without proper notice, “I would have been violating people’s constitutional rights by the thousands, and I wasn’t willing to do it.”

Two days later, Abbott was back in Del Rio, where he accused Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of “promoting and allowing open-border policies.” He touted the arrests of immigrants under his state initiative, one that counted work that had nothing to do with the border as part of its metrics for success.

The sheriff stood behind him.

While on his way to a doctor’s appointment last fall, Joe Frank Martinez got a call from an unknown number. It was a Republican operative inviting him to run on behalf of the other team.

The state’s Republican leaders, including its two U.S. senators, loved him, Martinez recalled the operative telling him. He’d taken positions as conservative as theirs on the issues they cared most about. If he agreed to switch parties, the political action committee would cover his filing fees and help fund his campaign.

He’d certainly had serious differences with Democrats in recent years. The party had changed in ways he didn’t like. But leaving felt too much like a dishonor, not only to his father’s memory, but to his ideals.

He said no.

Shortly afterward, the PAC, known as Project Red TX, placed its support behind a 56-year-old police officer named Rogelio “Roger” Hernandez. The Republican challenger was born in Del Rio but had spent his law enforcement career in San Antonio. Hernandez said he was planning to retire and move back to the border city to be near his mom. He couldn’t recall if Project Red TX approached him or if he approached the group.

Project Red TX began to more aggressively target border communities after Trump made gains in the traditionally Democratic strongholds during the 2020 presidential election. The group, which helps elect Republicans in local races in Latino communities, has raised more than $2.5 million. The bulk of that money comes from a political action committee whose biggest donors include Texas real estate businessmen Harlan Crow and Richard Weekley.

This year alone, the group has spent about $370,000 on advertising for about 50 local candidates, primarily in border counties, according to campaign finance reports. Three of the candidates, including Hernandez, are in Val Verde County.

The message seems to be resonating. This year, for the first time in decades, more people voted in the Val Verde County Republican primary than in the Democratic primary — in fact, twice as many did.

More than 2,000 people voted in Republican primaries in Val Verde County each year Donald Trump appeared on the ballot.

As part of his campaign to bring “order to the border,” Hernandez has promised to secure additional resources for the sheriff’s office.

“I’ll get them better training, better equipment, better vehicles, better everything,” Hernandez said, without offering specifics on how he would meet that promise, saying only “there’s grants out there that you can get.”

Martinez said his office has worked diligently to secure available grants, including those that are designated for border security. Altogether, Val Verde County and the city of Del Rio have received more than $13 million in state and federal grants since 2021, about half of which can be attributed to Operation Lone Star. That exceeds what they got in total the previous 13 years.

“That individual hasn’t lived here in over 30 years, and all of a sudden he shows up in the ninth inning. Come on, give me a break,” Martinez said.

As the race heated up this summer, Wayne Hamilton, a longtime Texas Republican operative who heads Project Red TX, posted a photo of himself and Hernandez on social media. Behind them was a stack of the candidate’s campaign signs. Hernandez was committed to border security, Hamilton wrote, then added, “The incumbent Sheriff was featured in a documentary helping migrants enter the country illegally. It’s time for change.”

Hamilton declined multiple interview requests and did not reply to questions about the race or about which documentary he was referring to. News footage from the 2021 immigration spike shows Martinez extending his hand to help people in the Rio Grande, who had already reached the U.S., safely onto land. He then turned those immigrants over to Border Patrol.

“Once you are in the United States, in the middle of that river, I’ve got to protect you,” Martinez said, questioning what people would have said if he hadn’t done so and one of the immigrants had drowned. “It’s a human being at the end of the day.”

The attacks are particularly upsetting for Martinez, who prides himself on having friends from the right and left. Among Martinez’s backers is the Republican sheriff he beat in 2008. “It’s about relationships, something I’ve been building since 1977,” he said.

Some of those relationships turned out to be more fragile than Martinez was aware.

On a recent afternoon in mid-September, Mary Fritz, a fourth-generation rancher and Trump supporter, picked up a sign for his opponent during a meet-and-greet at a local burger restaurant.

Fritz, a petite 62-year-old with weathered skin, and Martinez have been friends for about four decades. She has voted for him every time — even against Republicans.

He’s a good sheriff, Fritz says. She appreciates how he’s readily available and out in the community where constituents can talk to him and voice their concerns. “I just wish he would have pressed the border issue more,” Fritz said as she walked on a patch of the 2,000 acres of desert scrubland that abuts the Rio Grande where her family raises sheep and goats.

Martinez didn’t hold back his frustration. If voters were willing to disregard his decades of service and judge him on something he had no control over, “God bless them.”

When politicians, government bureaucrats or reporters come to Del Rio and ask the sheriff to show them whether the billions of dollars spent by successive presidents have made the border more secure, he piles them into his white Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck and drives them down to the so-called wall so that they can see for themselves.

“All this right here,” Martinez says, pointing to an expanse of land where ranches once stood about a mile north of the Rio Grande, “used to be little ranchitos that went all the way to the river. I think the U.S. government made something like 13 millionaires when they purchased all this property.”

In their place, there is now a jumble of fencing.

The black wrought iron panels about 14 feet tall were erected during the administration of former President George W. Bush, who was trying to funnel immigrants into areas where Border Patrol could more easily catch them. Martinez thinks those worked.

The Trump administration tore down some of them to build sections twice as high of the “big, beautiful wall” he promised voters. But Trump left office before completing the project. Biden then came in and immediately paused construction, pledging to not build “another foot” of wall. In Del Rio, that meant that workers left stacks of construction materials behind and gaps between the panels of fencing wide enough for tractor-trailers to drive through them. The Biden administration attempted to close those gaps by hanging flimsy wire mesh that is already sagging in some areas from people climbing over it.

For Martinez, all of this reflects a political system bent on fighting over border security rather than achieving it.

“Do we really have a system that’s broken, or do we have a political machine that’s broken?” he said. “The far right is pushing and the far left is trying to push back, but what happened to working together?”

Answering his own question, he later said, “We’re going to continue with this mess probably long after I’m dead and gone.”

Gerardo del Valle of ProPublica contributed reporting. Dan Keemahill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune contributed data reporting and research. Lexi Churchill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune contributed research.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Seth Freed Wessler, photography by Zaydee Sanchez and Kathleen Flynn, with additional reporting by Zaydee Sanchez

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Rick Roth is a staunch Republican and a conservative member of the Florida Legislature, but he’s quick to point out that he’s first and foremost a farmer. Roth grows vegetables, rice and sugar cane on the thousands of acres passed down to him from his father, in Palm Beach County south of Lake Okeechobee. And because the farm relies on a steady stream of laborers, most of them from Mexico, Roth spent substantial time over the last three decades, before and after he became a politician, trying to stop lawmakers from messing with his workforce.

A big part of that fight was against legislation that would make employers verify their workers’ immigration status. Such laws, Roth once said, would bankrupt farmers like him.

