When federal immigration policy hits home

In April 2022, I began reporting on immigration when thousands of migrants arrived in San Antonio speaking little English and desperate for help reaching their destinations across the U.S. Some had no idea where they were going.

Nonprofits serving immigrants were stretched thin, scrambling for resources to help the next wave of people expected to arrive. Most were asylum seekers whose cases were making their way through backlogged immigration courts. The Biden administration was fighting legal battles to lift Title 42, a pandemic-era health order that had allowed the U.S. to turn away hundreds of thousands of migrants at the border.

I went on assignment at 8 p.m. and headed to the basement of an old cathedral in downtown San Antonio, where I met a young Honduran family sleeping on cots. They were on their way to California by bus in the morning — they just needed somewhere to sleep safely for the night. Their two children, both under 3, played with donated toys, unaware of what their family had survived. They had fled gang violence in Honduras after men destroyed and burned their home to the ground.

"Here I feel that I can sleep peacefully, walk around peacefully, without fear," the father said in Spanish. "This is one story of many, and worse, you'll hear."

A month later, hundreds of thousands more migrants arrived. San Antonio asked the Department of Homeland Security to help distribute arrivals to other cities. When no help came, San Antonio used FEMA funds to open a migrant resource and operations center in July.

I covered what was happening at city hall while building sources on the ground. Outside the resource center, migrants told me nearby businesses refused to serve them, and residents drove by to yell at them and record it on their phones. Others arrived with food and clothing — valuable to people who had come with almost nothing.

Reporting from the scene, I noticed details that led me across the street, where I found a hole in a fence large enough to walk through that opened onto an abandoned lot where families with children had been sleeping. The city has established a three-day policy was pushing people onto the streets.

Days later, a source told me he had helped a woman named Perla recruit 10 people she met outside the migrant center, promising them jobs and education for their children. Those people ended up on planes to Martha's Vineyard as part of a political stunt orchestrated by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The 42 Venezuelan migrants and five children who were flown from San Antonio eventually gained a path to lawful status after a criminal investigation into the people who lured them onto the planes under false pretenses.

I explained to readers why Cubans and Venezuelans were arriving in the U.S. in record numbers — an effort to humanize people who had become a political flashpoint.

As the political landscape shifted, I investigated the asylum process in San Antonio, sat through hours of immigration court hearings and analyzed data that showed most asylum seekers would ultimately be deported — left in limbo in a backlogged system, without jobs or income while they waited.

Title 42 ended May 11, 2023. The anticipated surge never materialized the way officials feared. San Antonio received additional federal funds to continue aiding migrants and opened another holding facility at the airport in December 2023 as hundreds slept outside an overflowing resource center. It closed in April 2024.

Later, San Antonio and Catholic Charities disclosed information of thousands of migrants they had aided in order to access frozen government reimbursements for operating the centers.

Mass ICE raids began in San Antonio in January 2025 after President Donald Trump vowed mass deportations in his inaugural address. I reported on a San Antonio teacher who posted a TikTok calling on ICE to come to an elementary school — and the fear that spread through the community that followed.

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