In recent years, Los Fresnos has changed, much like the rest of the Rio Grande Valley. More retail chains are coming to the town of around 8,400, mostly along Highway 100—called Ocean Boulevard in town. Suburbs expand from that road toward Olmito or Bayview, with the oldest neighborhoods being rural colonias or collections of craftsman homes. The farmland and railroad tracks that spurred the city’s development remain, but it is the roadside businesses that most people know—including, for the last 13 years, Abby’s Bakery.
Abby’s has been a mainstay stop for conchas and donuts not just for the growing population of Los Fresnos locals but also for those traveling to or from the coastal town of Port Isabel and the touristy South Padre Island. Now, Abby’s has become something else as well: a target of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans.
In the weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began making highly publicized arrests, including in Cameron County—home to Los Fresnos—where 8.5 percent of the population is undocumented.
Social media livestreams have shown ICE actions in real time across the Valley. On February 12, video footage circulated on Facebook showing apparent arrests being made by agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the wing of ICE ostensibly focused on transnational crime, in the parking lot of Abby’s Bakery. According to a federal criminal complaint filed two days later in the Southern District Court of Texas, eight undocumented immigrants were apprehended that day at Abby’s, including two who were designated as witnesses in an investigation into the bakery’s owners, Leonardo Baez and Nora Alicia Avila-Guel, for “bringing in and harboring certain aliens and aiding and abetting the harboring of aliens.”
Six of the apprehended workers held temporary visas that allowed them to travel into the United States but not to work, as reported by the Texas Tribune.
Baez and Avila-Guel weren’t arrested that day, and they thought that was the end of it. Lacking employees, Abby’s Bakery sold all their pan dulce 2 for 1 that afternoon, trying to clear inventory. The next day, a hand-drawn sign on the front door said the shop was closed indefinitely.
On February 17, the bakery reopened. “Muchas gracias a todos por su espera,” Abby’s Bakery’s Facebook page read that day. Comments on the post ranged from expressing happiness at the reopening to approval of the employees being deported.
Precinct-level data suggests that a slim majority of Los Fresnos voters favored Trump in 2024, mirroring a flip of the overwhelmingly Latino Cameron County from blue to red.
Only two days would pass before HSI agents, armed with rifles fit more for a war zone than a local panadería, returned to Abby’s during an afternoon rush.
Before the second raid, things looked almost normal. People filed in and out of the bakery, moving counterclockwise to collect their sweet breads and coffee, pay, and leave.
Then, the agents arrived in unmarked cars. Documented on a Facebook livestream, one customer berated the officers as they detained the owners, Baez and Avila-Guel, off-screen. “My dad,” a child is heard crying in the video.
“They didn’t do nothing wrong,” the person filming the livestream said. “They’re hard-working people.” The agents then walked back to their unmarked cars in the alley behind the bakery.
That video now has over 6 million views. The thousands of comments include residents of Los Fresnos and other RGV communities decrying the raid, expressing a growing fear in a region where lacking papers is common.
“People are scared to go out because they go out with their kids, and they don’t want to go to a place where (people are) going to show up with guns to check whether they’re a U.S. citizen or not,” Rosa Muñoz Vallejo, a lifelong Los Fresnos resident and, at one time, candidate for mayor against current Mayor Alejandro Flores, told the Texas Observer. “That was very upsetting for a lot of people.”
The bakery owners were arrested on felony charges of harboring undocumented immigrants, with bonds set at $100,000 each. According to Homeland Security Agent Dillon Duke, who testified as a witness in the owners’ hearing, agents found a room in the same plaza as the bakery with six beds and two bathrooms, where workers were allegedly living.
KRGV reporter Stefany Rosales reported on the couple’s arraignment, where they appeared dressed in orange jumpsuits and shackled and were told by the judge that they could reopen their business if they did so “legally.” If convicted, they both face up to 10 years in prison.
Baez and Avila-Guel were held in U.S. Marshals Service custody in separate federal detention centers for 5 days. A technical issue with the court payment system delayed successful posting of bail, extending their detention, according to Avila-Guel’s attorney Jaime Díez. Meanwhile, Abby’s Bakery sat dark and lifeless.