But by 2023, when Florida was once again considering such a bill, Roth’s convictions had grown shaky. In May of that year, he sat and listened as his Democratic colleagues voiced their opposition: “This bill will tank our state’s economy by directly harming Florida’s agriculture, hospitality and construction industries,” one of them warned. Had this debate been unfolding even a few years earlier, Roth — who has acknowledged relying heavily on labor by undocumented immigrants in the past — likely would have nodded along.

This time, he didn’t. Several minutes later, Roth, his gray hair cut short and a cross pinned to his lapel, rose from his seat on the House floor, peered through reading glasses and delivered a statement antithetical to what the 70-year-old had long stood for: “I rise in support of SB 1718,” he announced. First among his reasons, he said, was an “invasion” of immigrants at the border. He called it a “ticking time bomb.”

The bill not only required all but the smallest employers to check the legal status of any new hires against a federal database, it also ordered hospitals to ask patients about their status. The measure added new funds to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ program to transport newly arrived immigrants out of the state, while making it a felony for individuals to bring undocumented workers in. DeSantis called it “the strongest anti-illegal-immigration legislation in the country.”

Roth knew that the legislation might hurt many farmers — not to mention landscapers and contractors and hotels and a slew of other employers in Florida. But it was good politics. Across the country, Republican politicians like himself have almost universally fallen in line with what amounts to a requirement for party membership. Even business-focused Republicans, who for many years had turned a blind eye to undocumented immigrants because they provided cheap, reliable labor, had given in to a mandate from a party whose leader has spent three presidential campaigns portraying immigration as an existential threat to the United States. In Roth’s case, the transformation from a decades-long advocate for expanding legal immigration to a Trump-style hardliner was so swift and so complete that he barely tries to explain it, other than to repeat what sound like Republican talking points about how the border has become a crisis.

The measure passed easily out of the Republican-controlled House the same day Roth stood to support it. Relieved it was over, he left Tallahassee to return to his fields outside the town of Belle Glade, where the motto is “her soil is her fortune.” He drove his Toyota Prius, a Trump 2020 sticker on the bumper, down the dirt lanes that run along his tracts of land. Birds darted around the fallow farmland. Roth felt at ease.

The calm didn’t last. Among Roth’s business owner constituents, there was a rising panic about the fate of their workers. A manager of a vegetable packing house stood by as dozens of his workers left. “We had a mass exodus here,” he later said. Undocumented immigrants and their families were loading up trucks with years of belongings and decamping to Georgia or North Carolina. “Everyone was afraid,” said a resident of a Belle Glade mobile home park. She’d watched as at least five of her neighbors, all undocumented immigrants, sold their trailers and moved. A daycare worker in the next town said several children of immigrants in her classroom were there one week, gone the next.

As workers were scrambling to protect themselves from what they saw as a coming crackdown, phone calls were flooding into Roth’s legislative office. The farmers and contractors and landscapers were complaining that this law Roth had supported was going to wreck their businesses. It was exactly the kind of fallout Roth had long warned of when he’d fought measures like the one he’d just helped to pass.

As one nursery owner who called into Roth’s office asked: “What have you done?”

Around the time of the flurry of calls, 26-year-old Salvador Garcia Espitia and his wife, Nohemí Enriquez Fonseca, were trying to figure out how they’d deal with their own crisis. The couple, who’d grown up near each other in the small ranchos of the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, had become parents two years before. Their son, Isaac, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and autism. Garcia’s work in a vegetable packing facility and in the corn fields around their town barely covered his son’s therapy and medication. Enriquez hadn’t worked since the baby was born, since his care took all her time.

The family lived in Cerritos, with Garcia’s parents. It wasn’t much of a town, just a cluster of homes behind a locked gate. The gate went up after a local woman was kidnapped, presumably by gang or cartel members, though no one knows for sure. Each night, after 9:30, residents communicated by group chat if someone needed to leave for an emergency, so that whoever had the key could let them out and back in.

Whenever Garcia worked overtime, which was almost always once Isaac’s medical bills stacked up, his mother would sit and wait for him to come home, even until 2 a.m. She feared for her youngest child, her only son. He was so full of promise, capable of so much with his serious disposition and vast intelligence. She worried not just about his safety, but that she hadn’t done enough for him. The best job she could find was cleaning houses, which she did for many years. Her husband was frequently out of work after a head injury he’d suffered back when Garcia was a toddler.

Since Garcia was a child, he had watched countless relatives and friends make the decision for their own families’ futures to go find work in the north. The men departed, crossing into the United States without papers. To have a home, to afford a car, to provide for a child who would struggle to walk or speak, going north was the only way.

But Garcia was clear: He would not cross the border that way. He could not risk being harmed or killed and leaving his wife and son with nothing.

Not long after the severity of Isaac’s condition came to light, Garcia began to listen more closely to other young men in the towns near his: There was a way to travel back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico for work, a way to do it that seemed safe.

The solution for Garcia was a visa program that promised to benefit both migrating workers in desperate need of livable wages and U.S. farms in desperate need of affordable labor. But in many ways, the benefits to workers have remained a gamble while for farmers they’re guaranteed.

Roth is a special case, a farmer and also a politician. For him, the program has served a dual purpose. It’s ensured the success of his business by providing a steady stream of workers. And it’s made it easier for him to adopt a harsher political stance on immigration at a time when he feels his party demands it.

Roth didn’t mention it on the House floor or broadcast it to his constituents, but the visa program made his farm mostly impervious to the provisions he’d rallied against in the past. As anxiety gripped communities of undocumented people and many of their employers, Roth Farms was going to be just fine.

The visa program turned out to be a lifeline for Roth. When Garcia reached for that same lifeline, it failed him.

Roth Farms dates back four generations to the late 1940s, but Rick Roth didn’t grow up thinking the family business would be his future. When he went off to Emory University in 1970 to study math, he figured he’d find himself working an office job, somewhere far from any fields.

“I thought, ‘Man, I’m too smart to be a farmer.’” But Roth said a mix of marijuana and malaise sent him off track. After he was placed on academic probation, he came home and asked his father to put him to work on the farm. To Roth’s surprise, he liked it. He was assigned easy jobs, like driving truckloads of radishes to the packing house. Though he’d often mess up basic tasks or show up late and hungover, his father’s workers knew that he could be the boss someday, and they treated him accordingly. Roth knew it, too. He also knew that if he went to work at some company, he’d start at the bottom, and there was no guarantee how far up he’d make it. Here, he had a clear path to the top.

Roth returned to Emory, finished his degree, and then came back to Roth Farms. His father gave him more responsibility, and within a few years he was overseeing harvest operations. With his crew leaders’ guidance, he’d earned his father’s respect and sensed that this might be permanent, that the farm could actually be his.

Sooner than he expected, it was. In 1984, his father had a heart attack. Two years later, he died. Roth still tears up, 40 years later, recalling his loss.

