Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy, and give us feedback.Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. HOUSTON — At a Pentecostal church in a shopping center just north of the city, the pastor called the children toward the pulpit for a Mother’s Day blessing. Brothers Isaac, 12, and Jeremiah Avila, 10, stepped forward holding cards they made for their mother, Margarita. Their smiles vanished as the mothers approached to hug and kiss their children — no one came for them. Seeing their faces, the oldest sister, Lisbet Avila, swept in to escort the boys back to their seats. Next to them, their father, José Avila, 54, kneeled as if to pray, but instead cried into his hands. Isaac pulled his button-down shirt over his face, hiding his red, tear-stained eyes. Jeremiah crumpled his card, which bore a note written in Spanish in his child’s scrawl: “Mother, I love you, and thank you for having me.” He leaned against his other sister, 27-year-old Ester Avila, who hugged him as she wiped her tears away. It was the first time any of them could remember Margarita missing a Mother’s Day. She had been sitting in a cell in an immigrant detention center since March as the Trump administration was preparing to deport her to Belize, where she left two decades ago because of threats to her family. “It’s really hard to see everything my wife is going through,” José said. “It hurts not being able to be with my wife — and seeing my kids sad — because their mother is always around.” Margarita with her sons Issac (left) and Jeremiah (right) in happier times. Photo courtesy of the Avila family Margarita Avila, 50, is among the tens of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. targeted for deportation in President Donald Trump’s second term. Trump has said his administration is going after “the worst of the worst” in an attempt to deport 1 million immigrants annually. But six months into Trump’s second administration, at least 70% of the more than 56,000 immigrants detained across the country didn’t have a criminal record, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes federal government data. Margarita requested asylum in the U.S. more than a decade ago and her case has been pending ever since. Meanwhile, she and José have grown their family in Texas, and like many other immigrants, they have put down deep roots. They bought a house in Houston’s Independence Heights neighborhood, started a landscaping business that grew to hundreds of customers, and had five U.S.-born sons who are American citizens. But on March 12, their fortunes changed. According to a police report, Margarita was cutting weeds in a residential area in Spring, about 10 feet from a postal worker who was delivering to a community mailbox and asked Margarita to turn off the weed eater until she finished. Margarita couldn’t hear her over the machine, the police report says, so the postal worker yelled to get her attention. The worker, who claimed Margarita hit her with the weed eater, called the police. When Margarita produced a Belize identification card, the deputy took her to jail on suspicion of assault — a charge that was later dropped. But it was too late — within a day, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plucked her from the Harris County Jail. As her family celebrated Mother’s Day without her, Margarita pondered whether to fight her deportation order and stay in the detention center cell for months, or sign her voluntary deportation papers and be sent thousands of miles away from her children and husband. Because of their various immigration statuses — some undocumented, some pending asylum, some U.S. citizens — Margarita’s deportation would make it difficult and in some cases impossible to see her close-knit family. Her husband would have to decide whether to stay in the U.S. with their two youngest children or follow his wife to Belize so they can raise the boys together in a country Isaac and Jeremiah have never known. For the oldest children born in Belize, it could mean not seeing their mother for years because they don’t have permanent legal status. “I feel like I’m in a lose-lose situation because if she’s deported, I can’t visit her because I wouldn’t be able to come back,” said Lisbet, 31, who has three children and can’t easily travel outside of the U.S. because of her temporary protected status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “I have my own family here to think about.” Lisbet Avila, the oldest of Margarita’s nine children, buys breakfast at a local store in May. They are a mixed-status family in which everyone has different immigration statuses. Lexi Parra The Avila grandchildren build a Jenga version of the detention facility where their grandmother, Margarita, was being held in May. Lexi Parra Lisbet Avila holds her daughter, Aubrey, while playing at the pool in May. Lexi Parra At the same time, the conditions in the detention center were eroding Margarita’s will. The watery, undercooked food sometimes smelled rotten, she said, and she was only given Advil for the pain that emerged in her belly. She later learned it was Hepatitis B, a viral infection affecting the liver that she suspects she contracted in the detention center. “The medical treatment was so bad that there were two days when I couldn’t even get out of bed,” Margarita said, recounting one week when she had a fever and began vomiting. After three days the staff sent her to a hospital for treatment before returning her to a cell. Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, the company that runs the Houston Processing Center where ICE placed Margarita, said the company provides “nutritious meals” and holds itself to high standards while housing immigrants. “Our staff are trained and held to the highest ethical standards as part of our commitment to our Human Rights Policy. ICE also employs a Detention Standard Compliance Officer to ensure we adhere to their strict standards and policies,” Gustin said in a statement. David Paz, Margarita’s immigration lawyer, said that before Trump returned to office, a situation like Margarita’s — a minor criminal charge that was later dropped — would typically lead to release from ICE custody, Paz said. But not anymore. “It’s become harder to help people in her situation,” Paz said from his downtown Houston office. An American dream José remembers when he first saw Margarita. He was 16, she was 13. “She was very beautiful,” José said. “Not just was, but is still beautiful.” He was drawn to her sincerity and how close she was with her family. She lived next door to his family in Belize. They dated for four years before marrying. He told her he wanted to have 12 children, and they soon had four: Lisbet, Abigail, Ester and José Jr. José supported them by working as a fisherman, maintaining an agricultural jet and importing snacks such as chips and cookies from Mexico, selling them to local businesses and street vendors. During his travels, he had left the Catholic Church for Pentecostalism, and he launched a church in their town. In 1998, the family went to a nearby lake for an outing, and one of Margarita’s cousins began playing too roughly with the Avila daughters. When José stepped in to defend the girls, he said the argument turned into a physical fight that ended with José whacking the cousin across the head with a boat paddle. The cousin didn’t forget the humiliation, and when he later joined a local gang, José and Margarita began receiving notes threatening to kill them. Later that year, the Avilas fled the country for their safety and applied for tourist visas in the U.S., settling in Houston. José began to work for a landscaping company and bought a house. When their visas expired, the Avilas stayed in Texas. The family kept growing. Eliseo was the first child born in the U.S. Then came Elias and David. In 2012, José was in a car accident, and because he didn’t have a driver’s license, he was arrested and eventually deported. Margarita and the children — except for Lisbet, who was 18 and taking care of her firstborn— returned to Belize to reunite with José, who went back to Margarita’s hometown. At first, everything seemed peaceful. But one day, someone delivered a note to their house demanding $10,000 — and threatening to kidnap one of their daughters if they didn’t pay. Six months after they had returned to Belize, José traveled through Central America and Mexico and crossed the Texas-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, where he surrendered and requested asylum. When José told a judge that he’d be harmed or killed if he returned to Belize, the judge rejected his asylum request but granted him withholding of removal, which prevents the U.S. government from deporting someone to a home country where they could face persecution or torture. José couldn’t get a green card or apply for U.S. citizenship, but the new status let him get a work permit as long as he checked with ICE agents once a year. José then sent for his wife and children, who made the same journey and turned themselves into U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley and requested asylum as well. Margarita received a deportation order for entering the country illegally, but the U.S. government granted her and the children humanitarian parole, allowing them to live in the U.S. until their asylum cases were settled. José was waiting for his family on the U.S. side. The first meal they got after being released was at a McDonald’s, he said. “I just remember my kids’ faces being so happy to be back,” José said. Planting roots After reuniting, Margarita and José lived in New York, where Isaac was born, but soon returned to Houston. There, they opened a landscaping business and returned to their home they had bought years earlier. Feeling safe and settled again, they had another child, Jeremiah. The oldest