The Free Press
SEMINOLE, West Texas — On the day Herman was deported to Mexico, back in 2008, the officer whose job it was to take him across the border was shocked to see him.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Getting deported,” he replied.
They were on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bus, pulling out of Presidio, Texas.
“But you’re white! You speak English!” the officer said.
“Yeah, but I’m not legal in the country.”
Now that he’s back in West Texas 17 years later—and still undocumented—Herman laughs at the memory, and continues with his story.
The immigration officer said: “We should let this guy out. He’s white! He’s not even from Mexico!”
It’s easy to see why the officer was confused. If one were to ask AI to generate a picture of a “stereotypical West Texan,” you might get Herman: a burly white guy, with a long beard and work-calloused hands, who loves guns, freedom, and Donald Trump.
“He’s illegal,” the bus driver flatly retorted. “White people can be illegal, too.”
Born in Bolivia in 1982 to Mennonite parents of European descent, Herman emigrated to Mexico with his family at the age of 6. He first came to Seminole to do seasonal farmwork when he was 14, and moved here almost a decade later, in 2007. He and his wife, Marsie, entered the country legally on visitor visas, then overstayed.
The following year, he was deported, but a few days later Herman reentered the United States, again as a visitor. The border officer didn’t bat an eye when Herman said he was “going home to Seminole.”
He’s lived here 18 years and counting.
Seminole is a small West Texas town with an official population of 7,000—though some locals guess it might be closer to 15,000, because of all the illegal immigrants. It’s the largest town in Gaines County, which has recently received national attention because it’s the epicenter of the recent measles outbreak, which started in the Mennonite community.
Herman, now 43, has built three small businesses here with his wife—two mechanic shops and a café, The Wild Harvest Kitchen—generating revenues of almost $2.5 million dollars a year. The couple are also raising 4 children, 2 of whom are birthright citizens.
“I came here for the American dream,” said Herman. “And I found it.”
“We had nothing,” he said. Now? “I’m a multimillionaire.”
Herman is also, arguably, a model citizen. Though he left the Mennonite community a long time ago, he’s still a “believer,” and his faith inspired him and his wife to found a nonprofit organization, Seminole Hope and Healing Center, to help care for poor and widowed people in their community. “I felt like God asked me to do that,” he said.
Also, with their businesses registered as LLCs, Herman and Marcie pay their taxes every year—as much as $60,000 in years when he doesn’t have many write-offs.
Many Americans don’t realize how much cash illegal immigrants contribute to the economy. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022,” using Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs). Though they aren’t eligible for tax benefits, like Social Security, many hope that making these payments will one day help their case for legalization.
But for people who, like Herman, enter the country legally and then stay illegally for over a year, there is no pathway to legalization that doesn’t require them to go back to their home countries for 10 years first. In fact, based on current immigration policy, it would actually be easier for them to adjust their status if they had entered illegally.
“There are lots of people who don’t realize how completely fucked up the immigration system is,” said Herman.
“But nothing can be done until you somehow stop the flow of illegal immigrants,” he added. “Or else you’ll just make a bigger mess of it.”
The illegal immigrants in the Mennonite community broadly support Trump, despite—and partly because of—his hard-line stance on deporting illegals. Many of the president’s economic and cultural policies appeal to the traditional, conservative sect, but Mennonites also believe that the lack of strict border policy enforcement puts illegal immigrants like them—who’ve been here a long time, working hard while hoping to adjust their status—at a disadvantage.
“I’m 100 percent a fan of Trump,” said Herman. “I love the man.”
German-speaking Mennonites first came to Seminole from Mexico in 1977, finding the home their ancestors had been looking for since the Protestant sect was founded in Switzerland in 1525. Arable land was abundant and affordable—and apparently far from the prying eyes of any meddling authorities.
Under their bishop’s guidance, 100 Mennonite families from Mexico pooled $2.6 million to buy 6,400 acres in West Texas. They’d been told (perhaps by their realtor, perhaps by their own bishop; accounts vary) that purchasing the land would open up pathways for them to apply for residency permits and green cards and ultimately citizenship.
And according to a 1979 article in The New York Times, Seminole “welcomed them with open arms, relishing the prospect of putting land back into production.”
“They’re a source of labor that we are deficient in here, and they’re pretty nice people,” Mayor Bobby C. Clark said. “We love ‘em.’”
But by this point, Seminole’s first wave of Mennonites, whose passports were mostly Mexican, had learned that they didn’t qualify for a legal pathway to citizenship. Although many locals—and even some government representatives—felt sympathetic to their cause, no one thought they could just be given special treatment. Silas Jervis, a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman quoted in that Times article, said it plainly: “How can you throw out 800,000 brown-skinned Mexicans each year and allow 500 white-skinned Mexicans to stay here?”