For a decade, the farm grew and prospered. Then, Roth faced his first major challenge. Back then, almost all of the farm’s workers were Black. But as the workers began aging out of farm labor, it was becoming harder to find new people to take their place. Though Roth had found reason to continue his father’s lucrative profession, he realized with some consternation that the people he employed in low-wage field jobs didn’t raise their own children to follow them: “No farmworker raises their kids to be farmworkers.”

Other Belle Glade farms were responding to the worker shortage by hiring newly arrived Mexican immigrants. Roth Farms hired a new Latino crew leader to help bring them in. By the end of the 1990s, “half of our employees working in seasonal jobs probably were illegal,” Roth said. “Everybody knew that.”

The immigrant workers Roth hired were young, strong and plentiful, and they were willing, he has said, to work for less money than Americans. That assumption brought trouble. By the late 1990s, nearly all of his workers were Latino, and in 1999, a group of nine of them filed a class action lawsuit against Roth for racial and national origin discrimination. They alleged that they earned up to $1.50 less per hour than the small remaining Black crew of a dozen or so workers. Roth at the time denied that any wage disparities were based on race.

The two sides reached a settlement, with Roth Farms agreeing to pay $124,000 to cover the additional wages the workers alleged they were owed. Roth declined to comment on the lawsuit.

As the farm continued to benefit from a fairly steady stream of workers from Mexico, Roth became convinced that those workers should be entitled to legal status. He felt that farms like his couldn’t just keep on hiring undocumented immigrants forever, or at least they shouldn’t have to. He began making treks to Washington, D.C., to advocate for an easier path for undocumented workers to become legal ones.

The bills that would have done that didn’t pass. But Roth kept up his advocacy efforts, reiterating that U.S. citizens would never return to farm work, even with higher wages, and that without immigrant workers, the U.S. would need to begin importing more food.

In 2011, Florida lawmakers began deliberating a series of bills modeled after a recent Arizona law that would make it a crime to be undocumented in Florida, allow police to check people’s immigration status and crack down on the hiring of undocumented workers. The Arizona law, and similar ones in Alabama and Georgia, played out as anticipated. Workers left. Fields of vegetables rotted.

One of the Florida bills also would have required private employers to run all hires through E-Verify, the system for checking legal work status, and imposed fines on companies that employ undocumented immigrants. In response, Roth intensified his public opposition. Those bills failed.

When Congress later that year considered the Legal Workforce Act, including an E-Verify requirement, Roth again spoke against it, telling the Palm Beach Post: “This is a repetitive job for people who don’t speak the language. These people pick the crops for other people who have air-conditioned jobs.”

Generations of Garcia’s family members had worked on farms, but he didn’t grow up thinking it was an inevitability. He wanted to go to college, maybe even become a doctor.

He was in high school when he met Enriquez, who was 15 at the time and a guest at his cousin’s wedding. She was struck by how serious he was, and how smart. No matter her question he had an answer.

Enriquez’s parents were strict. She liked to go out, much more than Garcia did, but she could only meet him in public with her parents in tow, at community gatherings or the annual festival celebrating the town’s patron saint. Otherwise, he could come to the family’s house.

By the time Garcia moved in with Enriquez and her parents, when she was 18 and he was 20, he’d had to give up on going to college. There was no money for that. He went to work in a local dairy, then to the fields and the vegetable packing houses.

A year after he moved in, Garcia and Enriquez married. He didn’t want to start a family too soon, though. He wanted to save up for a house of their own. They made it three years. A house was still a distant possibility, but Garcia took the pregnancy as the best news.

The baby was 6 months old when Enriquez became convinced that something wasn’t right. Isaac was not developing the way he should. She started to look for help. Eventually, she brought Isaac to a private doctor, who said the baby needed to see a neurologist.

That one appointment was nearly a week’s salary. The neurologist scheduled a scan of the child’s brain. Enriquez and Garcia cobbled together what they could, figuring that it was just enough to pay for the scan and cover the bus fare to the facility for her, Isaac and his godmother, who wanted to come along. But when they got there, the scan was more than they were expecting, and more than they had. Isaac’s godmother came up with the remainder, but they were left with no money to get home. They found a bus willing to let them pay the fare at the destination. On the way, Enriquez called a friend to meet the bus and lend her the fare.

The more stressed her husband got, the quieter he became. And in the weeks after the scan, he said very little. He was also working constantly. The neurologist had explained that Isaac had cerebral palsy, which meant he would need a speech therapist, physical therapy and a nutritionist. The rehab facility was an hour and a half away by bus. The therapy sessions cost 1,200 pesos, or about $60, every week. The most Garcia could bring home each week, working as much overtime as he could, was 2,000 pesos. Typically it was more like 1,500.

Just as they got help covering the cost of Isaac’s treatment, he was diagnosed with a second condition, autism. The new medication cost more than what they’d been spending to manage his cerebral palsy.

The need for Garcia to go north was no longer merely important. It was urgent. He turned to his wife and said: “I have to find another solution.” And that’s when the H-2A visa came up.

After years of lobbying against various laws, Roth began to wonder if he could do more for farmers by joining the Legislature rather than fighting it. In 2016, he announced his run for a Florida house seat.

Not long after Roth won his race, Donald Trump entered the White House. Roth wholeheartedly supported Trump, but he would soon find that the president’s immigration agenda created a new problem for his farm. “With Donald Trump, there were not a lot of illegals coming to America,” Roth acknowledged, which aligns with the low numbers of immigrants who crossed the border during much of the former president’s first year in office. “We started to have to say, ‘Well, now what are we going to do?’”

For a time, he did what he’d always done: He fought actions that would harm undocumented workers and their employers. He voted against a 2019 E-Verify bill pushed by DeSantis. But he was more quiet about his opposition, he said, refraining from the strong language he’d previously used. The bill died in committee.

It was around that time that Roth, along with his son, who’d taken over the day-to-day operations of the farm, found a fix. It was available to only a sliver of the state’s employers: an agricultural visa program called H-2A.

The program, which allows the U.S. farming industry to bring in foreign laborers on a temporary basis, had been around in some form since the 1940s. But until recently Roth had little need for it – his workers, documented and not, came back every year. Plus, he had considered the program’s requirements to pay more than the minimum wage and cover the cost of transportation from Mexico and housing in Belle Glade too expensive. But, like many other farmers who’d struggled with labor shortages, he came around to it. The program could dependably deliver legal workers. H-2A visa certifications have increased fourfold in the last decade, and nowhere are there more of these workers than in Florida.

“H-2A,” Roth said, “was really the only choice.”

When Florida’s anti-immigration SB 1718 came around in 2023, Roth had an almost entirely H-2A workforce — which made it easier for him to support legislation that purported to push out undocumented workers. As for how to explain his change of heart to constituents: “Given the border crossing that’s going on, we did need to send a strong message,” he said. “If you’re illegal, don’t come to Florida. We’re gonna make it tough on you.”