Facing harboring charges for allegedly providing accommodations to employees is rare, Díez said, as such cases are more commonly brought against human smugglers. “For harboring, that usually requires a person to be crossed [across a border], and … they are provided with a place so they can hide from detention,” Díez said. Duke said the apparent living quarters in the bakery had cardboard covering the windows, but Díez said that isn’t enough to prove concealment.
The arrests were the consequence of a tip that HSI got in December. Another raid occurred at a McAllen tortilleria a few days later, where HSI arrested 8 workers.
“What we are witnessing is the deliberate abduction of individuals as they are being uprooted from their lives,” reads a statement from La Union del Pueblo Entero in response to the RGV raids. “Trump’s deportation machine knows no bounds, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake.”
Díez echoed this. “It changes your life when you get arrested and you see everything that you ever had about to go away because you were trying to provide a living,” Díez said. “A lot of these people provide work for people because nobody else wants to do the job.”
Viviana Ramirez, a Los Fresnos resident who works in healthcare, told the Observer: “Somehow this little town, Los Fresnos—it’s become a part of this huge conversation that I don’t think anyone really expected. Maybe this is a chance for people to really look at what’s happening.”
Los Fresnos’ Republican-backed mayor, Flores, posted on his official Facebook page after the owners were arrested: “As this is an ongoing issue, we are unable to speculate at this time. I do agree that this doesn’t look good and since ICE is not putting out any statements, we are left to speculate. My prayers are with Mr Leonardo Baez and his family during this difficult time.”
Some locals feel the mayor should have taken a clearer stand against the ICE raids. Isidro Ramirez, Viviana’s husband, shared screenshots of an apparent exchange with the mayor on Facebook, in which Ramirez shared the livestream of the raid.
“So what many people don’t know is they had beds in the back,” Flores wrote back. “People were living there.”
Ramirez wrote back “Disgrace to our community” in response, which his wife told the Observer was meant to refer to the raid, with the exchange then escalating to the mayor writing “Dude fuck you.” Flores later apologized in a public post about the exchange. Flores has not directly addressed the raid since, though he did make a post celebrating Abby’s reopening. Through the city secretary, Flores declined to comment for this story.
While Flores appears to want to stay neutral, some local Valley officials have gone even further in Trump’s direction. For example, McAllen’s mayor, a former GOP county chair, recently posted assurance that his city would assist in immigration enforcement.
“How can you be neutral when somebody comes in your community … and they take away 8 people that, turns out, 6 of them had a documented status, and you have a business close down?” Jared Hockema, the Cameron County Democratic Party Chair, told the Observer at a protest against the raid held in front of Abby’s Bakery. “How can you be neutral about that?”
Hockema, who organized the February 24 protest, was part of a dozen or so others who stood outside the then-closed bakery with signs critical of Flores.
On the first Monday in March, Abby’s Bakery reopened again. Just like the last day it was open, the doors never seemed to stop opening and closing, with customers filing in and out—expressing gratitude to the employees for being there and giving away coffee.
The owners’ ordeal has not ended: Baez and Avila-Guel have now been indicted on three counts in the harboring case. They are expected to appear in court March 13. Under the conditions of their bonds, they can’t leave the Valley or go to Mexico. The two employees designated as witnesses were remanded to U.S. Marshals custody on February 20, the federal docket shows. Many documents in the case are sealed.
On this Monday, however, it’s like the last two weeks haven’t happened. The drone from Highway 100 remains the same, the pan dulce, too, and the “buenos días” and clanging tongs of a bakery that is once again providing for the Valley.
“I’m hoping that things will get better, I’m hoping that this won’t happen again here in our community,” Muñoz Vallejo told the Observer in front of the reopened bakery. “People are still scared to go out because of what happened here—and even though they’re scared, they’re here. They’re showing up.”
The post ICE Raids on Beloved Bakery Reverberate Through Rio Grande Valley appeared first on The Texas Observer.
