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. 

“It’s like we live in the shadows, when we just come out when the sun sets.”

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.

ICE agents arresting a person on July 15 outside of a Stripes convenience store on Musina Street in Port Isabel (Source: Facebook)

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.”

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.” 

The post ‘Living like Vampires’: ICE Surge Fractures Daily Life in Deep South Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The first time I heard of Alejandra Driskell was in 2014, when the Texas Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit in Bexar County accusing her of practicing immigration law without a license.

The assistant attorney general who’d filed the lawsuit against Driskell, her then-husband, and others was kind enough to include in the public record hundreds of pages of depositions that outlined in great detail the shady side of San Antonio’s immigration law community. The depositions described her first operating as what’s called  a “case runner,” someone who illegally solicits clients for a lawyer. Driskell worked at several law firms over two years, per the depositions, and was particularly active at the South Texas ICE Processing Center, a privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Pearsall where nearly 2,000 people are held in warehouse-like barracks. One attorney paid her a $400 weekly stipend plus a $50 bonus for every client she brought in, according to her own deposition. Another paid her a third of whatever fee the client paid, she testified.

The nearly 300 pages of depositions also had lurid details of office romance and infidelity. More relevant to the state’s case was testimony that Driskell, a short woman with dark hair that she occasionally lightens and who also goes by Alejandra Alvarez de Dyer, launched in late 2013 a more brazen plan to make money. A native of Mexico who testified that she earned advanced degrees in education there, Driskell chafed under lawyers she described as “lazy,” leaving most of the legal work to subordinates like her. On some days, she was in Pearsall by 7 a.m. On others, she was flying to meet with clients at detention centers in Louisiana, New Mexico, Washington, and Virginia. Her relationship with one of the lawyers had gotten particularly toxic, too. Both were married, yet their relationship had become “intimate,” according to the lawyer’s deposition, and culminated in a fist fight at a San Antonio steakhouse chain between that lawyer and a patron who was mocking Driskell. The lawyer went to the hospital, and their work and personal relationships unraveled. In his deposition, the lawyer testified that—after one of his clients claimed that Driskell had coached the client on how to make an asylum claim—Driskell told the immigrant’s family he’d go to jail if he told ICE she’d had him lie. 

Driskell said she kept getting calls from immigrants who needed representation. So, Driskell said in her deposition, she and her husband decided to start their own law office, though neither was a lawyer. Instead of relying on referral fees, they would run the business and pocket the profits. “The model was to hire the two attorneys, to have two legal assistants and then I’ll be the office manager to supervise all the work from the legals and supervision of the attorneys,” she told an assistant attorney general in 2014. Driskell hired one lawyer for $30,000 or $45,000 a year, though the depositions are unclear on the exact amount.

That same year, the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division, which, as its name suggests, is tasked with filing lawsuits against people who take advantage of commercial consumers in Texas, started receiving complaints about Driskell from immigrants and their families as far away as Virginia and Massachusetts. The complainants told various versions of a similar story. They’d paid Driskell to represent a family member in detention thinking she was a lawyer. Driskell accepted their money and responded to their inquiries for a while, ultimately ghosting them. One man said he paid Driskell $2,700 to represent his brother. She didn’t show up to court, and his brother was deported in August 2014, the complaint said.

In October 2014, the AG’s office filed a lawsuit accusing Driskell and several people who worked with her of violating the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. In Texas, only attorneys can own a law office, but the lawsuit alleged that, though they weren’t lawyers, Driskell and her then-husband owned and operated the firm, collected fees from clients, stayed in business after the attorney they’d hired left, and forged that lawyer’s signature on paperwork. 

Only attorneys or professionals known as accredited representatives, non-lawyers who work for nonprofits and have authorization from the Justice Department to represent immigrants, can offer legal services to immigrants in Texas. Driskell is not an attorney or an accredited representative, but the lawsuit alleged she charged immigrants for legal advice. 

The following month, I wrote a story detailing the allegations for the San Antonio Express-News. In 2016, a state district judge barred Driskell from “providing  immigration services” and “harassing or threatening consumers with deportation or other legal action,” among other things. At least three lawyers she’d worked with were eventually disbarred; one of them was later arrested and accused of impersonating an attorney.