But some of his constituents couldn’t help but get a different message: “We’re going to make it tough on your workers.” They told Roth that the law itself, not the far-away border crossings, posed the immediate threat to their livelihoods.

Eventually, the potential for the law’s harm began to sink in. Weeks after his vote for SB 1718, in the summer of 2023, Roth showed up at meetings across his district on a campaign of damage control. “I apologize to you for this bad bill,” he told a group gathered at a local church, with the help of a Spanish interpreter.

Roth made numerous statements in public and private meetings that the law is predominantly political, intended “to help a governor run for president.” He said it had been laced with “purposeful loopholes” to protect employers from too much harm. For one, it doesn’t apply to small businesses with fewer than 25 workers. But chief among the loopholes, Roth said, is that the E-Verify requirement doesn’t extend to undocumented immigrants who already have jobs. “If you like your job, keep your job,” he’s become fond of saying.

Roth admits that, even today, he may have longtime workers who are undocumented. When workers in his own packing house started asking questions about the law, he said he “instructed all my management what to say, and I just told them very clearly, ‘This new bill that you’re hearing all this talk about does not apply to workers that already have a job.’”

The full impact of SB 1718 is still not clear. Its E-Verify provisions did not take full effect until July. For some employers, it’s made life more difficult. “I can’t grow,” said Mark Baker, who owns a 40-year-old landscape and plant nursery in Delray Beach. He lamented that he can’t use the H-2A program, since his workers aren’t temporary. “I want to open another office, but I can’t because I can’t even staff the office I have.”

Despite having voted to crack down on immigrants in Florida, Roth maintains he still supports broader immigration legalization and insists it’s up to Washington to take action. He also admits he thinks such a fix is far off. What he knows for sure is that for farms like his, H-2A is working, that it incentivizes workers to come here the right way — with the assurance that worker and farmer alike will be protected.

That September 2023 morning started like so many others. Enriquez caught the bus to take Isaac to physical therapy. This time her husband came along. They stopped to eat something on the way back home, then Garcia collected the bags he had packed.

If he was nervous or frustrated or scared, he didn’t show it.

Garcia’s parents picked up the three of them to drive Garcia to the bus station. It would be tortuous for him to be away from his family, but the consolation was that the job would only last five months. It was dusk when they got to the bus stop, and they couldn’t linger. It was unsafe to be out in the dark. They hugged him tight. “Take care of our boy,” he said.

Garcia spent the following days sorting out paperwork with a labor subcontractor who specializes in recruiting Mexicans to work on U.S. farms. He knew a little about where he was headed: Belle Glade. His wife’s aunt had immigrated to a nearby town years earlier. Once he arrived, he visited with her before settling into his barracks-style lodging near the sugar cane fields, which happened to be just a few miles from Roth’s fields. Garcia texted his wife that he would try his best to get some rest that night, since he would start work in the morning.

The following afternoon, Sept. 13, 2023, Enriquez was just getting back from taking Isaac to therapy when someone called from Florida. It was a woman from the company that had hired Garcia. Her husband was fine, the woman said. He had fainted in the fields, she explained, which was something that happened from time to time, because of heat nearing 90 degrees. But no, he couldn’t talk to her right then. He was still unconscious. The woman gave Enriquez the name of the hospital where he was recovering.

As soon as they hung up, Enriquez called her aunt, who headed to the hospital. But when she arrived, she was told that Garcia had been transferred, to Palms West Hospital in Loxahatchee.

In the hours that followed, the calls to Enriquez accelerated. Amid all the ringing and buzzing, someone arranged that night for a video call so she could see her husband. He still hadn’t woken up. She spoke softly to him, trying to hold back her panic over the cables and tubes that crisscrossed his body, including one helping him breathe.

It was very early the next morning when the hospital called again. They needed Enriquez’s permission to resuscitate her husband. The words instinctively came to her — yes, save him — and she sprang into action. She realized she would need to somehow quickly cross the border to get to her husband. It seemed as if one minute, she was handing off Isaac to her mother and the next she was 900 miles away at the border crossing at Matamoros, Garcia’s mother by her side.

The two women had to wait on the Mexican side of the bridge for several hours. As they sat outside in the middle of the night, the hospital called again. They needed Enriquez to agree to resuscitate her husband. Again she said yes.

The nurses ventured one more question. In the event of a third resuscitation, would Enriquez have the same answer? Her husband was no longer well, they said. He was suffering. Enriquez weighed the pain in her soul. No, she said. Not a third time.

The border crossing took all day. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials had to ask so many questions to approve the two women for the humanitarian permit. Hours passed. Enriquez was aware that authorities kept trying to reach people at the hospital to confirm her husband’s condition.

Finally, the permits were approved. As the two women left the CBP building in Brownsville, Texas, an official saw them out, holding open the door. It would be the first time either woman had crossed into the United States. All the man said was, “I’m very sorry.”

Roth had heard about the death of a worker on a nearby farm. He said it was sad. He also said one of his first thoughts was one of worry, about what state or federal agencies would do in response. “It’s a big deal that somebody died,” Roth added. But “the government tends to overreact.”

In late 2023, Roth returned to Tallahassee to serve his final session in the Florida House before he termed out. He has plans to run for state Senate in 2026. Among the last bills he co-sponsored as a member of the House was one that would prevent local governments in Florida from implementing workplace heat protections.

It was introduced in reaction to a proposal in Miami-Dade County that would have required water, breaks and shade for outdoor workers. Roth had joined a chorus of business groups pushing forcefully to ban the local labor ordinance. “I’m a little bit insulted that some government bureaucrat thinks they need to help me take care of my employees,” he told a local Fox affiliate.

Roth had supported a bill four years earlier to require heat protections for student athletes, but he rejected the idea that Florida should impose protections for workers. He told ProPublica that employers don’t need state or local government to require safeguards, since employers already have every incentive to protect their workers. Given the shortage of workers across the state, he said, “do you really think they’re not taking care of their employees?”

He also pointed out that the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration already regulates workplaces, including fining those that don’t offer heat protections. And ultimately, he said, it’s the responsibility of workers and their crew leaders to make sure they’re not putting themselves at risk. On his own farm, he said, workers know when they need to take breaks.

On March 12, 2024, days after the Florida Legislature passed the anti-heat protection bill, OSHA revealed the findings of its investigation into Garcia’s death. It determined that the Belle Glade company that hired Garcia and other H-2A workers to local farms had failed to adequately protect workers from the heat.

“This young man’s life ended on his first day on the job because his employer did not fulfill its duty to protect employees from heat exposure,” the OSHA area director said in a statement. “Had McNeill Labor Management made sure its workers were given time to acclimate to working in brutally high temperatures with required rest breaks, the worker might not have suffered a fatal injury.”

For McNeill Labor Management Inc.’s failures to protect Garcia and to report his death to the government, OSHA issued the company a fine of less than $28,000.