children worked with them, mowing lawns and helping them communicate with their English-speaking clients during summer breaks from school. “It was hard work,” said their daughter Ester. “As children, we didn’t want to work, but we knew we had to help out.” The older children started their own families. Lisbet, Abigail and Ester also started their own landscaping businesses with their father’s blessing and guidance. In their big mixed-status family, the threat of deportation was always there for the older members of the family: Lisbet applied and received Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — also known as DACA — an Obama administration program that provides some young undocumented immigrants, who came to the U.S. as children, work permits and temporary protection from deportation. Lisbet Avila visits clients’ homes to send updates to her landscaping team in May. After helping her parents with their landscaping business, Lisbet started her own with her father’s blessing. Lexi Parra for The Texas Tribune José hugs Lisbet, his eldest daughter, at her birthday celebration on May 24, 2025. Lexi Parra Lisbet Avila at a landscaping client’s home in May. Lexi Parra for The Texas Tribune Abigail married Oscar, another DACA recipient who came to the U.S. from Mexico with his family when he was a year old. Ester married her high-school sweetheart, Isaias, an immigrant from Honduras, who came to Houston without papers to join his parents who had immigrated years earlier. The other older children all have kids who are U.S. citizens. Eliseo, a U.S. citizen, sponsored his mother for a green card in January, but the application is still pending, and the government could take months or years to decide whether to grant it. But the threat of deportation seemed distant, and it didn’t affect how they lived. Margarita kept checking in with ICE once a year, waiting for her asylum claim to be heard. Even when Trump was elected president in 2016 after whipping up anti-immigrant sentiments, nothing really changed — until Trump’s reelection last year. They soon began to see ICE agents arresting people during sweeps. The Avilas became more alert and tried to stay off the roads as much as possible. “We thought that maybe we’d be targets for, like, a racist incident, but not a target for deportation,” Abigail said. Lisbet, Abigail and Ester Avila have talked to their partners about what they would do if one of them was arrested and deported. They game plan worst-case scenarios: closing their landscaping businesses, selling their homes and cars, deciding which of their native countries they would choose to start all over. “There’s this feeling of helplessness because you can’t do anything about it,” Oscar said. “It makes me angry.” Missing moments From the detention center, Margarita called Lisbet’s phone to talk to her family on May 10. They went to a Japanese restaurant to celebrate the birthday of the second-oldest grandchild, 11-year-old Alex. Margarita had been in detention for two months. It was weighing on her and her family more each day. José is the strict parent. He believes showing sadness is a sign of weakness. He told his children not to cry in front of Margarita to spare her any emotional pain. Margarita is nurturing and affectionate, the one who soothed the kids when they felt their father was being too hard on them. Lisbet, Abigail and Ester sat at a table talking to their mother through a video call. They asked her what she ate. Margarita said she was served spaghetti, but it tasted like bleach. She didn’t eat it. Still, Margarita, wearing an orange jumpsuit and a white undershirt, had a Duchenne smile as her daughters talked to her. “Do you want to talk to dad?” Lisbet asked. She passed the phone to José, who stepped out of the restaurant to speak to his jailed wife. Cars roared down Interstate 10 next to the restaurant. “You look sad. Why are you sad?” José asked. “I’m not,” Margarita responded flatly. “It’s just hard to hear you.” “Okay, let’s talk later,” he said. Margarita was heartbroken to miss Alex’s birthday, she later admitted. She just didn’t want to tell her husband at that moment. “I felt horrible,” she said. “I would cherish those moments with my family.” The Avila family hangs outside after Jeremiah’s graduation ceremony. Lexi Parra for The Texas Tribune David Avila, one of Margarita’s sons, stands third in line as he walks towards the stage to receive his high school diploma at a June ceremony. Lexi Parra Sisters Ester, Abigail and Lisbet (left to right) talk as they cook at Abigail’s house in June. In the absence of Margarita, the sisters have looked out for their younger brothers. Lexi Parra Back inside the restaurant, the hibachi chef scooped up a shrimp on his spatula and flicked it toward Alex, who lunged with his mouth open but failed to catch it. The rest of the family laughed. It was a moment of relief for the family, but Margarita was still on their