I didn’t hear Driskell’s name again until June 2024, when the Express-News passed on to me a voicemail from a New Yorker named Caitlin Cavalletto. Cavalletto, who had lived in Ecuador, said family friends from that country had paid someone named Alejandra Driskell, who also went by Alejandra Alvarez, thousands of dollars; the family friend later sent me screenshots of bank transfers to prove it. Driskell was supposed to represent a teenager from Ecuador who had come to the United States seeking asylum and was being detained in Colorado. When he had a bond hearing in immigration court, Driskell didn’t show up, and he had to navigate the process alone, the young man later told me. Cavalletto’s family friends said they believed Driskell was an attorney, though in the screenshots of their communications they shared with me, she’s careful not to identify herself as one. The closest she comes is, when Cavalletto asked her to “confirm your authorization to practice law,” Driskell responded: “It’s in California.” The California Secretary of State’s Website shows Driskell runs an immigration consulting company (California, unlike Texas, allows consultants who are neither lawyers nor accredited representatives to charge for help preparing some immigration forms, but they can’t offer legal advice.)

When I showed up at Driskell’s apartment that July in an aging, sprawling complex in northwest San Antonio and asked her about the allegations, she said she didn’t know what I was talking about. But the next day, she threatened to sue Cavalletto. “You already started a war,” Driskell wrote, according to a screenshot Cavalletto shared with me.

I wrote another story for the Express-News. At the time, University of Texas law professor Mike Golden told me that if the AG’s Office had evidence Driskell violated the 2016 order barring her from providing immigration services, the state could ask the court that oversaw her case to hold her in contempt. But Golden cautioned it’s unlikely the AG would care much about fraud happening outside of Texas.

Then, on Christmas Eve last year, I received another communication about Driskell. A construction supervisor from Massachusetts named Luis Santana emailed me that he’d paid Driskell $4,000 to represent a friend who’d requested asylum and been detained in Pearsall. Driskell had done nothing to help his friend, who’d ultimately been deported, Santana said.

When I spoke to the friend, Endrina Gabriela Ramírez Reinoza, over the phone earlier this year, she was back in her home country of Venezuela. Ramírez told me she crossed the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass last fall and requested asylum when she encountered Border Patrol agents. This is borne out by federal court records, which show she was arrested near Eagle Pass in mid-October and prosecuted in Del Rio on the misdemeanor charge of illegal entry. A judge sentenced her to time served on October 22, according to the records, and Ramírez told me she was then transferred to Pearsall. She sent me a picture of paperwork showing she went through orientation at the detention center on October 24.

According to Ramírez, in Pearsall she had no idea how to contact a lawyer to pursue her asylum claim, and another detainee referred her to Driskell.

“Those were the only options I had,” Ramírez said in Spanish. “A personal recommendation or someone telling me, ‘Hey, this person can help you.’ Because, as you can understand, I had no means of communication other than what [the detention center] provided. And being new or just arriving in the United States, I didn’t know how the system worked there.”

Ramírez told me she called Driskell from the detention center and explained that she was fleeing Venezuela and wanted to make an asylum claim in the United States. Several days later, she said, Driskell came to meet with her. They conversed through telephones with glass between them. I sent Ramírez the picture of Driskell from the California Secretary of State’s website, and she told me that was the person she met in Pearsall. “She introduced herself to me as Alejandra Driskell, immigration attorney,” Ramírez said. Later, Ramírez clarified that the woman she met in the detention center introduced herself as Alejandra Alvarez. But later, when they communicated via text on one of the tablets the detention center provides, Ramírez said the woman used the name Alejandra Driskell.

She told me Driskell explained how to get a bond, and promised to contact ICE to see if Ramírez was eligible for release, but warned she could spend six months to a year in detention.

“She offered me many words of encouragement, truly very comforting ones,” Ramírez said. “But that was the only time I saw her.”