Owner Shannon McNeill told ProPublica that his company, which employs 700 mostly H-2A workers at the height of operations, provides workers with all of the protections that safety advocates call for, including water, shade and breaks. He also said that the company is now easing new hires more slowly into full-day shifts, a practice that OSHA already recommended. But he is contesting OSHA’s determination that the company is responsible for Garcia’s death.

McNeill Labor Management had paid for Garcia’s body to be returned to Mexico and his funeral expenses. On a morning in July, before a heavy rain set in, Nohemí Enriquez left her son with her mother near the church in the town of Pueblo Nuevo and drove out of the town center to visit her husband’s grave in a small, orderly cemetery. The flowers she placed there on her last visit had become dried and shriveled. She took them from the vase and threw them away, angry at herself for not bringing fresh ones. And then she prayed. “For those I love and who loved me,” his gravestone read.

One week earlier, on July 19, Roth was in the audience as Trump spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee about “a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land.” He promised to deliver on a commitment to carry out “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Roth, a party delegate from Florida, had spent the day before dancing and laughing on the floor with other delegates, as well as shedding a few tears. “It was very emotional for me when Trump came out,” he said.

Asked a week later if the mass deportations would do harm to the agricultural industry in Florida, he responded with confidence that Trump would not actually engage in an indiscriminate mass deportation program. But even if that did happen, he said, there will always be a supply of H-2A workers waiting. “We’ll figure it out,” he said. “We’ll get more.”

Translations by Wendy Pérez, Jesús Jank Curbelo and Greta Díaz González Vázquez.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel, photography by Sofia Aldinio, special to ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Dan Meyer, the police chief in Whitewater, Wisconsin, had been worried for months about the seemingly sudden arrival of hundreds of Nicaraguan immigrants to this quiet university town. But he rarely got to hear from any of them directly; most of what he knew, he had learned from his officers.

Then one afternoon in November 2022, a man named Ariel walked into the police station.

Meyer, 35 at the time, had been trying to get a handle on what was happening since the last week of January, when his officers responded to a series of unusual incidents involving the recent immigrants: Young children found alone in an apartment while their mothers were at work. A family living in a shed in below-freezing weather. A 14-year-old girl who said her father was making her work in a factory instead of going to school.

As the year went on, police responded to a rise in calls from an apartment complex that once was filled with college students and now housed immigrant families, including some who doubled and tripled up to save on rent. Meyer and other city officials met with people all over town, including the apartment building managers, to look for ways to address overcrowding and some of the other challenges they saw the new immigrants facing.

What kept his officers busiest were the Nicaraguans driving without licenses, often without car insurance or even much driving experience. Few of them spoke English, and many had no government identification at all or handed officers fake IDs. As a result, traffic stops that should take 15 minutes stretched into hours long investigations as officers used translation apps to find out the drivers’ real identities.

In the middle of all this, Ariel showed up at the station. He had moved to Whitewater in 2020 and had been building a new life for himself and his family. He’d found a job in town sorting recycling and trash, and he brought his wife and son up from Nicaragua. They went to church, spent time with their extended family and reconnected with friends who’d also made the move from the same mountain villages to Whitewater.

Ariel, 43 at the time, was one of the licenseless drivers the chief had heard so much about. He hadn’t gotten his license because he couldn’t: While Wisconsin offers a path for asylum-seekers to get a license, Ariel didn’t have all the paperwork he needed, including his Nicaraguan passport, to apply.

He drove anyway. It seemed impossible to do everything he needed to do — get to work and his son’s school and the grocery store — without driving, and he’d mostly managed to get away with it. Ariel had only been ticketed once for driving without a license. Then, about a month earlier, he got behind the wheel after stopping at a bar for a few drinks and drove his car into a ditch.

Ariel had presented officers the fake Nicaraguan ID he’d used to get a job. It was the only one he had, as his work permit hadn’t yet arrived. His wife had gently chided him after his arrest for drunk driving, saying she hoped it would straighten him out. Then, just a few weeks later, she was run down by a 21-year-old American motorist as she tried to cross a street at night.

His work permit arrived a week or so after her death. That’s what led Ariel to take the day off that November afternoon and walk the mile from his home to the police station. He wanted to set the record straight. He hoped doing so would help him start to put life in order for him and his son.

Meyer stopped what he was doing to meet with Ariel. There was a lot he liked about running the police department in this city of about 15,000 people, but he missed talking to residents. He did his best to introduce himself to Ariel in Spanish, a language he’d tried to pick up in college but never felt comfortable speaking. He asked a bilingual county employee who works at the station to join them.

The chief listened, taken aback as Ariel apologized for showing officers a fake ID. He had been a police officer for more than 12 years and had just recently been named chief, but even he still got nervous at the sight of flashing blue and red lights in his rearview mirror. He’d felt there was a trust gap between his department and the Nicaraguans who’d been arriving in Whitewater, but here was Ariel, voluntarily walking into a police station to admit wrongdoing.

The conversation between Meyer and Ariel didn’t last much more than 15 minutes. Before he left, Ariel asked whether there was anything the chief could do to help him drive without getting in trouble. Meyer told him he needed to get a license. Ariel thanked him and walked back home to the young son he now had to care for on his own.

Meyer wondered about Ariel and what brought him to Whitewater, but he didn’t ask. He went back to work, back to trying to figure out how his officers should best respond to the town’s newest residents. And, over the next year, he talked to city council members and anybody who would listen about the challenges his short-staffed department was facing.

The chief thought about what responsibility Washington bore for what was happening in Whitewater; after all, the federal government operated the nation’s immigration system. With the encouragement of city council members, Meyer wrote a letter to President Joe Biden asking for help.

Meyer, who had spent his career in Whitewater, would be the first to say he didn’t know much about immigration, though he was trying to learn. He’d never had to pay attention to immigration policy before the Nicaraguans came to town. For one, it wasn’t his responsibility. And he knew how polarizing the issue could be.

At least he thought he did.

“President Biden,” the letter begins. “I am writing to inform you of significant challenges the City of Whitewater faces related to ongoing demographic change, and I am asking for your assistance in obtaining resources to address the situation.”

It was late December 2023. By then, the chief estimated that between 800 and 1,000 new immigrants from Nicaragua and Venezuela had settled in town. “Some are fleeing from a corrupt government, others are simply looking for a better opportunity to prosper,” he wrote. “Regardless of the individual situations, these people need resources like anyone else, and their arrival has put great strain on our existing resources.”

Meyer wrote about how officers had issued close to three times as many tickets to licenseless drivers as before. Wisconsin had long banned undocumented immigrants from getting licenses. Many Nicaraguan immigrants in Whitewater had permission to be in the country, but they didn’t have the documentation they needed to apply for a license — such as a passport and proof of an ongoing asylum case. Others couldn’t read well enough in Spanish to pass the written test.

