‘Living like Vampires’: ICE Surge Fractures Daily Life in Deep South Texas

Deep in the Rio Grande Valley, Brenda Dumas and her family are adjusting to a new normal. 

One family member, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal from the federal government, has a work permit. He has to leave from his home in Olmito, a tiny town off Highway 69 between Harlingen and Brownsville, early in the morning to head east to South Padre Island, where he works. He shows up almost two hours before his shift starts. But to go any later is to risk being pulled over by the unmarked SUVs that drive around the Laguna Madre area—the 15-square-mile coastal mini-region surrounding the eponymous salty lagoon—starting around 7 a.m., pulling over, seemingly at random, other people heading to work. 

Dumas’ husband, who is close to achieving permanent residency in the United States, starts landscaping for clients once it gets dark, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are less likely to be driving around looking for work trucks. Another family member, who also has a work permit and similarly requested anonymity, was detained by ICE in the nearby town of Port Isabel. ICE released him last week with an ankle monitor, one of more than 50,000 people the agency is tracking through the devices. Dumas now uses an app on her phone to track where family members are, and communication among them is constant. 

Since early July, ICE has arrested people daily in traffic stops throughout the Laguna Madre area—which includes Port Isabel, South Padre Island, Laguna Vista, and Laguna Heights—based on Texas Observer analysis of posts, photos and videos on social media. Like much of the Rio Grande Valley, these communities have a high population of people who were born outside of the United States. Twenty-one percent of those who live there were born in other countries, and more than half of those residents are not U.S. citizens, according to Census data. 

ICE arrested more than 46,000 people nationwide in July, which is around 3,000 more people than the agency did in June, according to internal data CBS News obtained. On July 14, the agency announced that on just one day in June it had arrested 238 people in the Rio Grande Valley, an apparent record for the Harlingen field office, which oversees the Laguna Madre area. ICE quietly took its statistics dashboard offline in July, after not updating its detention data for months. On July 20, ICE published its most recent data, showing that the agency has deported over 80 percent of the people it’s arrested since September last year. 

These arrests appear to usually occur in the early mornings or late afternoons, as people are heading to and leaving work. Dumas, who has lived in Port Isabel for most of her life, is one of several residents who are speaking out on social media against ICE arresting people in the community who do not have violent criminal histories. 

“It’s gotten that bad: People don’t want to register their children to school. They don’t want to do groceries. They don’t even want to stop by the store for their morning coffee,” Dumas told the Observer. These arrests are usually documented by a loose group of residents like Dumas who see ICE detaining people or their abandoned cars, sharing the videos and photos on social media and in group chats to warn others of the vehicles ICE agents are driving. 

In August, photos and videos showed ICE arresting a man who owns a snack shop in Laguna Heights while he and another person were painting a home. His wife was deported earlier this year. That arrest happened just hours before a protest at the Port Isabel Lighthouse, the first of four in the area since July.

The protests have had low turnout—but not necessarily for lack of support. People are afraid of leaving their homes, opting to go grocery shopping at night or asking people with U.S. citizenship, like Dumas, to drive them around. Residents have filmed ICE agents arresting people outside of restaurants and convenience stores in the area or stopping vehicles on Highway 100, which cuts through all of the Laguna Madre area. A video from August 7 acquired by the Observer shows an ICE agent knocking on the door of a home in Laguna Heights for around two minutes before leaving with other agents.

At least one restaurant in town became a drive-thru-only business for a period of time, closing its dining room to the public. A convenience store in Laguna Heights locked its doors, only unlocking them for customers.

Dumas and other Port Isabel and Laguna Heights residents the Observer spoke to describe the area as being like a “ghost town” since ICE ramped up arrests. “It’s like we live in the shadows, when we just come out when the sun sets,” Dumas said. “I feel like we’re living like vampires now.”

Port Isabel’s mayor, Martin Cantu Jr., said in a statement that he has been speaking with the area’s Democratic congressman, Vicente Gonzalez, about ICE’s arrests and wants residents to do the same. 

“I will say I personally am troubled by the potential of immigration operations to violate the civil liberties of US citizens, as well as the apparent lack of accountability shown by some immigration officers,” Cantu wrote. “It is deeply concerning to me that US citizens have reportedly been detained or roughly treated by immigration officers wearing masks, in unmarked cars. No one flashing the authority of the government should be able to do so anonymously, behind a mask.”

About Cantu’s statement, Dumas said: “It doesn’t answer our questions. It doesn’t answer our concerns.”

At least one U.S. citizen has been detained, then released, by ICE in the area. Residents report that a majority of those being arrested are people of mixed legal status that have lived in the community for years and do not have criminal records. At least one of those residents is considering leaving the area, after ICE agents were seen near one of Port Isabel’s elementary schools, according to reporting by ValleyCentral.

In Texas, thanks to the state’s 2017 “sanctuary cities” ban, local governments cannot prohibit police from cooperating with ICE. Still, Cantu said that “it is not the role of the [Port Isabel police] department to actively participate with any federal agency on the enforcement of federal laws, and this also applies to the enforcement of immigration law.” And the city does not take money from the Operation Stone Garden grant program. Under this grant, the federal government gives money or equipment to cities in exchange for help with border security. Port Isabel stopped applying for the Operation Stonegarden grant last year, according to City Manager Jared Hockema. South Padre Island and Laguna Vista still receive Operation Stonegarden grants. Cameron County, where the Laguna Madre region is, has taken money from the program in the past, spending it on off-road vehicles. 