Santana, Ramírez’s friend, sent me screenshots of bank transfers showing that in early November he gave Driskell a total of $4,000. The screenshots also show him and Driskell discussing Ramírez’s case and Santana sending Driskell records she requested. Driskell does not refer to herself as a lawyer in any of the messages he sent me, but she does refer repeatedly to “my paralegal.” Santana told me he didn’t see any red flags. “Through all of this, she was calm, collected, really cool,” he said. “She responded to my text messages.” Santana told me he agreed to pay Driskell and Ramírez promised to pay him back if she received asylum.

Several days after her meeting with Driskell, Ramírez told me, ICE transported her to El Paso to prepare her for deportation (she sent me a picture of a notice, in English, dated November 11 that she’d be transferred to the notorious Camp East Montana). As she boarded her deportation flight in El Paso, Ramírez said, she asked about her asylum claim.

“I spoke with some ICE agents, and they checked the system and explained that my paperwork hadn’t been submitted,” she said, “and that I had to be deported because I was already in the system, that I had no legal representation, I had nothing, it was like an empty file. And I was left with no choice other than to board the plane and come here.”

I asked Ramírez what her reaction was. “That the lawyer lied to me, let me down … or failed to deliver on her promises,” she responded.

In an attempt to reach Driskell for this story, I called the phone number Cavalletto, Santana, and Ramírez told me they used to communicate with her in July and left a voicemail. I never heard back, and when I called again in August, the voicemail inbox was full. I also sent the number a text message and a message on WhatsApp, the messaging application Cavalletto, Santana, and Ramírez said she used to communicate with them, and I left a voicemail with a San Antonio phone number an online people search said was associated with Driskell. She didn’t respond, nor did she respond to my attempt to reach her through her apparent LinkedIn page. 

Paxton (AP; Texas Observer)

After her deportation, Ramírez said, she was detained by Venezuelan officials for several days, then released. Screenshots of text exchanges she and Santana shared with me show them pressing Driskell to refund the fees. At first, Driskell seemed to be amenable, but the messages soon got testy. Santana told me that Driskell offered to connect him with a smuggler to bring Ramírez back to the United States. “[Ramírez] and I discussed that,” he said. “But we didn’t want to do that. All we wanted was for her to refund the money.”

In one exchange that they shared with me, after Santana threatened to sue her, Driskell wrote: “Remember that doing business with organized crime smugglers is a criminal offense.”

So I set out to write this story. But now, I wanted to better understand how someone like Driskell is allowed to continue operating. The texts Cavalletto, Ramírez, and Santana had sent me and the disclosure from the California Secretary of State raised questions about whether Driskell was complying with the 2016 judge’s order. And the AG’s office knew about the 2024 allegations—I’d emailed them questions before I published my second story. Was anyone doing anything?

The first thing I did was check the docket of the old Bexar County case for any new activity. No new filings since 2016. When he was attorney general himself, Governor Greg Abbott had a reputation for aggressively combating immigration fraud (in a 2012 op-ed warning about the dangers of immigration fraud, he boasted, “Since 2002, my office has shut down two dozen fraudulent ‘immigration consulting’ operations.”) I’d been told his successor, Ken Paxton, has little interest in that sort of case. The Attorney General’s Office had ignored my questions when I wrote about Driskell two years ago, so I filed a request under the Texas Public Information Act for a list of every lawsuit filed by the Consumer Protection Division going back more than a decade. By poring through court records and press releases related to the more than 400 consumer protection suits the office filed since 2014, I identified about 30 against people accused of defrauding immigrants.

In 2014, Abbott’s last full year as attorney general, the office filed 11 lawsuits against people accused of defrauding immigrants, according to the records. Paxton took office the following year, and his attorneys filed five new lawsuits and asked judges to hold in contempt the defendants in two previous cases who had allegedly violated orders similar to the one against Driskell. In 2016, the office filed four such suits.

Many of the lawsuits were about what’s called “notario fraud.” In parts of Latin America, including Mexico, a notario público is a special designation for a licensed attorney. In Texas, an identically named notary public witnesses the signing of certain documents and administers oaths. The confusion over the difference has created an opportunity in Texas for notaries public to pose as attorneys or consultants who can help people with their immigration proceedings. State law prohibits notaries public from using the Spanish term in advertising.