In his letter, Meyer wrote about how language barriers, the prevalence of fake IDs and distrust between immigrants and the police made investigating cases more time-consuming. The chief said the city wasn’t focused on immigrants’ legal status. What mattered was public safety. Meyer wrote about the family found living in the shed and other incidents, including the death of an infant, sexual assaults and a kidnapping. He considered those cases serious enough to merit extra attention.

The case involving the dead infant had, in particular, left many residents shaken. A Nicaraguan woman had given birth in her trailer, and some teenagers later found the body in a field. The woman was charged with neglect leading to a child’s death and hiding the corpse.

“None of this information is shared as a means of denigrating or vilifying this group of people,” Meyer wrote. “We simply need to ensure that we can continue to properly serve this group, and the entirety of the City of Whitewater.”

Meyer asked for funding to hire more police officers and for the city to hire somebody to work directly with the new immigrants. The chief signed the letter, as did other city officials, and they sent it off. Within days, Meyer’s phone started to ring. Reporters from all over were calling for interviews. Breitbart, a conservative national media outlet, had written about how “Biden’s migrants” had “flooded” Whitewater in a story that went viral on social media.

Then former President Donald Trump picked up on it and began talking about the city at his campaign rallies in Wisconsin. His Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, “has flooded the town with an estimated 2,000 migrants from Venezuela and Nicaragua,” he said during a rally last month in Prairie du Chien, in southwestern Wisconsin. “The police say they cannot handle the surge in crime,” he added. “The town’s in big trouble.”

He described what was going on in towns like Whitewater as an “invasion,” the way he would later talk about Venezuelan street gangs taking over apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado. Both examples took kernels of truth and blew them out of proportion to inflame voters’ fears about immigration. Trump promised to “seal the border” and to conduct “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

The Biden administration, meanwhile, didn’t respond to Meyer’s letter for almost two months. When it did, officials told Meyer about a program that had sent hundreds of millions of dollars to local governments and nonprofits providing humanitarian services to new immigrants. At the time, though, none of that money was available to smaller cities like Whitewater.

Meyer hadn’t asked for mass deportations. He just wanted more resources. And he said he never intended his words to become political ammunition for anyone. “It irritates me to no end because when I hear that, I know that there’s no actual desire to fix the issue here,” he said. “It’s a desire to use it for their own political gain.”

The city and its police chief were left on their own to figure out what to do next.

There are cities and towns like Whitewater all across America, places where hundreds or thousands of new immigrants have shown up in recent years. Their arrival has divided residents, fueled resentment and spread fear about dwindling resources and rising crime, prompting local officials to ask the federal government for help providing humanitarian relief. In large cities like New York, Chicago and Denver, Venezuelan immigrants have filled homeless shelters and slept on the streets. In smaller cities like Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants became the subject of disinformation repeated by Trump and other Republicans who say the Biden administration has let too many people in.

Whitewater is a quiet, liberal city with an outsize university presence, a blue dot tucked between two red counties in a swing state. Nobody knows how many new immigrants have actually arrived, though the chief’s guess is about as good as anybody’s. Federal immigration court data shows that about 475 people with cases that were initiated since the start of 2021 have listed a Whitewater address. The vast majority are Nicaraguan, with only a handful from Venezuela. This count leaves out many immigrants, including those who came before 2021, like Ariel, and those who avoided getting caught by Border Patrol and are now undocumented, like some of Ariel’s relatives.

ProPublica reporters began visiting Whitewater in January and have returned more than a dozen times since. We’ve conducted about 100 interviews, reviewed hundreds of pages of records, and spent hours riding alongside Meyer’s patrol officers as they did their jobs. We’ve talked with many longtime Whitewater residents, including some who have gone out of their way to welcome the newcomers and others who worry that immigrant students are bringing down test scores in schools. We spoke to undocumented Mexican immigrants who settled in Whitewater three decades ago and are resentful that the Nicaraguan asylum-seekers moving into their neighborhoods have access to government privileges such as work permits and driver’s licenses — privileges that undocumented people do not have. We talked with a landlord in town who says the new immigrants are paying more in rent than his previous tenants, and we spent time at a tiny grocery store where Nicaraguans send home more than $100,000 each weekend to remote communities such as Murra, Jalapa, El Jícaro and Somoto.

Finally, we’ve interviewed more than three dozen Nicaraguans who live in Whitewater. Most arrived in the U.S. after Biden took office in 2021, crossing the border illegally between ports of entry, turning themselves in to authorities and asking for asylum. Ariel asked that we not write about his decision to emigrate to the U.S. and seek political asylum or use his full name; he worries about hurting his case and putting relatives back home at risk.

Most of the Nicaraguans we spoke to said they left their country because of a lack of economic opportunities and because it seemed like they would be allowed to enter the U.S. and would find jobs. A few said they had suffered political repression or violence at the hands of Nicaragua’s authoritarian government. Others came in undetected years earlier and had been quietly working in Wisconsin’s dairy industry before they learned of jobs in Whitewater.

And there are jobs. Steven Deller, an applied economics professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies smaller, rural communities in the state, said there have been many more job openings than unemployed Wisconsinites since the spring of 2021. “There was a real, real severe labor shortage,” he said. “A lot of employers were getting desperate.”

Enter immigrants, many of whom arrived with thousands of dollars in debts to the smugglers who shepherded them to the U.S.-Mexico border. Deller described the new immigrants as being willing to work for little money, in roles with few if any benefits, and in jobs that are “hard work, dirty work, perhaps not safe work.” And employers are happy to have them, he said. “That’s happening across the country.”

The Nicaraguans in Whitewater work at a range of food-processing facilities, factories and egg farms in and around town, places they refer to by nicknames in Spanish: “los pollos” for a meat-processing plant, “las pompas” for a rubber and plastic parts factory, “los huevos” for an egg farm. Many get hired through temporary staffing agencies. In recent decades, American factories have increasingly turned to staffing agencies to fill their jobs, an issue ProPublica has reported on. These agencies offer flexibility and can help shield companies from legal issues related to employees’ questionable immigration status or workers’ compensation claims because the agencies are the direct employer. We called companies we knew of that rely on the labor of new immigrants. Over and over, these businesses declined to talk to us or ignored our interview requests.

Not all of the newcomers in Whitewater have work permits, at least not at first. Many use fake papers to get hired. Records from traffic stops of Nicaraguan immigrants sometimes show officers discovering fraudulent IDs alongside work badges from prominent factories in town.

When Trump talks about immigration, he says immigrants are destroying communities with their “migrant crime.” But the reality in places like Whitewater is more complex. The city is not overrun with violent crime. For example, Whitewater hadn’t seen a homicide — one of the most reliable measures of violent crime — since 2016, predating the arrival of hundreds of Nicaraguan families. That changed this summer, when police arrested a University of Wisconsin, Whitewater student for the murder of another student.

