We want our daughter — and all children — to know that Texas hasn’t always been this cruel. They deserve to know that this is their home, that they belong, and that they matter — regardless of where they were born.
As the latest election season descends on us, those of us who call the Lone Star State home are at a crossroads. I’ve been thinking a lot about this election, for myriad reasons, but I think it’s primarily because of our daughter, Izel.
From the moment she was born in Austin in 2021, her life has been political. My wife was a Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient when she gave birth to Izel, and even that fact alone means that the decisions made by elected officials in our country and state have had a massive impact on her life. Attacks on birthright citizenship from Trump and Congressional Republicans call into question the very citizenship of our daughter and countless other children born to immigrants, and the five years since she was born have made us truly question our decision to raise a daughter in Texas.
But this is our home. Texas has been home for me since I was four years old when my parents migrated from Chihuahua, Mexico and established our roots in El Paso, the city that made me who I am today. El Paso has a long history of welcoming people from all over the world, and my story is much like those millions of people who’ve come before me and who have arrived since. It’s a city that welcomed me with open arms in a state with a long history of immigrants contributing to our success, and a state that for a long time acknowledged those contributions.
During the last 12 years though, the state has descended into right-wing extremism on immigration and has become ground zero for the Trump administration’s cruel, violent and chaotic deportation agenda. And leaders in our state have fully supported, if not been at the forefront, of this inhumane agenda.
First, on DACA, the nonstop attacks on the program that my wife, and hundreds of thousands of Texans have benefited from originated in Texas. As Attorney General, Ken Paxton has been at the forefront of efforts to end DACA, not only preventing the program from expanding to new applicants, but challenging the legal foundations of the program itself, leaving even those with existing DACA in continual uncertainty. It was Paxton in 2017 who led a coalition of state officials and sent a letter to President Trump demanding that he end DACA.
My wife benefitted from DACA for more than 10 years, but Paxton’s attacks left families like ours uncertain about our future in the only country we’ve called home. And now that we’ve resettled on the border and have chosen to raise Izel here in El Paso, immigration policy is present everyday in our lives.
But Paxton’s and Gov. Greg Abbott’s obsession with attacking immigrant communities did not end with DACA. Paxton referred to birthright citizenship as “a scam that threatens national security” and has continuously supported President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to nearly every child born on U.S. soil, including undocumented immigrants. Those attacks were ultimately struck down by a Supreme Court decision earlier this year.
Paxton was also the central figure in Texas ending in-state tuition in 2025 for undocumented Texas residents, despite Texas being the first state to offer this benefit back in 2001, under then- Governor Rick Perry, a Republican. And now, undocumented Texans graduating high school next Spring will have fewer options at higher education, something that undermines the future and economy of our state.
It is also Paxton and Abbott, under the direction of President Trump and Stephen Miller, who have politicized our border region and turned it into a backdrop of chaos, only acknowledging it when it’s to push their anti-immigrant agenda or to tout new border barrier construction, including in our beloved Big Bend National Park region. They refuse to see the beauty of the border and our community.
And now here we are in 2026. Our daughter is five years old, soon to be six, a student in a public school in Texas, the daughter of two immigrants, and an American citizen living along the U.S./Mexico border. As much as we’d love to shield her from the brutal reality that is Texas politics, it’s impossible to do so when so much is at stake. It’s impossible to shield children from the reality of family separation. It’s impossible to shield them from federal agents pursuing, and even killing, immigrants on our cities’ streets, like the tragic shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston this past July.
Beyond immigration, she will now have less bodily autonomy than women before her. Her public schools will have less funding from the state as those in power seem hell-bent on ruining and defunding our public school system. She will have to grow in a Texas that is led by corrupt politicians who will sell out her clean air and water to the highest bidder, and who will attack her or her classmates for simply choosing who they want to be. Unless we make a change.
I want Izel to understand that Texas hasn’t always been this callous and cruel. Texas hasn’t always attacked the most vulnerable among us, and it doesn’t have to do that anymore. I want her to understand that her home, for as long as we choose for this to be our home, is a place where you can be welcomed, supported and loved, regardless of who you are or where you were born.
So again, we’re at a crossroads and as Texans, we have a massive opportunity in front of us. I encourage Texans to see a different path forward. A path we set together for our children that includes all of us, and doesn’t leave others behind, and doesn’t hand our children’s future to politicians who only seem to care about themselves and their power. Belonging should never be conditional, and as someone who wasn’t born here but was welcomed here, I’ve seen firsthand the Texas that we can become again.