Some of the allegations, among the AG’s decade-old filings, described more sinister schemes. “Arrange fake marriages and fix the paperwork,” read an advertisement cited in a 2014 case against an Austin woman accused of offering immigration services without a law license. A lawyer with offices across the state was accused in 2015 of encouraging immigrants who had lived in the United States for years to file frivolous asylum claims so they could apply for work permits while their cases dragged on, without telling them that they could face deportation when their doomed applications were rejected. And of course there was Driskell’s tawdry saga.

Then the numbers started to decline. In 2017 and ’18, the office filed two new immigration fraud lawsuits each year, as well as one motion for sanctions in 2018 against a notary who’d previously been ordered to stop providing immigration services. In 2019, the office filed four cases. In the nearly seven years since, according to the data the office provided me in August, it has filed a total of two immigration fraud cases. One was a 2023 lawsuit against an El Paso notary whom the AG’s office alleged “targets Spanish-speaking consumers with limited resources who do not understand the legal system in the United States.” And the other was filed this year against a North Texas notary who, state lawyers alleged, charged immigrants for help filling out forms. Though the notary provided documents identifying her as a lawyer in Venezuela and took classes from a company in Florida that teaches people how to prepare immigration forms (like California, Florida permits laypeople to assist in filling out some paperwork), she was not allowed to offer those services in Texas, the lawsuit alleges.  

“The Attorney General’s office in Texas is supposed to do this,” said Michelle Méndez, the legal director at the National Immigration Project, referring to the policing of scams that target immigrants. “They did it for a while. Now they’re not enforcing these laws and protecting people.”

Méndez said that letting fraudsters go unpunished doesn’t just impact immigrant communities. “It’s just a matter of time before those fraud schemes reach any one of us,” she said.

I asked Méndez to review the most recent lawsuit by the Texas Attorney General, and she said that, though it includes Trump Administration talking points—unlike previous lawsuits, the one filed this year cites the restrictionist organization the Federation for American Immigration Reform and goes on at length about allegations of fraud in a Biden-era parole program Trump canceled last year—“the aim of the complaint is noble, and hopefully we will see Texas and other states pursue more cases of unauthorized practice of law, especially those where noncitizens were deprived of property or liberty, just as Driskell’s victims were.”

As before, Paxton’s office did not respond to my questions for this story.

Illustrating how aggressive the AG’s office once was in cases of alleged fraud against immigrants, Méndez said that after the office’s 2014 lawsuit against Driskell, state lawyers contacted her—then working for another organization—looking for a nonprofit to replace Driskell as the guarantor on immigrants’ bonds to ensure the money went back to the people who’d paid. Court records also show that Texas attorneys intervened in Driskell’s bankruptcy proceedings, trying to ensure that immigrants who hired her were included as creditors.

“I think that just showed the thoroughness of the prior campaign by [the AG’s] Office,” Anne Schaufele, now the co-director of the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic at the University of the District of Colombia, said. She helped prepare some of the 2014 complaints against Driskell after people who’d hired the Texan approached the nonprofit legal provider where Shaufele worked at the time. “It’s just so gutting,” she told me when I called her earlier this year. “Especially when folks are already in some of the worst chapters of their lives.”

In recent years, as state and federal officials have implemented harsher anti-immigration policies, Schaufele said, immigration scams are often going unpunished. ProPublica recently reported that the number of immigration scams reported to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has doubled since President Donald Trump returned to office. The schemes have also gotten more complex. ProPublica detailed a case involving fake hearings via video to bilk money from an immigrant who was deported after she reported the fraud to ICE. (After the news organization’s report, the Department of Homeland Security said it was “declaring an all-out war” on immigration scams.)

“I think it comes as no surprise that in the state of Texas there’s been a shifting of priorities in such a way that certain crimes just aren’t litigated anymore, certain civil violations are just being ignored because of who the victims are,” Schaufele said.