“I don’t use the term ‘migrant crime,’” Meyer said. The new immigrants, he said, aren’t committing crimes at a greater rate than other Whitewater residents — and research from around the country backs him up. But police have struggled with other very real challenges tied to the arrival of so many people from another country. The new immigrants arrived in Whitewater with limited resources. They didn’t speak English. They were unfamiliar with local laws and norms. And, he said, they had no driver’s licenses and “no real opportunity to get one.”

Ariel got his first ticket for driving without a license in Whitewater in January 2022. Two relatives had come by to visit on foot in below-freezing weather. Ariel offered to drive them home in an old Chevy Trailblazer he’d bought used a few months earlier. On his way back home, Ariel found himself in a left-turn lane by mistake. He let the cars around him pass, then drove straight through the intersection.

“I didn’t know I couldn’t do that,” he said.

Ariel had come to the U.S. not knowing how to drive. He never had the opportunity to learn in his village in Murra, a province in Nicaragua’s mountainous north. Though Murra had a similar number of residents to Whitewater, life there was very different. Few people even owned cars or could use them on the winding, pockmarked roads that turned into mud in the rain.

Ariel, a farmer with a second-grade education, got around on foot and by horse or mule. He enjoyed riding around his land, about 35 acres, to survey his coffee plants, corn and beans.

He lived in a one-room adobe block house with no electricity and a growing family: Maricela, the girl with a crown of dark curls he’d fallen in love with years earlier, and their young son. Ariel and Maricela had put off a church wedding but had a long-term, common-law marriage.

Ariel left Murra in April 2019, at a moment when Nicaragua was seeing an exodus due to political repression and economic insecurity. Trump, meanwhile, was in the White House and looking for ways to deliver on campaign promises to keep immigrants out. Border Patrol agents hadn’t seen so many crossings in years, including from countries like Nicaragua that hadn’t previously sent many immigrants to the U.S. In the 2019 fiscal year, when Ariel arrived, authorities at the southern border encountered more than 13,000 Nicaraguans — nearly as many as in the previous decade.

Ariel said authorities confiscated his passport and ID and detained him for about four months in Texas. Then he was given a notice to appear at a later date in court and released on bond.

He knew where he was headed. Ariel had friends and relatives from Murra who had migrated north years earlier to work on Wisconsin dairy farms, establishing a path that would eventually make the state a top destination for Nicaraguans. Some nephews in Wisconsin bought him a bus ticket to Madison and helped him find his first dairy farm job nearby.

Ariel was comfortable working with animals but said “the work was brutal.” He milked cows and scraped away their excrement 12 hours a day, seven days a week. He worked at three farms in different parts of the state.

Then one day, early in the pandemic, he heard that factories and food-processing facilities in the Whitewater area, between Madison and Milwaukee, were hiring essential workers through staffing agencies. Unlike the farms, factories paid overtime. And Ariel needed every dollar he could get to pay back the $20,000 he’d borrowed to make the trek from Nicaragua and to bond out of detention. He also wanted to save up to bring Maricela and their son to the U.S.

In April 2020, he moved to Whitewater. He didn’t have work authorization yet; that would come later, after he found an attorney and filed for asylum. In the meantime, he used a fake work permit and fake Nicaraguan ID to get a job making $10.50 an hour sorting trash and recycling at a facility in town.

Ariel was one of the first Nicaraguans to arrive in Whitewater. As he told more and more people he knew about the job opportunities there, other Nicaraguans followed. First came one of his brothers, who had been working on a farm near Green Bay.

More family and friends arrived after Biden took office in January 2021 with the promise of a more humane approach to immigration. Border Patrol agents encountered more than 50,000 Nicaraguans at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021, nearly four times as many as the year that Ariel crossed.

That February, Ariel sent for Maricela and their 3-year-old son. He missed them. Ariel and Maricela had spent nearly every day together in Murra for years, and it had been difficult to live apart. “She did everything with me,” he said.

Maricela, then 28, had rarely left their community before — had never even visited the capital city of Managua or flown on a plane. Now she was making a two-week, 1,600-mile trek to the U.S.-Mexico border. She called Ariel along the way when she could and told him they were tired and barely eating.

They made their way across the Rio Grande on an inflatable raft, then surrendered themselves to authorities. They were quickly released. Ariel borrowed a credit card from a friend to buy them plane tickets to Milwaukee and got a ride to pick them up at the airport. Maricela appeared in the lobby, their son in her arms. The cheerful, healthy pair Ariel had known now looked exhausted and emaciated from their journey. He wept as he embraced them.

Meyer’s job as police chief is nonpartisan and unelected. He prefers it that way.

In his letter to the president, the chief had tried to focus attention on the police department’s need for resources without staking out a political position on immigration. But his message kept getting lost. It felt like every time somebody, whether on the left or the right, spoke about Whitewater, they were talking about a more extreme, exaggerated version of the city that he knew.

“You’re kind of just like holding your breath, like, ‘What are they gonna say?’” Meyer said. “Because you know there’s gonna be major blowback for us here locally, questions from the people that live here. ‘Why are these people talking about us?’”

Even before he wrote the letter to Biden, he had seen how his comments on the new immigrants in town could stir fierce criticism. It happened last November when he took part in a press conference with Republican lawmakers. At that event, officials from a local sheriff’s department said Whitewater had seen significant drug cartel activity — though Meyer was unaware of any direct connection between the Nicaraguan immigrants and cartels. It happened again a few days later when Meyer spoke to the UW Whitewater College Republicans and his picture appeared on a poster that read: “Explore the safety concerns tied to illegal immigration in our community.”

Some residents were furious, saying Meyer was highlighting isolated crimes to make immigrants look bad. Others thought he was right to raise concerns about what they believed was evidence of Biden’s failed border policies.

After his letter went viral, Meyer’s inbox filled with messages from people in Whitewater and beyond who had something to say about the newcomers in town. One Whitewater resident offered to send $500 to help pay for the immigrant liaison Meyer wanted to hire. Another said she no longer felt “safe in my own yard or even to run to Walmart.” A man who said he was a retired police officer called Meyer a “pansy ass coward chief” for asking for help “instead of telling Biden to F-OFF and close the damn border.”

Meyer tried to not take his frustrations about the political spectacle home with him. It followed him anyway. Meyer, who is married and has three children, began hearing from friends and relatives from Eau Claire, the city in western Wisconsin where he’d grown up. They had seen Whitewater in the news and were curious about what was happening and how he was doing. “Why are we hearing about Whitewater?” they’d ask him. “Are you OK?” He’d explain that Whitewater had become a hot spot for new immigrants, which presented some challenges for his department — but that they were working through it. “We’re just trying to do our job,” he said.

Liberal residents who had worked hard to promote positive stories about immigrants were disappointed that Whitewater kept showing up in the news. Kristine Zaballos, a longtime resident and UW Whitewater employee, said she wished Trump and other conservative politicians would stop spreading misinformation and see Whitewater for themselves. “I was frustrated that all of the efforts of so many people in town, all of our voices, really seemed to come to nothing,” said Zaballos, who co-founded a local food and clothing pantry called The Community Space that serves many recent immigrants.