Under the same 2017 law, Texas also requires county jails to honor ICE requests to hold inmates so the federal agency may pick them up. In 2025, Texas also passed Senate Bill 8, requiring counties that operate jails to enter into so-called 287(g) partnerships with ICE. These agreements come in three forms, and Cameron County has opted for the least extensive of these state-required partnerships, wherein sheriff’s department officers may serve immigration warrants on individuals already in jail and transport arrested individuals to ICE facilities.

Primera, a small town just northwest of Harlingen, is the only municipality in Cameron County that has a “task force” agreement with ICE—the most extensive of the three 287(g) models, which effectively deputizes trained local police officers as ICE agents. Other Rio Grande Valley towns with such agreements include Port Mansfield, Escobares, and Roma.   

All of the Valley’s four counties—Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy—also fall in either the 25-mile or 100-mile immigration enforcement zones, meaning ICE or Border Patrol agents can go on private land or board any kind of vehicle without a warrant, respectively. These agencies also employ thousands of people in Texas border communities, the Rio Grande Valley included, with high salaries and, lately, bonuses. This year and last, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, $240 billion through 2029, the most money the agency has ever had. Seventy billion of those dollars went to ICE. 

The agencies have significant economic and political power in the Valley, which partially explains why few of the Valley’s elected officials have spoken out about ICE detaining people in their communities, compared to places like Minneapolis and Chicago. Texas state government is also supportive of Trump’s deportation agenda and has spent years attacking localities who try to protect undocumented immigrants.

“The political climate at the state house in St. Paul[, Minnesota] and Austin actually does affect the starting point for political responses by local elected officials; that also sets the limits of the legal options that are available,” César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a Professor of Law at Ohio State University who studies the criminalization of migration, told the Observer. “The Texas Legislature has been extremely proactive in the last 10 years or so in flexing the economic might of Texas, to help make the state as unwelcoming for migrants as possible.”

In 2023, Texas also passed a law that allowed state police to arrest people for illegally crossing into the state from Mexico and permitted judges to issue deportation orders, even if they aren’t trained in immigration law. After several lawsuits, the law, which the ACLU calls “unconstitutional,” took effect in May. 

Still, in some parts of the state, resistance to ICE overreach may be growing: Prosecutors around the country are organizing to support each other in case they bring formal charges against ICE, including the Travis and Dallas County district attorneys. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare is investigating ICE shooting and killing Lorenzo Salgado Araujo last month in Houston. 

In Austin, Congressman Greg Casar and local elected officials spoke against ICE raids on the north side of town, two days after ICE arrested a person going to a food bank at a church. Casar said he submitted a formal inquiry to the Department of Homeland Security about ICE’s activity in the area and how much it’s costing taxpayers, and he told the agency on social media to “get the hell out of Austin.”

At least one local police officer, in Laguna Vista, created a report in response to a resident calling 911 because of ICE potentially breaking the law, as the Observer reported in July. The Observer filed a records request for the police report and has not received a response from the town. Emails, calls, and texts requesting an update after the state-mandated 10-day deadline went unanswered. 

In the Valley, business owners have arguably been more vocal than local elected officials. The South Texas Builders Association has drawn significant attention to a critical shortage of labor to build homes in the region. At least one social media post shows ICE detaining people near homes under construction in Laguna Heights, but most of the people the agency is taking appear to be from vehicle stops or are targeted once already in jail. When asked for more information about how ICE was determining the people it was arresting, a spokesperson sent the Observer a list of four people ICE said were in the country illegally and had committed serious crimes in Texas. The agency did not answer any of the Observer’s questions. 

The Laguna Madre area, where thousands of tourists gather year-round to stay in hotels and eat at restaurants, would not function without the labor provided by people who were not born in the United States, who make up large portions of the population in Port Isabel and Laguna Heights. Some of those people include Dumas’ family, who no longer feel safe in the community they’ve called home for years.

“I’m tired of him having to hide like he’s a criminal,” Dumas said of her husband. “It feels like he’s being kept hostage for something that he didn’t do.”

The region was likely the first to experience ICE killing someone during the second Trump administration. A Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) agent, which is a part of ICE, shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez, a 21-year-old man from San Antonio, on South Padre Island last March. The agency alleged Martinez ran over the agent and that the agent shot him in response, but body camera footage and subsequent reporting by the Texas Tribune contradicts this.

Congressman Gonzalez was the lone elected official from the Rio Grande Valley that the Observer could find publicly commenting on the shooting. In a statement to the Observer, Gonzalez said he was “soon” filing legislation that would “allow small businesses to sponsor undocumented workers who have been in the country for at least five years and have no criminal record.” Congress has to do its part to “rein ICE in,” he also wrote.

“The reality is that America relies on undocumented workers to do many important and difficult jobs that most Americans will not do themselves, like building homes, harvesting crops, and commercial shrimping,” Gonzalez’s statement continues. “Without this workforce, everyday costs for American families and businesses continue to surge.”

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García Hernández, the Ohio professor, who is from the Rio Grande Valley, said that while federal immigration enforcement has an outsized presence now, economic and political conditions change, and elected officials need to keep this in mind as communities call on them for help. 

“I would hope that elected officials in the Valley view their positions as being something that they believe in, rather than something that they have inherited and is a foregone conclusion,” he said. “That would be the opposite of leadership, and I would hope that residents of the Valley would expect more of their elected officials.”

ICE appears to continue arresting people in the area daily. On local Facebook groups, people dismiss residents like Dumas who are worried that ICE is stopping and arresting people regardless of their legal status in the United States.

“People do not believe us. They’re just like, ‘If you’re here legally, you don’t have to be scared.’ And it’s like, ‘Yes, you do.’” Dumas said. “They really think that the ICE agents and the administration in general, [that] they’re doing things correctly, and they’re really not.”