I noted that the AG’s Office also gave me records that showed, in contrast to the FTC, the number of complaints about immigration fraud it had received has declined in recent years. Schaufele said that, in Texas—where the state police are extensively involved in deportation efforts, Abbott has ordered hospitals to collect patients’ immigration status, and Paxton has tried to use the Consumer Protection Division to shut down nonprofits that provide services to immigrants—people are likely afraid to come forward. The state “has weaponized every possible agency to go after undocumented immigrants,” she said.

I also wondered why Driskell keeps reportedly getting access to detention centers. According to the state’s 2014 lawsuit against her, ICE banned Driskell from its detention centers more than a decade ago after the lawyer she’d had the messy falling out with accused her of “criminal activity” related to her case running. If she’d been allowed to visit the South Texas ICE Processing Center last year, as Ramírez told me, why was someone who’d been sued by the state, previously banned from the detention center, and ordered to stop providing immigration services allowed to visit detainees?

So I asked ICE and the GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the Pearsall detention center, if Driskell had visited Ramírez and what their policies are about access to detention centers for someone who’s been accused of immigration fraud. GEO referred me to ICE and wouldn’t tell me if it has a policy. ICE told me to file a request under the federal Freedom of Information Act, which it then refused to fulfill.

Before publishing this piece, I called Cavalletto, the New Yorker who’d tipped me off about her Ecuadorean family friends who said they’d been ripped off by Driskell. Cavalletto said that after my story ran in 2024, she was contacted by investigators from ICE’s criminal division. An agent in Texas and a government attorney called her in late 2024, Cavalletto said, and seemed serious about investigating Driskell. “I asked, ‘Are you sure you’re going to do that?’ because it was just before Trump was in office,” she told me. The agent responded that she might have a point, Cavalletto said, but he still made plans to fly to New York to interview her. “And he just ghosted and didn’t follow through.”

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Texas is in a state of fiscal crisis. Or, at least many of its school districts and municipalities are. All across Texas, from the biggest urban ISDs and metros to the smallest towns and exurban counties, local governmental bodies are feeling the increasingly painful fiscal pinch—and resorting to rigid austerity measures. 

The state’s 10 largest school districts, from Houston and Dallas to Austin and El Paso—collectively charged with educating a near-majority of Texas public school students—have all projected or enacted budgets that have them in a fiscal deficit. This is driven (in addition to factors like declining enrollment and property values) by an inadequately significant bump to the basic allotment of school funding last legislative session, as that funding has fast been consumed by inflation-fueled cost increases. Many districts across the state have been forced to close numerous neighborhood schools to alleviate the current strain. 

Austin Independent School District (ISD) had a roughly $181 million deficit projection that it’s trying to close with staff cuts, campus closures, and a litany of other downsizing measures. Dallas ISD has a $108 million budget deficit; Houston ISD $25 million; neighboring Cy-Fair ISD about $80 million. A spring survey by the Texas Association of School Business Officials found that over 70 percent of surveyed districts would need to make budget cuts and that 44 percent would end the year still in a deficit. 

Some of the largest cities and counties in Texas are also facing dire funding gaps. For instance, the City of Dallas is facing a $30 million budget shortfall and recently furloughed more than 4,000 municipal workers. Harris County, the state’s largest population center, is facing a “structural deficit” of $130 million, which could reach as high as $800 million by decade’s end. 

Cities and counties are between a rock and a hard place, as they’ve lost the healthy cushion of COVID-era emergency funds, which helped maintain and expand services, at the same time that they’ve become severely limited by the state government in how much revenue they can raise through property taxes. Sales tax revenues, once sky-high during the pandemic era, have also come back down to earth. While population growth continues to surge across Texas, local governments can’t keep up with the growing cost of payroll and supplies. In some cities like Dallas, their revenue bases are also under threat, as major corporate employers threaten to flee downtowns for the surrounding suburbs. 

This fiscal storm isn’t limited to localities, and it’s animating some of the marquee races on the ballot in November, namely the gubernatorial contest. 