“According to President Trump, maybe I shouldn’t be a citizen,” John Peters tells me. In 1972, John was born two months prematurely in Fresno, California, to Mennonite parents with Mexican passports who were living in the U.S. illegally. “I was supposed to be born in Mexico,” John told me, “for religious and cultural reasons.” Instead, he is a birthright citizen of the U.S.—a status the president says he wants to get rid of.
John’s parents moved to Seminole with that first wave of Mennonite immigrants on Valentine’s Day, 1977. He was 5, and has lived here ever since. These days, he runs an immigration advisory service in Seminole, Peter’s Consulting. We met in his office, and I noticed that he has a framed Thomas Jefferson quote about liberty. John, a lifelong Republican, told me that the market for his services is growing, because Mennonites are still coming to West Texas in search of liberty, and a better life. “Over the last year, there’s been a huge wave—maybe 1,500—from Bolivia.”
John spends his days helping hardworking people obtain the right to work in the U.S.—and he sees it as a service to his community. “Farmers around here need workers. We specialize in getting their workers permits,” John said. “It takes two years.” And this frustrates him deeply.
He also thinks deporting people who contribute to the American economy and pose no criminal threat is absurd and serves no one. But he’s no fan of the Democratic Party. “When Biden started, we were very hopeful there’d be a flood of immigration reform, and people would be helped,” he said. “It never happened.”
The only positive change John could recall was that Biden increased a work permit’s validity from one to five years—but his administration also “jacked up all the prices; he made the immigration process much more expensive.”
He also created or expanded Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protections for asylum seekers from certain Central American countries, safeguarding them against immediate deportation and granting them work permits. This pathway is unavailable to Mennonite immigrants who come from countries that haven’t been TPS-designated, such as Belize and Mexico. In short, John said, “what we saw was [Biden] allowing millions of people across the border, and giving them almost better status than people who have been waiting here and would like to follow something legally.”
One of John’s clients in Seminole is Micheal. “I would love to call myself an American,” he told me, while leaning against his red Ford truck, which has a bumper sticker that reads: We the People.
Born in Canada in 1989, he was raised in a Mennonite community in Belize, and now lives in Seminole—illegally.
His path to West Texas was winding. In 2017, after Hurricane Franklin bankrupted his farm in Belize, he moved back to Canada, where he worked as a commercial truck driver. Then came the pandemic, which hit Canadian truckers hard, and left Micheal lonely and isolated. He began using drugs.
Because of this, a worried friend invited him to Seminole for the weekend, and Micheal stayed three months, doing odd jobs to make ends meet. “The thought of me staying here illegally haunted my mind,” he told me. “There’s no way I thought I could do it.”
But after he returned to Canada, where lockdowns were still in full effect, he sank back into despair. Ultimately, he decided moving to America was worth the risk. “During the pandemic, the Canadian-American border was not open to public traffic, only to commercial,” he told me. “So I put a pallet of my tools in the back of my truck and I ‘imported’ them into the USA.”
“It was the easiest crossing of my life,” he added.
Micheal settled in Seminole and got to work, establishing a landscaping business which now employs 8 to 10 people in the busy season. All his employees are of Latino descent, and all obtained work permits after they claimed asylum and were given Temporary Protected Status at the border.
Micheal, on the other hand, remains undocumented, but he sees his business as a kind of protection. “I don’t think Trump will want to kick me out,” said Micheal. “My business has paid as much as $8,000 a month in tax here.”
Neither Micheal and Herman are afraid of the authorities finding out about them; both were happy to be named and photographed for this story. “The federal government knows I’m here,” said Micheal. “I’m filing taxes with the IRS—they know I’m illegal.”
“They love our money,” he added. If he’s threatened with deportation? “I’ll ask for a refund of the tens of thousands of dollars in taxes I’ve paid over the last couple of years!”
But Micheal may have less to fear than other undocumented immigrants because, to put it bluntly, he is light-haired and blue-eyed. “People are surprised to hear that I’m illegal. They’re just like: ‘What? You’re white?’ ” he said. According to him, his appearance means “the immigration authorities aren’t paying as much attention to me.”
None of the undocumented immigrants I met in Seminole believe Trump’s threats of mass deportation; they argue that the economic fallout would be too extreme. In 2006, when ICE deported around 10 percent of the population of Cactus, Texas—which is about 260 miles away from Seminole—it almost ruined the meatpacking plant the small town depended on.
“He’s a businessman, not a politician, and he’s not going to cripple the country,” said Micheal, who has a lot of faith in the president. “I support Trump. I’d vote for him if I could. Overall he still stands for freedom.”
But still, he doesn’t think the president is perfect. “I wish that Trump would make it feasible for us hardworking people to become legal,” he said.
He also has a bone to pick with some of his fellow Trump supporters.
“When people say, ‘They should come here legally,’ I think it’s just a stupid chant that brings people together,” he said. “They don’t understand how difficult it is, and they don’t realize how much of their life depends on the illegal community.
“You say you want to deport us all? Go ahead; you’d be up shit’s creek without a paddle. Life as you know it would disappear.”