She and other residents who were already volunteering their time to help the newcomers were motivated to do even more. Recently they worked with city officials to make videos aimed at teaching immigrants about American social norms and offering tips for living in Whitewater — from why parents should send their children to school to the difference between the recycling and trash bins.

Conservative residents were glad to hear Trump talking about their community.

“Even little old Whitewater is important to President Trump,” said Chuck Mills, who runs a local towing company.

In his opinion, the Biden administration has failed to control the border and abandoned communities like his. But Mills doesn’t believe the city is less safe because of the new immigrants, though he worried about that a few years ago. His feelings changed once he got to know his new neighbors. He went to Spanish-language church services and learned that immigrants were filling menial factory jobs he thought locals didn’t want. He liked seeing families move into his neighborhood and seeing children riding their tricycles on the sidewalk in places where he once saw drunk college students.

“I managed to get my shit together and accept them,” Mills said. “We got lucky here in Whitewater. … These people came here to work and raise their families.”

After Maricela arrived, more of Ariel’s relatives and friends followed, including his brother’s wife and their children, a sister, nephews, nieces, former teachers and neighbors. Sometimes, it felt like all of Murra had come to Whitewater.

Nicaraguan flags started appearing on apartment windows. Mexican immigrants who’d settled in the city decades earlier rented out rooms to the new arrivals. On Sunday afternoons, a few dozen men began getting together at a city park to play baseball — Nicaragua’s national sport.

Maricela found work at a few facilities in town before getting a job power washing machinery at the meat-processing plant. She worked the night shift while Ariel worked days; that way, they could switch off for their son’s care. On Sundays, they attended Spanish-language mass at St. Patrick Catholic Church.

They were building a new life together in Whitewater, though Maricela missed her family in Nicaragua. She called her mother almost daily and talked about returning one day.

Ariel took on extra shifts to make more money and pay down their debts. He got rides when he could after his first ticket for driving without a license in January 2022. He wanted to get a driver’s license, but he couldn’t even apply until he made progress on his immigration case and retrieved his Nicaraguan passport. A friend put him in touch with an attorney in Milwaukee who filed his asylum application and requested that the government return his passport.

That October, Ariel got behind the wheel after drinking at a bar with friends. He quickly realized he was drunk and decided to sleep it off at the home of some relatives nearby. As he pulled into the driveway, he drove into a ditch.

Ariel said he waited 20 minutes or so to see if another driver might stop to help him. The next vehicle that drove by was a patrol car. In a police report, an officer noted Ariel’s glassy, bloodshot eyes and the smell of beer. A Breathalyzer test found that his blood alcohol content was more than twice the legal limit.

Maricela took his arrest and tickets in stride. “Maybe this will straighten you out,” she told him.

Chastened, Ariel stayed off the road.

A few weeks later, he asked a friend for a ride to a quinceañera party that his family was invited to outside of the city. It was dark when they left the party and headed home. There are no streetlights, crosswalks or sidewalks on that stretch of road, and barely enough room for a car to squeeze onto the shoulder.

As they pulled up outside, Ariel’s friend asked if he could drop the family off on the side of the road, across from their house, instead of pulling into the driveway. “No problem,” Ariel said.

He stepped out of the car, carrying his son, who’d fallen asleep in the back seat. Maricela grabbed the booster seat and followed as Ariel started crossing the road.

At a distance, he could see headlights. A car was coming, but it looked far away. Ariel remembered telling Maricela to hurry and then feeling a whoosh and hearing a thump behind him. He reached back, but Maricela was gone. She lay on the pavement, gasping for breath. A neighbor heard Ariel’s screams.

Maricela died the next day.

Last month, Meyer watched the first debate between Trump and Harris. Meyer was curious what the candidates would say about immigration. He heard Trump repeat right-wing talking points about immigrants in another American city. The former president claimed that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs.

Meyer said he felt sorry for the people of Springfield and their leaders.

“I know how tough that is to have the spotlight on you,” he said.

He was relieved the spotlight was off Whitewater and that he could focus on doing his job. Over the summer he took a Spanish class that the city offered its municipal employees. Some of the Spanish he learned in college came back.

And he kept looking for money for his department, which has 24 sworn officers but will need another eight within the next four years, according to a recent study commissioned by the city. This spring, after he received the Biden administration’s response to his letter, he looked into federal funding for cities providing humanitarian services to new immigrants, but Whitewater wasn’t eligible. The program has since been expanded, but Meyer didn’t apply. Instead he applied for a federal community policing grant he learned about from lawmakers after his letter went viral. Last month, he learned his department would be awarded $375,000 to help cover the salaries of three additional officers.

In an interview, a senior Biden administration official said the government has done a lot to help communities receiving large numbers of new immigrants, but recognizes that the “funding that Congress has provided is really just a drop in the bucket and is not sufficient.” The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Ariel was unaware of the political controversy surrounding immigrants like him in Whitewater. He was too busy trying to keep his head above water as a sole parent. He and his son moved out of their apartment. They didn’t want to have to see the stretch of road where Maricela had gotten killed every day. The tire marks were visible for weeks.

The driver, a former UW-Whitewater student, had been drinking and smoking marijuana at a football game tailgate, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office investigation. Marijuana was later detected in his blood, but no alcohol. The man was ticketed for possession of marijuana and driving with it in his system.

A sheriff’s official said there wasn’t enough evidence to seek criminal charges in Maricela’s death, in part because she was crossing the road in dark clothes. Ariel couldn’t help but wonder if the outcome would have been different had the roles been reversed — if an immigrant like him had run over a U.S. citizen.

Since his wife’s death, Ariel has tried to stay out of trouble. But he still sometimes drove without a license. The tickets he received when he got caught have cost him thousands of dollars.

He now works at a recycling facility in Janesville, a half hour from Whitewater, and relies on a friend for a ride. He struggles to get his son, now in second grade, to school and to buy groceries. Some Sundays, they miss church when they can’t get a lift.

One morning in August, Ariel took another rare day off work and got a ride from a nephew to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Janesville. He smoked a cigarette in the parking lot. He said he was more tired than usual; his son had been sick and up all night, vomiting.

Inside the DMV, Ariel got in line and waited his turn. He finally had all the paperwork he needed to apply for a license. But he’d taken the written test in Spanish twice and failed both times. Even though he’d studied, he still had a hard time understanding the questions.

“I don’t know how to read very well,” he said. “I know the letters, but I don’t practice.”

Ariel was motioned to a computer terminal. He stared at the initial screen, unable to figure out what button he needed to press to begin. About five minutes passed before he advanced to the actual test.

A few people took seats at other terminals and completed their exams while Ariel remained at his computer, working his way through the questions for another 90 minutes.

Then the screen showed him his results. Ariel stood, walked over to his nephew and shook his head. He had failed again.

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

Mariam Elba, Jeff Ernsthausen and Mica Rosenberg contributed research.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.