Leonardo Baez and Nora Avila-Guel’s bakery in the Texas community of Los Fresnos is a daily stop for many residents to share gossip over coffee and pick up cakes and pastries for birthdays, office parties or themselves.
When Homeland Security Investigations agents showed up at Abby’s Bakery in February and arrested the owners and eight employees, residents of Los Fresnos were shocked.
But the bakery’s owners, Baez and Avila-Guel, a Mexican couple who are legal U.S. permanent residents, could lose everything after being accused of concealing and harboring immigrants who were in the U.S. illegally. It’s a rare case in which business owners face criminal charges rather than just a fine.
“I was surprised because I know that they’re not taking advantage of the people,” Esteban Rodriguez, 43, said after pulling into the bakery’s parking lot to discover it was closed. “It was more like helping out people. They didn’t have nowhere to go, instead of them being on the streets.”
The reaction in the town of 8,500 residents may show the limits of support for President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in a majority Hispanic region dotted with fields of cotton, sugarcane and red grapefruit where Republicans made gains in last year’s elections. Cameron County voted for a GOP president for the first time since 2004. For neighboring Starr County, it was the first time since 1896.
Los Fresnos, which is 90% Latino and counts the school district as its largest employer, is about a half-hour drive from the U.S.-Mexico border. Hundreds of school bus drivers, painters, retirees and parishioners from the nearby Catholic church come into Abby’s Bakery each day. Customers with silver trays and tongs select pastries from glass-door cabinets.
Six of Abby’s eight employees were in the U.S. on visitor visas but none had work permits when Homeland Security Investigations agents came to the business Feb. 12. The owners acknowledged they knew that, according to a federal complaint.