Governor Greg Abbott, who is seeking an unprecedented fourth term in office after having led the state now for nearly a dozen years, would have you blame all those local fiscal crises on the tax-and-spend libs who preside over those big, bloated school districts and cities, just as he’d have you blame those entities for the persistent local property tax crisis. (There’s certainly plenty of blame and accountability to go around for local leaders, but the broader forces responsible for their fiscal realities are mostly out of their hands.) 

This is coming from a man who has perennially campaigned on promises to provide property tax relief to the burdened masses—via iterative state “buydowns” of local property taxes, which have now reached a cumulative cost of over $50 billion—and to variously handcuff localities’ ability to use their taxing power to maintain and expand operations. It’s part of a larger ideological project by the Texas GOP to make these local entities inert wards of the state government. (See, relatedly: the right’s persistent attempts to ban “taxpayer-funded” lobbying at the Lege, which would effectively prohibit professional representation of cities, counties, and ISDs in lobby-dominated Austin.) 

Of course, Abbott’s 2026 reelection bid is no different. Back in June, the governor held an event in Houston to roll out his most expansive property tax policy plan yet—one that goes squarely after the big blue cities of Texas. His plan includes components to require localities to get a nearly impossible two-thirds majority approval for tax rate hikes and to initiate a constitutional amendment that would effectively eliminate school property taxes. 

This would be an extremely heavy lift, even for a Texas Legislature that is increasingly under his thumb. But that new taxation system would also require the so-called Texas Miracle—unregulated, uninhibited economic growth—to stay white-hot for eternity. (Awkwardly, that economic aspiration has become increasingly untenable politically; see: Abbott’s embrace of the data center boom followed months later by his abrupt 180-turn to rein in development.) 

Further still, it’s not even clear that there will be enough money in the banana stand to cover (or just maintain) the cost of further property tax buydowns. The Big Three—Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and House Speaker Dustin Burrows—recently issued a letter to state agencies ordering them to prepare for 3 percent program cuts across the board (with the only exceptions being public ed funding and the shiny new private voucher program). 

There are also rumors around Austin that if Don Huffines, Abbott’s onetime nemesis who then won the GOP comptroller primary against the governor’s ally, becomes the next comptroller, he’ll bring an end to the halcyon days of bursting state surpluses by releasing a significantly more austere biennial revenue estimate, the blueprint on which state budgets are built. With ample surpluses, the state has built up its rainy day fund to record highs, at about $25 billion as of last year. Rosy revenue estimates have also lubricated recent sessions with an aura of abundance, as illustrated by the Lege handing out billions for new programs like private school vouchers, pro-Texas film tax incentives, dementia research, and so on. 

Abbott in 2023 (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Abbott made a point of trying to appease Huffines by getting his preferred candidate (and appointed comptroller), Kelly Hancock, who was demolished by Huffines in the primary, to resign early so Abbott could put Huffines in his place, making him the de facto incumbent heading into the general election against state Senator Sarah Eckhardt, an Austin Dem. 

Meanwhile, Democrats have been trying to turn fiscal crises in Texas into a useful campaign cudgel. For her part, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa has said that it’s time for Texas to stop hoarding excess taxpayer money and give it back to the people—in this case, calling for a $1,500 check to every Texas household. It’s a charmingly simple populist method, one that President Trump has wielded in the past and perhaps one that might force Abbott onto his back foot. 

Eckhardt, for her part, noted to the Texan over the summer that the state could pay off every single ISD’s budget deficit, “and we would still have roughly $24 billion in that reserve.”

Regardless of the outcomes in November, neither of those policy proposals is very likely to come to fruition. But, especially if Democrats enjoy anything like the sort of surge projected in the Texas House and beyond, Abbott’s expansive anti-city property tax “reform” isn’t either. 

If that’s the case, we could see Republican majorities at the Capitol respond similarly to how they did back in 2019, after losing more than a dozen legislative seats, when they narrowed their political focus to the meat and potatoes of overhauling state public education funding (well, kinda) and property tax reform. Perhaps then, local governments and school districts would get some real help—rather than just operating at the middle of the blast radius.  

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